Pandora: Musical Godsend

It seems you never realize how important music is in your massage life until it stops playing. At my first job, a large massage business, we had the typical piped-in stereotypical massage music, which we often made fun of. I personally referred to it as New-Age-Neil-Diamond-Meets-Elevator music. It was somewhat relaxing, yet often repetitive. At least once a day, we had to listen to a track one therapist called the #$%^@#! song. “I’m sure whatever that woman is saying is wonderful and peaceful and loving in whatever language that is,” she said, “but it still sounds like she’s saying #$%^@#! over and over.” And truly, it did, and after that, I could never hear it again during a session without fighting back a snort of laughter.

Finally the therapists got together with personal contributions to try and improve the quality of the music, but we ran into some problems there as well. For one thing, some of my favorites, like the soundtracks to Snow Falling on Cedars and Pan’s Labyrinth made one of our younger therapists “feel like [she] was having nightmares,” and following up those pieces with some of the hula music another therapist brought in made ME feel like I was having nightmares.

But, I found out when I switched jobs, that poor music is better than none. In the chiropractic clinic where I worked, I was provided with a broken-down old boom-box that only worked, say, one-third of the time, and if anything will give you nightmares, it’s a CD-skipping version of O Mio Babbino Caro. Yuck.

Enter Pandora Radio. I have fallen in love with it. I access Pandora through my I-Phone and set up all sorts of cool channels for free. I have Eccodek Radio, Romantic Opera Radio, the guy-who-wrote-the-soundtrack-for-Snow Falling on Cedars Radio, George Winston Radio, etc. I select one of my stations, plug my I-Phone into a small set of portable speakers, and presto! I can listen to people singing odd songs I actually like, none of which sound like #$%^@#! If you haven’t tried Pandora, you should. And you’ll enjoy it outside massage as well: I like my Stayin’ Alive Radio for cooking. If you haven’t stirred, chopped, and sautéed to the Bee Gees, well you just haven’t lived.