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Music to Dine By

Posted by Adam Kuban, June 7, 2007 at 3:15 PM

Josh Friedland, proprietor of the über-useful Food Section blog, complied a neat list of 100 songs for food lovers last week for something called "Blogger Radio" on AOL Radio.

It's a neat idea, and one that I've been employing almost since the date that Apple launched its iTunes Music Store. I've made mixes, for instance, to soundtrack a number of dinner parties, cookouts, and early-morning brunch feeds.

Of course you don't have to use the iTunes Music Store to create a playlist of your own, but its search function makes things easy. If you're hosting a burger cookout, which is what I'm preparing my "Burger Cookout" mix for in the window above, the iTMS will also give you artists with "burger" in their name, so it's best to sort the search return by song title. iTMS will also give you any podcasts, videos, audio books, etc., with "burger" mentioned, so restrict your search to the "Music" category.

The search is a little scroggly when you're using it like this; looking up "burger" doesn't return the Jimmy Buffet classic "Cheeseburger in Paradise," for instance. So if you have a specific theme in mind, try variations on your term. I also tried "hamburger," as well as the corresponding plurals.

Not all the songs are going to be winners. For some reason, queries for food-related themes pull up a lot of children's songs. And that can be fun for one or two songs, but they tend to spoil the mood. (And if you don't have kids, your guests are going to start to wonder about you.)

Subtlety is key, at least for me. I don't like to tell guests that they're listening to a special mix, instead preferring that moment when ZZ Top's "Cheeseburger Man" or the Beastie Boys reference to White Castle elicits a knowing smile from an attendee.

You're not going to be able to find more than a couple hours' worth of, say, PBJ-related songs (not ones you'd want to listen to, anyway). So be sure to throw in a heaping helping of your favorite non-themed tunes. I like a ratio of 1:5, going lean on the themed songs—they're like a strong spice that should be used sparingly.

Choose your playlist, hit "random play," and enjoy your food-tune soundtrack.

Related: Burger Cookout Playlist [iTMS; will open iTunes on click]

3 Comments | Tags: entertaining, iTunes, music