A Variant: answers

[dr_whom]

Looks like it wasn't too hard to identify the themes of my mixes! As far as I can tell, each of them has been more or less correctly identified at least once in the comments on the previous post. That's not too surprising, since I deliberately chose songs that were good examples of the themes of the mixes. The answers are within; read no further if you want to keep guessing!

I. Friendship. Correctly identified by dumble, lord_codfish, and boojum42.

II. Money. Identified by occultatio.

III. The real concept here is "Songs that are reminiscent of 'One Day More'". I'll credit khyros's and boojum42's guesses of 'preparing for a showdown', lord_codfish's guess of 'different sides of a conflict', and occultatio's guess of 'montage' as between them adding up to correct, with points to tiamat360 for act closers as well. To be on this mix, a song has to exhibit some satisfying subset of the following characteristics, of which some are more important than others: characters preparing for a dramatic showdown; montage of characters in different locations singing first one at a time and then all together (preferably in counterpoint) later in the song; reprise of numerous melodic themes from earlier in the show; looking forward to some specific time in the near future ("one day more", "the weekend", "tonight", "tomorrow night", etc.); act I finale.

IV. Parents and children. Identified by dumble, khyros, lord_codfish, tiamat360, and boojum42.

V. Gossip. Identified by dumble, khyros, and tiamat360.

VI. Soliloquies in which the singer wrestles with some conundrum or decision. Identified more or less by khyros and lord_codfish.

VII. Duets about falling in love, or realizing that you've already done so. Identified by dumble.

VIII. Opening songs that set the scene for their shows in detail. Identified by lord_codfish.

IX. Gender. Identified by dumble, khyros, tiamat360, occultatio, and kind of by boojum42.

X. Heaven and hell. Identified by occultatio.

XI. Songs in which the singer explores some aspect of their own identity. Identified by occultatio.

XII. Night. Identified by tiamat360 and boojum42.

XIII. Patter songs. Identified by khyros and lord_codfish.

XIV. Travel and transportation. This was actually the first mix I made to listen to in the car, and the real underlying theme is "songs that it feels correct to listen to in the car". Identified by dumble, lord_codfish, and boojum42.

XV. Simple pleasures. Identified by occultatio. boojum42's suggestion of "times of day" is ingenious, well-motivated based on the list of songs, and a total accident of the songs I coincidentally happened to choose as good examples of "simple pleasures".

XVI. Songs that are about themselves or the circumstances of their own performance. I'll give pastwatcher credit for the answer "Meta", though I'm not sure she didn't just mean "songs about songs" in general as lignota and khyros suggested.

XVII. Parodies and alternate versions of other songs. Identified by dumble, lord_codfish and occultatio. This one would have been way harder if I'd used covers and alternate takes instead of parodies as the clues: it's a lot harder to extract a theme from "My baby don't mess around because she loves me so and this I know for sure", "...Been a long time gone, old Constantinople", "...Take these broken wings and learn to fly", and "Once upon a time you dressed so fine" than from the clues I used.

XVIII. Nostalgia. Identified by khyros, tiamat360, and occultatio.

Comments

[pastwatcher]

No, I meant self-referential songs. The reason I didn't say it clearly was that it didn't occur to me that it might be songs about songs in general, rather than songs about themselves. I even thought khyros meant songs about themselves.

[dr_whom]

In that case, I was right that you were right!

(And everything is quite correct!)

[khyros.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this is what I meant... I mean, if someone can interpret something I say as meta, it probably is

[http://users.livejournal.com/-mycroft-holmes/]

What you really need to do now is identify the unintended themes that connect the four-song sets and make new mixes based on those themes.

[dr_whom]

For most of them, the theme that connects the four-song set is "hopefully these will make it easy to identify the theme of the mix".