Strange Associations

There is a cool music website, Pandora, that lets you build your own stations. You put in an artist and it will play a song from that artist and then play music from similar artists. Most of the time it seems to work well; the artists make sense. I put in Metallica and I got Maiden, Priest, etc. Flogging Molly gave me a bunch of Celtic punk music.

Today, though, I got a rather odd selection. I put in Jim Steinman, he of Bat Out of Hell fame (the first two). First up, it played a song from his solo album, Bad for Good. Okay, good. Next, though, it chose a song from Dragonforce.

WTF?

I happen to like Dragonforce. They are an awesome European power metal band with some crazy fast guitar work. But they really are in a different category from Steinman's Wagnerian rock. Both are good and both are over the top, but that's really where the similarities end.