Some questions:

1) Is there anyone here near Edinburgh or Fife?

OK, that's whittled down the majority. Now...

2) Does anyone fancy coming to a fundraising music quiz in Fife on Saturday night?

Hmmmmmmm.... anyone left? Just in case...

3) Can I tempt you to pop along? Licensed bar... free food (homemade chili, both real and veggie)... some great prizes... charity auction.... a chance to shine in front of the masses, revealing your intellectual heft and lofty command of the finer points of contemporary music trivia?

If so, reply here. It's to help raise money for a local playgroup, which keeps the little urchins off the street and prevents their parents sending them up chimneys or summat. I'll be there (in charge of the food as it happens) and it'd be nice if any local(ish) Wordites fancied turning it into a kind of mini MassiveMeet on the Fife Riviera?

Well, worth a shot...

I'm pretty sure the reason we all ended up here is because of our love of pop music - whatever label we put on it. We can agree to disagree about the best this or the worst that but we can ( hopefully) all agree that loving music is one of the best diversions there is. I've come back to music in the last couple of years and I'm so glad. It feels like meeting up with an old friend, the kind of friend you haven't seen in years and yet still sit down with and carry on the conversation as if it were yesterday. What I love best is the way it can fit your mood. This time yesterday it was soaring strings, lunchtime was jumping around and this morning a little more gloomy. Each time the songs were there to fit the mood. So whoever invented music thank you and to those who don't care I really pity them. Won't post a song but whatever you choose to listen to today, be it happy, sad or stupid, enjoy.

It hasn't escaped my attention that my musical likes and dislikes aren't a perfect fit with the dominant tone of the blog (Watch it - understatement ed.). Luckily, I don't (usually) care. But I definitely don't have the same intense relationship with music that some do, on here. I'd hate to go without it, but it's not a lifeline.

My main motivation for listening is pure fun. Simple, visceral excitement. Dancing. Jumping up and down. And if you're going to play me a "ballad", it had better be beautiful, because if music isn't going to make me move, then it'd better be trying bloody hard to make me cry.

What's in it for you? Do you need music? Is it stitched right through the fabric of your life? Would you die or go mad without it? Or is it a lovely decoration that brings out the colours in everything else?

For me, music is the latter. It's fairy lights. And as far as I'm concerned, there's very little that's more beautiful and life-enhancing than fairy lights.

(I'm conscious that this is a silly and rambling post. But I'm genuinely interested, because I often think people care about music in really different and strange ways. I'm pretty shallow, and perfectly comfortable with that, but I'd love to hear from people for whom the surface is just that irritating bit you have to break through to find the good stuff. As should be obvious, for me, the surface very largely is the good stuff.)

I got this from gearslutz, but it's still a fab thing to recognise.

When you imagine music, it's in mono.

Okay, a little concentration can create a stereo field, but then the music naturally falls back to somewhere just front of centre inside your head.

(BTW, which side of the road do you drive on in your dreams? Since I moved to 'other parts', I now drive on the right.)

Any artist who moves to Switzerland seems to have forfeited their talent at the border.

They're a fondue of their former selves.

Much like Charles Ives (Unanswered Question), Bartok must be the go-to composer for creepy music.

Where Ives' piece is HAL ejecting an astronaut into space, Bartok conjures blooooood and maaaadness.

Off the top of my head, here's two movies that use his "Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste":

* The Shining

* Alien

And I know I've heard it in many other movies, but I can't be arsed tracking down which ones.

The bit where someone hits a music-stand at 1:42 is fantastic, and in every movie.

They all seem to be this 1954 recording:

Please add!

Rereading Miles Davis' autobiography, and I'm reminded again of the prodigious amounts of drugs and shagging the chin-stroking fraternity have got up to.

Arguably, and I will argue it, demonstrating heftier appetites and Olympian staying-power over their rock'n'roll counterparts.

Meanwhile, they also managed to perform – between 'nodding off on the bandstand' – pretty well in a demanding musical idiom.

Not that I'm recommending it. The drugs that is. As a gateway to jazz.

Like most Wordy music lovers, I like a well turned lyric but, really, are lyrics that important? I have to admit, I think not.

Even with the best wordsmiths, it's the hypnotism of music and voice that bind you to a song. Without which, the lyrics mean about as much as the ingredients label on a hill of beans.

Strip the lyrics out of a great song and it's still a great song, as evinced by foreign language hits, e.g. "Je t'aime" by Serge Gainsbourg, "Da Da Da" by that 80s German band, and that Belgian take on "Subterranean Homesick Blues" by Plastic Bertrand (well, at least for two minutes, it is).

Plus, a fair bit of Super Furry Animals Welsh output.

Does anyone love any songwriting just for the lyrics?

then I did.

At what point did you realise your lanky locks were up for the chop?

I may've missed it, but what were the best reads on music for 2011?

(Xmas lists being frantically passed around...).

I've never met someone who hated Jimi Hendrix who didn't also harbour racist tendencies. I've lost interest in women once I've seen what they listen to (Wet Wet Wet...), and have a good handle on blokes who have every Metallica or, indeed, Yes album.

And I've formed immediate bonds with people who, in the balance, have great taste – i.e. mine.

How do you use music to assess people? And don't say you don't do it – otherwise you'd not be reading the Word!

Does this bring back any memories?

I don't think I've ever had a cup of instant coffee since watching it. Cherry pie, mmmm. And freshly squeezed.

At around 4.45 this morning I woke up in the middle of a nightmare that I was on Masterchef and in the ensuing obstinate wakefulness had to get up and sit in the cold lounge. A cosy album and a hot drink were in order. I picked on Deserter's Songs by Mercury Rev for the former - such a completely wintry record, from the dark-blue hardly lit cover photo to the soft strings and stolen melody from Silent Night - and made myself a special treat for the latter: hot apple juice with chunks of ginger and a bit of cinnamon.

So, a warming tune and an accompanying winter beverage, if you will.

Here's mine: mulled apple juice supped down to Opus 40 by Mercury Rev.

Yes, I know the point of music journos is to keep us talking about music (if not buying it), but Mr Hepworth's notion that songwriters peak before they're 24 holds as much water as a teenager on his first night out on the piss.

The Boss didn't get into his stride until his mid 20s; the Bobmeister was still knocking out classic albums into his 30s; while Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Jack White, Serge Gainsbourg, David Bowie, JJ Cale, most of Led Zep, late Beatles, and naturally many others beyond my own record collection have certainly made a bloody good contribution to music we care about.

Feel free to add more.

Hey folks,

I'm interested to find out if there are any websites dedicated to up-and-coming/unsigned bands (where I can do searches on various styles and so on without having to go to other sites to hear snippets etc.)?

I've got in mind something like a sort of 'Facebook for music' combined with the voting approach used in sites like the 'stack exchange' so that (in theory) the better stuff floats to the top.

I figure such a thing must exist but apart from MySpace I can't see (or, more likely, am not aware of) anything like this...

MySpace seems to have tried to branch into signed artists, video, news and all that - which is fine, but I want something purer, a conduit (if you will) into up-and-coming unsigned music without too much bias, and driven by voting and comments.

If such a thing doesn't exist, I'm tempted to create it. But I want to make sure that I'm not going to spend months of my life building something that nobody wants. However, I'm looking for a new creative project to take on in the new year and this is one itch I want to scratch (or abandon)...

So, to the Word Massive, if you know of something like this, please let me know. I love discovering new music and I have a hunch that many of you lot do too, so you're the ideal people to tell me that this is a great idea, go build, or 'been there, seen that, go find something more useful to create instead'...

OK, over to you...