4 Hour Delay in Hartsfield-Jackson
A musical journey of fun & connection.
My brother & I took my father to Atlantic City for a few days for his birthday. While that was super fun and I love spending time with them both, this is about the 4 hour rain delay before my flight finally left Atlanta for Newark.
As anyone who flies a lot knows, airport time is slow time. Especially when you mix in the uncertainty of a weather related delay. On my way to the airport I got a notification in my Delta app that my flight was delayed 30 minutes. When I got through security, another notification tacking on 30 minutes more and before my first hour in the airport was up, I knew it was going to be a long day in the ATL and my evening plans in New Jersey were shot.
I didn’t know how I was going to kill the time, so I crafted a text message, “Building an Amazon Music playlist while stuck in the airport. Give me 5 songs that must be included, GO!” I texted it to about 50 people. What happened next was glorious. The responses started pouring in. My phone was on vibrate and there were so many texts back it was literally bouncing off the floor at one point.
This was a fascinating exercise for a variety of reasons, but let’s look at some of the numbers. I got exactly 40 responses. It was almost exactly an 80% response rate. I could text the same 50 people hello and not get an 80% response rate. It was a pretty amazing display of musical passion. It was also an incredibly diverse group that replied. I got 20 responses from men and 20 from women. A true 50/50 split, which was also generally reflective of the overarching sample size. The youngest respondent was my 19 year old son and the oldest was in her 60’s. As impressive as the diversity of respondents were the truly eclectic mix of the music was something to behold.
The playlist has 178 songs on it. There were 179 suggestions. There was only 1 duplicate. 1 DUPLICATE!! I don’t know if I should be surprised by this, but I was. The only duplicate was Kashmir by Led Zeppelin.
Another pretty huge surprise is that no single artist has more than 3 entries on the playlist and only 3 had 3. 15 artists had 2 entries on the list which makes a grand total of 139 different artists out of 178 songs who made the list. Eclectic doesn’t even begin to cover it. Take a look. It’s all over the place!
It isn’t just artist diversity that we see in the suggestions, but generational diversity.
The 1980’s led the field with 23.2% (41)of the suggestions, but the 2010’s were close second with 21% (37). The oldest song was Slim Dusty’s 1945 rendition of Waltzing Matilda and there were 3 released in 2019. One area that wasn’t diverse was language. I only got 2 suggestions that weren’t in English.
One of the things I found most interesting is the way some people took the question. One person said he could never boil down his music to 5 suggestions. (This was more of a guideline than a rule as one person suggested 13 songs and a few only suggested 1) One person said I couldn’t handle his music. One woman flat out refused to share for reasons still unclear to me and a couple of people thought their suggestions were weird or in some way not good enough. A couple of people only sent things they thought I would like, but luckily most people gave me suggestions of music they liked or had some connection to. One person sent me video they had personally shot of Night Ranger singing Sister Christian and told me that was appropriate for any playlist. It was super fun!
One suggestion I wanted to call out was Greensky Bluegrass playing a cover of Into the Mystic. Because I added my personal suggestions last, Into the Mystic wasn’t duplicated, but it would have been if I had not looked at the other suggestions before adding mine. Unfortunately the version below was never recorded anywhere so I substituted it on the list with Van Morrison’s original. However, I urge you to take the 5 minutes and watch the embedded video below. I never heard of Greensky Bluegrass before, but I found this to be a really beautiful version of a song that I have a real personal connection to.
Another really fun thing that happened was some people have no idea what the music they like is actually called. As I was compiling the list I had to back into some of the music through a variety of search criteria that got me where I needed to go. Also, in the interest of full transparency, I knew a lot of the songs, but could not have named the artist or the song title under torture.
As I was going through the responses I realized I forgot some people I knew would have brought a huge amount of value to the list. I also wound up leaving a couple of people off as I went through my contacts because our friendship has transitioned and that was bittersweet.
Some people sent back texts like, anything by Tupac, so I grouped those suggestions separately at the bottom of the main playlist. One of the most amusing responses came from one of my friends in the LGBTQ+ community. He said, “Pick any 5 songs from Madonna or Rhianna, how gay is that?” That made me really laugh and the woman sharing the outlet with me wound up asking what I was doing because I was laughing so much at the responses. She said next time she had 4 hours to kill she was going to the same thing.
I think that was the best part of the whole experience. Having 40+ conversations at once, learning more about my friends and colleagues and what they like and turning the long wait into a meaningful way to connect around shared interest. In the end, the time flew by and provided me with a fun story, a lot of new music to listen to, and a little excitement about the eventual Part 2. And with that, I give you, The Airport Suggestions. (You’ll need Amazon Music Unlimited to access all the songs.)
