So here's a random thing to know: yesterday, Lauren and I realized that the time it takes to listen to the entire Police discography (we're "studying" for an upcoming concert) is roughly equal to the time it takes to drive from Bakersfield to Oceanside. For reference, that's 70-something songs over 190 miles, or about 4 hours driving time. Yeah, I'm pretty impressed too (it's a lot of time to spend listening to Sting's voice).
But anyway, as we were driving past miles of Joshua trees and creepy windmills, rewinding to listen to the literary references in "Don't Stand So Close To Me", the whole thing made me wonder...
How long would one have to drive to cover, say, the entire Beatles catalog?
[ENTER: Christmas Break Nikki, who suddenly has a lot of time on her hands and wants to spend it all writing weird blog posts!]
I started trying to figure it out while on the drive - which would've been a much more lofty goal - but eventually left it until I got home so I could consult the Goog.
To begin, the Beatles recorded 288 songs, 213 of which were original (according to the search I just did [alas, my Beatles knowledge is not vast enough to know this information on my own]). I'm too lazy to sit and add up all the actual albums lengths, so...averaging all the recorded songs out to 3 minutes each (although a lot of the earlier ones were more like 2 minutes), you get 864 minutes, or 14.4 hours, OR, a little less than the distance between:
- Los Angeles and Denver (Google maps says 14 hours, 33 min)
- San Francisco and Vancouver
- Boston and Chicago
As Spock might say: "Fascinating."
Also according to the internets, the Rolling Stones recorded 437 songs. I'm going to go a little higher and estimate that the average length of a Stones song is 3.5 minutes (again, pure estimation/laziness). That puts us at 25.5 hours, which could take you from San Diego to New Orleans, San Francisco to Kansas City, or Nashville to Las Vegas.
So the obvious question is.....who wants to road trip with me and find out?? 2014 resolution, maybe?
For the record, I still know nothing of Sting's solo career, so we will probably have to do this again before the Paul Simon/Sting concert on February 17.