Mann-Handled

Precocious Daughter and I love to listen to music together.

I may have written about that before.

I'm a bit like a broken record. See what I did there?

We share a Rhapsody account, and between us we have a pretty large - and quite diverse - music library. Often we listen to music separately, but we also like to plug her phone into a speaker dock in the family room and listen together while we're eating or cleaning or just hanging out.

Just your typical 21st-century family.

Each of us has our own playlists and whole albums that we've added, but when we listen together we like to just hit the shuffle button and play songs from across our communal library. And that gets us a mix of music that ranges from the Velvet Underground to songs from Les Miz to Daft Punk. Occasionally one of us will roll our eyes at the other's musical taste (although PDaughter is remarkably tolerant of the occasional Dylan track, bless her heart), but for the most part we enjoy the hell out of ourselves.

But about a week ago, we were listening in shuffle-all mode, and a song came on that neither of us recognized. I checked her phone, and it was an old Manfred Mann song. OK, I dig me some Manfred Mann - "Do Wah Diddy Diddy" and that - but the thing was, neither of us could claim to have added this particular track. I have a couple of 70s songs from Manfred Mann's Earth Band in my playlists, but not any of the older stuff, and Katie barely even knows who Manfred Mann is. We laughed off  the mystery track.

And then there was another one. This one was from a 2004 album. And while we both liked the song ("Down in Mexico"), neither of us knew how it had gotten into our library.

It was a tad bit creepy.

Credit: Grace Weston.

Today we were listening again. And, like, three goddamn Manfred Mann songs came on. OK, what. We were laughing our butts off by this time, but we couldn't for the life of us explain what the hell all these Manfred Mann tracks were doing in our freaking Rhapsody library.

Upon further examination, we found we had 164 Manfred Mann songs. Of which I could honestly claim to have added two.

Honestly, nothing against Manfred Mann, Manfred Mann's
Earth Band, et al. 

So I went through and deleted most of them. I did keep a few more tracks than we originally had, but hey, what is Rhapsody for if not for discovering songs you didn't know you loved?

But the mystery remains: How did Manfred Mann invade our music library? Were we hacked? Was it a technical glitch? Did I at some point get extremely drunk and try to download just one Manfred Mann song and end up downloading like 15 albums' worth of music?

Seems highly unlikely.

If you have any idea how half a day's music by one band that neither of us really is into ended up on our Rhapsody account, let me know. If you're an incredibly sexy hacker who is responsible for this, definitely let me know.