So the one problem with the title of this post is that I hardly work out any more. A daily exercise regime was one casualty of the pandemic for me. At best, I go for walks outside, but I don’t have walking outside music because I don’t think it’s safe to have music playing through earbuds/headphones when out and about outdoors, since that means you might not be aware of what is happening in your surrounding environment. But once upon a time, I did work out to the playlist that is mentioned in this post’s title, and that playlist comes with a little story.

Back in the early 2000s, I used what was that era’s version of a streaming music service: everyone and their cousin downloading and sharing music. One of my coworkers had a huge collection on his work laptop, and just put it all on a share drive on the company’s intranet and I copied it all to my work laptop and had new music to listen to for the next few years. We were all pretty brazen about it. You may have similar memories from the same time period.

Another friend who lived in a different state would burn me mp3 discs and mail them to me. It was like we had peer to peer file sharing with a snail mail extension. He liked to introduce me to new bands, and one time I got a disc that included the album Alligator by The National. I liked it! It was rock and roll with intelligent and subversive lyrics, each song a tight little package rich with meaning. The pacing and style of the tracks varied from hard driving rock to gentle, jangly dirges, which made it perfect for a workout album – you can use the fast bits to push yourself, and the slow bits to pause for a breather.

I copied the album to my mp3 player (remember, this was in the long ago) and it entered my workout music rotation. I liked how it started off right away with a really heavy, hard hitting track. The album really got my blood flowing; it was a good choice for a sort of power workout. If you recall any of my earlier workout album posts, you will note that I tend to favor EDM (electronic music) over rock, so this album was kind of a stand out.

As the years went by and the mp3s just died, I switched to using my smartphone for listening to music. When I queued up Alligator, I was shocked to discover that the tracks were in the wrong order! The album didn’t start like I was used it to starting, with an instant dive into a fast, hard riff. It was a bit disappointing.

As it turned out, the mp3 burn that I had been listening to previously had the tracks in a different order than they appear on the album. This was because they were sorted by track number, starting with track #10. I had been listening to the songs in the wrong order the whole time!

But it was the order I was used to, and I liked it, so I made a Spotify playlist which reordered the tracks accordingly. Here it is, and you can check it out and see if you agree with me that it’s the best way to listen to the album.