I’ve written before about how, like what I imagine is common for music aficionados, I have a habit of associating music (generally, whole albums) with events in my life, or things I’m doing, or whatever. The concepts can be abstract “high school” or specific “that wide turn to the left around a hill somewhere right after Wildcat Mountain on Highway 33 heading east from La Crosse” (seriously), but they’re always associations that become hard to shake, in no small part due to how lovingly I embrace them.

In lieu of any sort of real informative update (er, I’ve been playing a lot of Etrian Odyssey and Rock Band, and so far fighting off my daydreaming of a new video card…), I decided to list another one, a more recent one.

Part of it, honestly, is because it is the merging of two suggestions I quickly grew to appreciate: Nightwish’s Dark Passion Play and George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. I’ve listened to Dark Passion Play too many times to count since I got it, and still have yet to finish A Game of Thrones (in part because I felt I was going through it too quickly), but nevertheless, this one is sticky. Two suggestions from two people. Doesn’t hurt that they arrived in the same box from Amazon.

For a week or two, my evening ritual was firing up DPP in Amarok, crawling into bed, and flying through five or so chapters of AGoT, enjoying both in tandem. The song that I think really makes the link, for whichever reason, is “For The Heart I Once Had,” which opens in a certain way that makes me think of cold Starks — I think it has something to do with the opening and the guitar bridge riffs. I don’t know why, so I won’t try to explain it.

Two updates this month… I must be getting sick. :)