Every morning the first thing I tweet (besides maybe how tried I still am?) is “What is everyone listening to? I’m walking to work with ______ .” I love seeing whatever it is my tweetstream is into at that moment: jazz & soul, industrial metal to wake themselves up, indie pop to organize their thoughts, classical. I love every genre of music, so no matter what they recommend, I’m sure I can find something new to love in the ether. And so here I am, with a new feature (one that will hopefully be run more often and more easily than my others, ha!).

What I’m listening to at Limbo (aka, my current must-have music)…

Muse: I have been on a hugely complex kick over the last few weeks. Give me layered, complicated, luxurious music and I’m a happy girl. Is it any surprise that in the midst of that sort of mood, Muse would be at the top of every one of my play lists?

The Kooks: Again with the delicious layering and a depth that constantly takes me by surprise. I discovered The Kooks thanks to the unique music stylings of the first season of Gossip Girl (which, come on, introduced Kings of Leon to the masses), and checked out more of their stuff about a year and a half ago. Their LP’s have been on my rotation pretty constantly since and I hardly go a day without them stuck in my head for some reason or another. “Stormy Weather” is, in my opinion, one of the best recordings to come out in recent years.

In simpler fare, I’ve been relaxing late evenings with James Taylor and Yiruma, both beautiful composers of music that just lifts you up a bit and gently places you back down in a much more calm place. It’s always good to have a backlog of music you can just disappear into, and my favorites for this tend to lean on the classical side of things. Vivaldi‘s “Four Seasons” can always get me through a particularly hard day at the office, and when I’m feeling more blue than calm, I turn to Beethoven‘s “Moonlight Sonata” (a habit I picked up from a boy in high school who was always much sadder than 15 year old boys tend to be).

I guess my listening these days is a bit all over the place, but I never see that as a bad thing. Music of any kinda – world, street, techno, pop, country – tells a story through rhythm and heart; if I’m all over the place, maybe it’s because I feel lots of different stories speaking to me at once.

So tell me, what are you listening to?