Sometimes I listen to Air while running. Yesterday, in the middle of a self-imposed treadmill 5k, it occurred to me that their music is compelling. It compels me forward. It has inertia, driving energy, consistent forward movement.

Other songs on my 'gym mix' are entertaining (I want to sing along with Lily Allen's escapades). Or they're distracting (I am locked in Justin Timberlake's danceable rhythm). But Air compels me to run, run, run.

Does that same quality compel consumers to run, run, run to purchase Nissan, Levi's and L'Oreal products?

Air's Wikipedia entry lists many of their licensed tracks.

The Time Warner Cable-supplied blurb described the program as:

Conventional music used in a [sic] unconventional manner.

I wondered, what might that unconventional manner be, so I clicked on channel 83, the Ovation network.

It was Carter Burwell, describing the process of composing for Fargo, how he took a Norwegian folk song called The Lost Sheep, played around with it on his piano, then reshaped it with fiddle, pizzicato cello, double bass, harp and celeste using his computer and a few synthesizers. (It was rerecorded, of course, for the film).

Fargo, North Dakota.

I've always been drawn to the melancholy theme that seems to sum up the snowy expanse of the rural Dakotas. It was performed on a Hardanger fiddle by Paul Peabody.

I've been thinking about a passage in this book.

The narrator recalls that, as a young girl, she was obsessed with a particular song. When no one was around, she played it over and over on her boombox. She sang along with her eyes closed, cradling a pillow. She kept the cassette cued to that song, eventually wore out the tape.

Baby, baby, never let me go...

Years later, she realized she had deliberately ignored some of the lyrics. It was about lovers, not infants. She had skipped over those phrases to recast the song and maneuver her meaning onto it.

She had imagined infants, not lovers.