Selecting your music: Always this before that (and often something must go in between)

Sorry, weird title! Like all of you, I have wide ranging tastes in music, and a large collection to choose from from. Do you have preferences (rules) about what gets played when? Can the first thing you put on in the morning be free jazz or black metal, or do you have to ease into things with, say, Billie Holiday? Is classical only for certain dayparts?

And (here's where I get a bit aspie) can you listen to disparate genres back to back? Case in point: the other day I started my listening with Abbey Lincoln. I had also picked up the new Deke Dickerson CD, but couldn't bear to follow up Abbey's dreamy ballads with rockabilly; I needed to find some middle ground between the two (the 1.5 between 1 and 2.) Ended up putting Etta James on before Deke.

I think in terms of "programming" like a club DJ (and I would have made a good employee at Muzak, sequencing unobtrusive peaks and valleys to control moods.) But I'm doing this at home just to please myself. Common ILM behavior?

"Do you have preferences (rules) about what gets played when?" no.

"can you listen to disparate genres back to back?" yes.

"Common ILM behavior?" perhaps?

Yeah, I figured you'd be a no rules/anything goes guy!

when I have a listening party by myself, it goes something like this:

the CURE - A Few Hours After This
PAVEMENT - Summer Babe
the English Beat - Save It For Later
Le Tigre - The The Empty
Prince - Play In The Sunshine
James Brown - I Got The Feeling
the White Stripes - When I Hear My Name
Martha and the Vandellas - I Promise To Wait my Love
Son House (1965) - Empire State Express
Caetano Veloso - Um Canto de Afoxe Para O Bloco do lle (Ile Aye)
the Underdogs - love's Gone Bad

...after a few singles, I start playing albums. I think the singles have some kind of flow, but with the albums, it's no rules, but i do think it gets more instrumental for some reason,like maybe some Royksopp then some Clifford Brown.

That Cure song's a great opener! But my linear way of thinking would probably want to put Son House first (oldest/most sparse) then Martha and the Vandellas, then JB, then Prince, then go from there. I certainly don't always play music in chronological or stylistic order though, and I like that your list goes for a more intuitive flow.

i listen to records from disparate genres back to back all the time. probably more common than listening to two records from the same genre.

my big thing recently has been listening to way more aggro/loud/energetic stuff on the morning commute and wanting something quieter at the end of the workday.