Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
MUSIC MAN
The Sound Track of His Life
Jimmy Iovine, Bono, Jobs, and The Edge, 2004
On His iPod
As the iPod phenomenon grew, it spawned a question that was asked of presidential candidates, B-
list celebrities, first dates, the queen of England, and just about anyone else with white earbuds: 
“What’s on your iPod?” The parlor game took off when Elisabeth Bumiller wrote a piece in the 
New York Times
in early 2005 dissecting the answer that President George W. Bush gave when 
she asked him that question. “Bush’s iPod is heavy on traditional country singers,” she reported. 
“He has selections by Van Morrison, whose ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ is a Bush favorite, and by John 
Fogerty, most predictably ‘Centerfield.’” She got a 
Rolling Stone
editor, Joe Levy, to analyze the 
selection, and he commented, “One thing that’s interesting is that the president likes artists who 
don’t like him.”
“Simply handing over your iPod to a friend, your blind date, or the total stranger sitting next to 
you on the plane opens you up like a book,” Steven Levy wrote in 
The Perfect Thing
. “All 
somebody needs to do is scroll through your library on that click wheel, and, musically speaking, 
you’re naked. It’s not just what you like—it’s 
who you are.
” So one day, when we were sitting in 
his living room listening to music, I asked Jobs to let me see his. As we sat there, he flicked 
through his favorite songs.
Not surprisingly, there were all six volumes of Dylan’s bootleg series, including the tracks Jobs 
had first started worshipping when he and Wozniak were able to score them on reel-to-reel tapes 
years before the series was officially released. In addition, there were fifteen other Dylan albums, 
starting with his first, 
Bob Dylan
(1962), but going only up to 
Oh Mercy
(1989). Jobs had spent a 
lot of time arguing with Andy Hertzfeld and others that Dylan’s subsequent albums, indeed any of 
his albums after 
Blood on the Tracks
(1975), were not as powerful as his early performances. The 
one exception he made was Dylan’s track “Things Have Changed” from the 2000 movie 
Wonder 
Boys.
Notably his iPod did not include 
Empire Burlesque
(1985), the album that Hertzfeld had 
brought him the weekend he was ousted from Apple.

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The other great trove on his iPod was the Beatles. He included songs from seven of their 
albums: 
A Hard Day’s Night, Abbey Road, Help!, Let It Be, Magical Mystery Tour, Meet the 
Beatles!
and 
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
. The solo albums missed the cut. The Rolling 
Stones clocked in next, with six albums: 
Emotional Rescue, Flashpoint, Jump Back, Some Girls, 
Sticky Fingers
, and 
Tattoo You
. In the case of the Dylan and the Beatles albums, most were 
included in their entirety. But true to his belief that albums can and should be disaggregated, those 
of the Stones and most other artists on his iPod included only three or four cuts. His onetime 
girlfriend Joan Baez was amply represented by selections from four albums, including two 
different versions of “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word.”
His iPod selections were those of a kid from the seventies with his heart in the sixties. There 
were Aretha, B. B. King, Buddy Holly, Buffalo Springfield, Don McLean, Donovan, the Doors, 
Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, John Mellencamp, Simon and 
Garfunkel, and even The Monkees (“I’m a Believer”) and Sam the Sham (“Wooly Bully”). Only 
about a quarter of the songs were from more contemporary artists, such as 10,000 Maniacs, Alicia 
Keys, Black Eyed Peas, Coldplay, Dido, Green Day, John Mayer (a friend of both his and Apple), 
Moby (likewise), U2, Seal, and Talking Heads. As for classical music, there were a few recordings 
of Bach, including the Brandenburg Concertos, and three albums by Yo-Yo Ma.
Jobs told Sheryl Crow in May 2003 that he was downloading some Eminem tracks, admitting, 
“He’s starting to grow on me.” James Vincent subsequently took him to an Eminem concert. Even 
so, the rapper missed making it onto Jobs’s iPod. As Jobs said to Vincent after the concert, “I don’
t know . . .” He later told me, “I respect Eminem as an artist, but I just don’t want to listen to his 
music, and I can’t relate to his values the way I can to Dylan’s.”
His favorites did not change over the years. When the iPad 2 came out in March 2011, he 
transferred his favorite music to it. One afternoon we sat in his living room as he scrolled through 
the songs on his new iPad and, with a mellow nostalgia, tapped on ones he wanted to hear.
We went through the usual Dylan and Beatles favorites, then he became more reflective and 
tapped on a Gregorian chant, “Spiritus Domini,” performed by Benedictine monks. For a minute 
or so he zoned out, almost in a trance. “That’s really beautiful,” he murmured. He followed with 
Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto and a fugue from