From whence inspiration shall arise?

Or, how I refilled my "music hump". I've long known of a certain trend in my music: if I'm running short on ideas, it means that I'm not listening to enough music in general. Like how authors tend to be voracious readers, I always have music on. However, the problem comes in when I'm working on tweaking a mix, at which point I'll start listening to my own music incessantly. It ends up being like any thermodynamically closed system: devoid of an outside energy source, the creativity dries up and peters out. When that happens, I've got a method I use to get things going again, that I call "filling my music hump" (yes, odd camel association. It works for me). In iTunes, I've made a smart playlist that will autofill itself with about two gigs of music that I haven't heard in the past six months or so (excluding things like audiobooks and stand-up comedy). I then listen to that on random. Drives my wife crazy (she calls it my "whiplash mix", as it's entirely possible to go from The Andrews Sisters to Chuck Mangione to Yes to Skinny Puppy), but it gets me thinking about *all* music*. And that gets me back to my current project. It was in that "filling the music hump" mode that I popped in one of my wife's Within Temptation CDs. You know how it is when something grabs you by the shirt and makes you pay attention? Yeah, this was one of those moments, one of those, "THIS IS AWESOME. I MUST WRITE SOMETHING LIKE THIS." So, I have a new track that's symphonic metal, something of a departure for me (although I'll admit it's a bit heavier on the symphonic, light on the metal). I'm working on getting someone to sing it for me, because really: I have no business singing this genre. I'll post the bed track later on.