A person’s taste in music can teach you some interesting things about them.

Power: Minor
Cost: 4 minor charges

Ingredients

For the purposes of this ritual, you’ll need:

-A CD player from the early 1990s, when hidden tracks on albums were all the rage. It must be programmable.

-A CD your target has listened to, from start to finish, at least once within the last month. The album must have liner notes – meaning it cannot have been pirated – and it must boast at least 13 full tracks.

-A Sharpie brand marker

Ritual Action

Insert your target’s CD into the CD player, and crank it to the maximum possible volume. Program the CD player to play each prime number track (1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17 and so forth), and let it rip.

You must sing along to each and every song, to the best of your ability. The lyrics must be both correct and complete (including any and all vocalizations, including “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” and “OOOooooOOoooh baby!”).

Every time a track ends, write the final digit of the track length down on the liner notes, beside that track’s copyright entry (the one that tells you who wrote the song, what studio recorded it, etc.). So if the song is 3:47 long, write 7.

When you’ve finished listening to the CD (at full volume), take it out of the player. Total up the numbers you’ve written on the liner notes, and write that number on top of the CD with your Sharpie. Put the CD back into the player. There will be a new track on the CD, appearing at whatever number you scrawled on it.

With your player still at full volume, skip to the very last song on the disc, and listen to it in full. When the song has finished, you will hear 30 seconds of silence, and the CD player will skip to the new bonus track. This track will be a previously unreleased song that sounds as though it belongs on the CD (same artist, same musical style, thematically similar to other works by that artist from the relevant period, etc.).

The song’s lyrics will be about your target’s noble passion (if the CD is inspirational, romantic, melodious, etc.), or your target’s rage passion (if it’s anger music like punk or hip hop). The song will only play once. Any attempts to record this song will result in static, and the same CD cannot be used in such a ritual more than once. Keep a notepad handy. (This also means that you’d better get a CD in a language you understand).

Rumours tell of a similar ritual that divines the target’s fear passion, and involves playing records backwards.