AN: I need to stop writing one-shots, because if all I do this year is write 365 drabbles I'm not going to be very impressed with myself… The problem is that now every time I get a tiny little headcannon I have this urgent need to fic it. Anyway, this is what happens when "Bohemian Rhapsody" comes on the radio the morning after I binge on SPN fics.
Dean, of course, likes Metallica, and occasionally Bon Jovi, and Deep Purple, and all other kinds of mullet rock. Once, he picked up a girl from a local diner in New Jersey and as they were about to get going they turned on the radio to find "Eye of the Tiger" playing, and instead of having sex like they'd planned they had a naked jam session (Sam walked in thinking they were done and he swears he still has mental scars, the waitress just laughed). But Dean actually has a weak spot for Queen – or he used to, anyway. Before Sam left for Stanford and everything, they would sing along at the top of their lungs to "Bohemian Rhapsody", doing all kinds of voices and the guitar solo at full volume. On a good day, John would join in (no one could hit the highest notes like John Winchester). But after he made his demon deal to bring Sam back from the dead, the lines "Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me" hit too close to home, and since then that song lost its charm. One day when Cas was feeling particularly down over his fall from grace, Sam and Dean blasted "Mr. Farenheight" as loud as it would go and the three of them danced like morons. That song also lost its touch, after Cas destroyed Sam and left him to his memories of the Cage. It didn't come back after Cas did, either. But Dean still considers himself a Queen fan – after all, there's nothing better for prepping for a hunt than "We Will Rock You".
Sam listens to what his brother (teasingly) refers to as "douchey crap". He's actually willing to admit that some of it really is douchey crap, but never to Dean. He has all the albums of Jack Johnson, The White Stripes (although he had to delete "Get Behind Me Satan" after he and Ruby let Lucifer out of the Cage), U2 (that's a little harder to excuse, he thinks), and Coldplay. Oh, does Sam love Coldplay – "I am part of a cure, I am not part of a disease" is what he sings to himself when he gets overwhelmed by all the mistakes he's made. Once Dean asked him what Gavin DeGraw was doing on his iPod, a little bit after Stanford. It was because of Jess, of course. For as long as they'd been dating, Jess would make Sam sit with her and watch One Tree Hill – Sam could practically hear Dean griping about how stupid and unbelievable and dramatic it was, and how it lacked monsters when there was obviously room in the plot for them, and he agreed, but he watched it every week anyway, just for Jess. The theme song, however, enraptured Sam on the spot. After that first week, he went out and bought the album, and Jess sometimes heard him singing it in the shower. He sang that song in the shower exactly one time with Dean, and Dean still won't stop teasing Sam about it. Dean doesn't know it, but during his time hallucinating Lucifer, he found Florence and the Machine, which he listens to surprisingly often. It makes him feel a little bit better – especially, oddly enough, "Shake It Out".
Everyone expected Castiel to be really into gospel music, but he says he finds the voices to be a grating imitation of the singing of his brothers and sisters. Instead, he prefers music without words. There's the classical music, of course: Beethoven and Bach and Chopin. But Cas already heard their works in Heaven growing up, and nobody is really very surprised by this. It's the angel's love of Celtic music that confuses them. Once, they were passing through some state and some station was playing on the radio but it was pretty out of range, so Sam scanned for something with less static and found a station that, for some God-forsaken reason, played Celtic music all the time. The brothers stayed there a second, weirded-out expressions plastered on their faces and laughing, but when Sam made to start scanning again, Cas stopped him. A few days later, Cas bought all the (lyricless) Celtic music he could find. Another time, the boys sat down to a movie at Bobby's house while they had some time between jobs, and Cas found himself completely in awe of the soundtrack. He started looking up the artists and found X-Ray Dog and the 300 Violin Orchestra and he downloaded most of those songs to the iPod he had for reasons he wasn't too sure about. But everyone was taken aback when Castiel revealed that one of his favorite artists was called Two Steps from Hell.