Tone, do you understand now why I saw the spangram first yesterday?
It spoke to you.
I have a hypothesis that in most word games, the words that mean the most to you somehow are going to stand out, whether in your recall or jumbled in front of your eyes.
When I'm playing Strands, I approach it almost like those holographic pictures where you have to focus beyond the surface of the page to see the hidden image. I'm not focusing on the letters, I'm letting groups of them grab my attention. And what I've found is that words that are most-often in my thoughts pop out first. So, obviously, words related to music are going to pop, because that's where my head is a lot of the time.