There are times that I feel like I need to warn my readers that they are about to go on a weird ride. This morning is one of those times because I have been in a strange head-space of late. Anytime I start plumbing the depths of my psyche you know something strange is going to come welling up from below. I’ve probably even written about this topic before, but when you have as many posts as I have it is bound to happen. Music used to be of the utmost importance to me and from the moment I got my first Walkman around 1983 until sometime circa 2008 I had music going almost 24/7.
I lived my life to my own personal soundtrack made up of whatever I happened to be listening to at the time. This was often times blaring out of a “boom box” into whatever room I happened to be in. I spent copious ours listening to music and drawing and at the same time thinking about all sorts of things. However at some point over the years I lost both of those things. I know exactly the moment when I stopped doing much in the way of artwork. It was our first year out of college and I had begrudgingly agreed to paint a mural in the activity center. We were supposed to be the only people in that area for the next two weekends and I decided to leave my paints, brushes and materials locked up under the bar area. When I came back a few days later it was all gone and I never quite recovered from the loss and pretty much shut down artistically.
The music thing however was more subtle. I don’t know exactly when I stopped actively listening to music but it is sometime over the last decade. I am not sure if I traded podcasts and youtube videos for music, or if I just stopped listening for other reasons. I do know that I am still pretty much constantly wearing headphones while seated at the computer, but often times there is nothing playing through them and I just sorta find the subtle pressure on either side of my head comforting. I was an early adopter of the MP3 and I remember in college setting up a script to rip new CDs I had bought to MP3 over night. However at some point I stopped caring about my archives of that as well and I just started streaming music first through Pandora and eventually through Google Music and now Amazon Music.
The problem with Google and Amazon is that they are not exactly great engines for showing me new things. I tend to go there when I want to listen to a specific song or album, whereas with Pandora I was constantly experiencing music that was effectively “new to me”. The algorithm that tried to gauge taste actually did a fairly good job of predicting the sort of music that I would normally want to listen to. I spent several years fine tuning it and even had a premium subscription back when those were like $20/30 a year instead of the monthly fee that exists now. I wonder if returning to Pandora would make the whole experience feel fresh again rather than just something I do when I specifically want to hear a song, because right now when I have one of those random moments I tend to just look something up on YouTube instead of a proper streaming service.
I know that sometime within the last ten years I started to struggle with listening to music with words while working on other things. More specifically I had trouble coding while listening to music with lyrics, and I ventured out into movie and video game soundtracks in a big way. The Destiny Soundtrack and the Tron Legacy Soundtrack have become my go to music for when I need to buckle down and concentrate on something. The only problem with that however is that soundtracks don’t make me think in quite the same way that lyrical music used to. While doodling away in my room I would explore the structure of songs and try and dissect all of the possible meanings that they could have. There are so many words and phrases that I use today that I first heard and stole from a song.
I grew up in the country without a steady flow of options when it came to music. So when someone got something new we used to make copies and pass it around and each time I got my hands on new music it was like a beam of light shining down on my otherwise dull existence. The same was true with movies and video games because they were all equally uncommon, and it wasn’t until I could drive that I regularly had access to get a fresh supply of those things. I was stuck in a small town that during my High School years didn’t even have a Walmart because it had closed during a consolidation when the Super Center opened one town over. So as a result things that are probably not important to anyone else are important to me, because when I did buy an album… I tended to listen to it until I had the transitions between songs memorized. Still to this day there are times when I hear a song and my brain expectantly waits after it finishes for the next song on the album to start playing.
The problem is… I am not quite sure how to get back to the place where music held the important role in my life that it once did. I’m almost not quite certain how to get over the mental block that has kept me from doing actual artwork for the last two decades. There are times when you have lost something and you are not even sure how it happened. I realize this has been a weird and lament filled post but it is what has been thrashing around in my brain. One of the things about daily blogging is that occasionally I feel like I have to be honest with my readers and just let these odd posts make their way onto the page. Instead of images I am going to perforate this post with some songs that have been kicking around in my head of late.
As someone for whom music has been critically important and central to my sense of self for close on five decades, I’d just like to say there is more interesting, stimulating, involving, exciting and all round amazing new music to be found right now than at any time in the last half century. It’s also never – quite literally never – been easier to find it.
My own wilderness years were the 20-oughts or whatever we’re calling the first decade of the new milennium. That was when I discovered MMORPGs and really didn’t pay much attention to anything else culturally for the best part of ten years. When I finally came out of that daze and started poking around to see what I’d missed a vast untapped ocean of possibilities opened up before me.
There are myriad ways to expose yourself to new sounds from Spotify to Global Radio to Bandcamp and more people linking and reviewing things on blogs and websites than you’ll ever have time to trawl but my personal favorite way to discover new artists, bands, singers and performers is to type random key words into YouTube and see what comes up. I think I started with colors, then animals, then textures and combinations of all of them. Then I spent a long time trying countries and cities and states and regions. Currently my obsession is searching for covers of bands or songs.
It’s not so much the results the searches bring as it is the way they cascade. Watching one video can lead to dozens, hundreds more. Reading the comments, where people often compare one thing to another, opens up more rabbit holes to dive down. There’s not just a whole world but a whole timeline to explore, too; all of musical history (well, since we started recording and filming music and performance, anyway), dumped in a chaotic heap to rummage through.
And it’s not just quantity, it’s quality. I’m hearing new music as good or better than anything I’ve ever heard as often as I’ve ever heard it. The best music I ever hear may well be the next music I hear is a thought that goes trhough my head often. As for the old mix tapes we used to make and swap in the ’80s ( a big part of my musical education at the time), YouTube or Spotify playlists and especially the kind of blog posts I’ve been doing for the last few months fill that space and then some. Thanks for your links and videos in the post. I’d love to see you do more posts like that. Several people in this corner of the blogging woods are doing something similar these days and I really hope it’s a trend that grows and keeps growing.