Welcome to my Music blog! I've wanted to do a music list, blog or podcast for some time now, so I'm excited to be bringing this to the web.
Few things in this world are as magical, mysterious, fascinating or just plain fun as music is for me. Music has tremendous power to recall a moment or memory, evoke powerful emotions anywhere on the spectrum, induce relaxation or arouse rage.
I could not begin to rank my top songs or albums in order of importance-it was hard enough to narrow it down as much as I did. The best I can hope for is to present them all as the top of the top for me, and hopefully convey a little of what I value in music along the way.
Music has been the soundtrack for my life all along, I suppose. Music was always playing in my family growing up. In fact, almost every single memory I have has a song tied with it. I was born in 1969, so the AM Radio hits of the early to mid 70s was the soundtrack of my formative years. Every family vacation, school I attended, milestone or period has its own unique soundtrack that take me right back there when I hear any of those tunes. And what's really funny is that 9 times out of 10 (or better) my brother and I have the same memory associated with a song when we compare notes.
Thinking back, it was strange how early I took a vested interest in music and started to build my own collection. I joined a record club (Columbia or RCA, where you would join and get 13 albums for a penny, etc...when I was in first or second grade and ordered albums by Simon and Garfunkel, Peter Frampton, The Beach Boys, etc... I remember ordering albums based on a combination of what the cover looked like, instinct, semi-random choice and what I was familiar with from my dad's mix tapes.
My dad made his own version of mix tapes in 8-track format in the early to mid seventies. I remember him sitting in front off his reel to reel player with his can headphones on making these tapes when I was a kid. They had stuff by The Turtles, The Lovin Spoonful, Neil Diamond, The Beach Boys, CCR, The Zombies, Spanky & Our Gang, Mamas and the Papas etc...And a lot of what was on those tapes (combined with AM radio of the day) built the foundation for my love of music.
My first concert was the Beach Boys in Portland Oregon on December 12th 1977. During the "Brian's Back" campaign where Brian Wilson was staging his comeback from the famous reclusive "bedroom" period of the mid 70s. Even as an 8-year-old, I remember vividly how fragile the Great Man looked as he made a token appearance to play a few songs seated in front of a keyboard that folded out from the dash of a (don't quote me on this) 1957 Chevy.
Then in fall of 1982 MTV came to my town and life changed for me forever. That was back when MTV played music 24/7, and seeing full color moving images of musical artists was all brand new. Not like today where you can get on YouTube and see anything (videos, interviews, live performances) anytime. You had to sit there for hours on end waiting for your favorite bands to come on. And it opened up a whole new type of music that we weren't hearing on the radio. The visual aspect of music coupled with a lot of very visually oriented bands of the day really captured my imagination.
Devo was the big one for me. All of that fall of 1982 I was crazy for the Spud Boys. Their videos were insane, hilarious and, best of all-entertaining. Their seemingly nonsensical video imagery really appealed to (and contributed to) my sense of the absurd. My friends and I would say "either they are absolute geniuses or total idiots". I thought their make believe world with Booji Boy and General Boy was brilliant. It's a shame people only remember the flowerpots, there is so much more to Devo.
For the rest of the 80s and into the 90s it was anything that was British and Indy
that ruled. If it wasn't British, gloomy and the guys weren't wearing eyeliner (i made an exception for The SMiths and New Order 'cuz of the extra gloom!), I wasn't interested. The Smiths, Joy Division, New Order, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Bauhaus, Love and Rockets were what my wheelhouse was all about!
I was briefly interested in grunge when that rolled around, but that was very short-lived.
Sometime around '96 I began really frequenting the record shops and hitting them hard grabbing everything that was even remotely interesting and really began building the foundation for my future aspiration of a music library for the ages and a knowledge of music history to match. I jumped in the deep end of 70s Funk music and discovered so much great stuff in that genre that I love to this day. I was really all over the board-I picked up such a range of things like Herb Alpert, Henry Mancini, Burt Bacharach, Dick Dale all the way over to Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin and almost everything in between. I missed classic rock during the 80s due to being a waver
(you typically did not cross party lines in those days).
Finding one great band or album led to exploring other related artists and that forked off in many directions. And by the way-this required a lot more leg work back in the mid to late 90s (pre internet), it wasn't easy. It required going to the library and looking things up in books or going to record shops and devouring magazines in search of useful leads. But, it was fun as hell. Come to think of it, I can't even remember the last time I was in a real Brick and Mortar record shop.
I would also frequesnt thrift stores where I bought all sorts of vinyl LPs of old easy listening stuff, funk and whatever looked fun and interesting-at $.99 for an album, you couldn't go too far wrong. And the smell of old records! It's worth flipping through the stacks for that alone. I keep thinking about picking up a turn table today, there is a lot of old vinyl out there at the Goodwill's and other thrift shops that will never make it to the digital world and would make for some great listening I'm sure.
I was a deliver driver at this time, so I would make tapes (tapes were still around, and CD players were not ubiquitous yet) and listen to music all day as I drove my routes and I actually sort of became the de facto DJ in the warehouse (where I worked) as well, since I was consistently willing to cart my music to and fro.
The digital music revolution has brought on some amazing changes to how I can play music, how I choose to play music, how I experience music and even when I play music. I don't think I would say that it is better now or worse-just different...quite a bit different. But I would say that I think it would be difficult to have an appreciation for all of the modern music listening tools without having experienced the simplicity and the limitations of how it used to be.
I'm not a fan of Pandora, generally speaking. If things are going to be played randomly, I prefer to be in charge of the content. I'm not a passive listener. Which is why I prefer something like Spotify, or just playing my own iTunes music library or playlists on random. I think iTunes has brought about significant changes for me in how I interact with music and my musical overall experience in general. The ability to organize by artist, album, genre, year, rating, date added, date purchased, last played, beats per minute, etc (44 data points in all) offers unlimited interesting ways to look at what music I have.
For example-I am always picking up new music from the local library and ripping it to my iTunes library. Generally speaking, I have a pretty solid stream of new music coming in. I devised a somewhat systematic and interesting way of processing it, that I really like. After putting it into my general iTunes library, I put it into a playlist which then gets synced with my iPhone. At any given time there is usually 4 hours or more of music on this particular playlist. I love listening to music while I ride my bike. So I take this playlist out and listen to it on shuffle for a few hours while I ride and take the new material in. Sometime after I get home I sync my phone and in the view for the playlist I was listening to I sort by the Last Played
column, which will chronologically sort the songs that I just listened to and bring them to the top of the list (sorted by date). I review them and take mental notes of what songs caught my interest and what didn't, make genre modifications if necessary, assign them to other playlists I have if applicable, etc...I remove all the songs that were listened to (sorted by Last Played
) from this playlist and sync the iTunes library with my phone to put the revised playlist into my phone. Then when I get something new (from the library or wherever) I add it into this playlist and repeat the process again. So, by doing this, I guarantee that I will be listening to and familiarizing myself with all my incoming/recent acquisitions (rather than just stuffing them into my library to collect dust) and that all are given proper rotation.
The randomification of music is something I rely on heavily and really love. I love the idea of songs from all corners of my library queueing up for a totally unique listening experience. Sometimes the result is total magic, while others not so much-you never really know what you're going to get. Hearing strange combinations of songs can reveal attributes and characteristics of the music that may not be present when the individual songs are in their natural habitat
.
Being able to carry around over 10,000 songs in my pocket on a device the size of a few credit cards is pretty amazing. In vinyl album terms, that would be like carrying around 833 albums! You would need a truck to haul that around.
But at the end of the day-it's still music. And it's still magical, mysterious, fascinating and fun for me and only continues to get to be more so with age.