I grew up on the radio. Not literally, of course, but listening to the radio. I love music. Always have. As a kid in my house, we had a couple of different choices. My Dad loved the music of the 60's and 70's (Motown, The Beatles, Creedence) and my Mom listened to classical. (To this day, I think of Mom whenever I hear Rachmaninoff.) So until I was old enough to buy my own records (yes, vinyl) that's what I listened to. However, in the early 80's, I started to "discover" my own musical taste.
We lived in a small southern town with access to about one good radio station which played a consistent mix of Top 100 music. I remember listening to Casey Kasem every week to find out what was the new #1 song. I still have tapes I made listening to the radio with my finger poised on the "rec" button so I could catch my favorites. These are the artists I grew up with. [Madonna, Michael Jackson, Queen] I was part of the MTV generation. Later in that decade, I expanded to include to a lot of Big Hair pseudo-metal bands. [Def Leppard, Poison, Bon Jovi] In college in the 90's, I added to that whatever my friends were listening to, mostly pseudo-grunge pop hits, creating a mildly eclectic mix. [R.E.M., Pearl Jam, Nirvana]
Meanwhile, I listened to the radio less and less. Which is surprising, because you'd think that the college scene would be ripe with a variety of musical listening choices. Maybe it was. I had a particularly bad experience with my freshman-year roommate who would sit around and listen to They Might Be Giants all that time, and as much as I wanted to like what everybody was calling Alternative Music I just hated that guy and probably wrote off TMBG by association (for far too long, sadly). That whole genre, I just never got into it. Besides, most of my friends were, like me, still listening to the music they grew up with.
Meanwhile, I had a friend at the time who turned me on to some really good classic jazz, so I started investing in a CD collection. [Mingus, Monk, Miles] And for reasons unknown, I stumbled onto the world of musicals and invested deeply into that area, too, despite my ironic last name. [Sondheim, Lloyd Webber, Menken] I explored the world of classical music, which because of my mother I had a keen ear for, and really enjoyed that. And later in that decade I decided I really liked electronica [Moby, The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers] which led me even further away from whatever was playing on the pop radio stations at the time.
Eventually, I graduated from school, got out, moved on, got a job in the "real world" and kept listening to basically the same stuff I had been before. I kept a few of the popular radio stations programmed in my car and occasionally shuffled through. There have been a few artists in the last 10 years that I've added to my collection. The Barenaked Ladies is a great example. I love those guys. Beck is another. I have a tendency to find an artist I like and then go out and buy all of their CD's, backdating my education in that way. When I finally discovered how much I liked Sting, I had to go back and start with Dream of the Blue Turtles, and I remembered buying that tape for a friend of mine 15 years ago for his birthday party without ever knowing what great music that was.
I picked things up from movie soundtracks. The Grosse Point Blank CD stayed in my car for years. But so did the two Forrest Gump CD's. Go figure.
I started making mix CD's from my favorite songs and kept a selection of those in my car at all times. I upgraded my old Honda Accord to a Nissan Maxima, (with a 6-disc in dash changer) and kept it loaded up with a good selection and pretty much stopped listening to the radio altogether. It seemed my musical education, which had been grinding down for years, had finally stalled.
Then, three years ago, something interesting happened. We moved to North Carolina. Down here in what they call The Triangle we are nestled in between 3 big schools: NC State, UNC and Duke. (Thus the name, the "Triangle.") Despite all of the other benefits associated with having a constant flow of educated kids graduating and entering the workforce, there is also a lot of interesting culture down here. And one thing I discovered right off the bat is a great little radio station out of NC State, WKNC. I link to them happily. They play music that I don't think I would have ever heard on any of the pop radio stations of my youth. There is no Christina Aguilera. There is no Brittney Spears. (Thank God.) There is, however, a lot of local bands, and lot of independent bands, bands from England or similarly overseas.
I found myself listening to the radio to and from work, just this one station, and remembering to myself that there was this great song at 8:46am or 5:32pm (or whatever) that I needed to find. When I got home I'd go to their website, look up the song on their playlist (which wasusually sometimes accurate) and then go buy it on the iTunes store. I've purchased hundreds this way. And some of those songs have led me to an artist's entire body of work, per my M.O., as I back-track and find out what else they've done.
Pandora has been great for this, too. I plug in an artist I like and it plays for me others like it. The internet is an amazing resource. When I was a kid, would I have ever thought that entire CD's would be available for streaming? That music videos would be a YouTube click away? That I could buy a single track instead of owning an entire shelf of discs that could be politely classified as one hit wonders?
Anyway, these pages share the wonders of my discoveries, and hopefully you will find something in here that you like as well, and that discovery takes you places you would not have gone otherwise.
Here's hoping, anyway.
I don't write too much about music in here. That's not intentional. I had another blog going for a while, a sister-project to this one you could say, where I was regularly visiting a new artist and talking about them. I'd pick a new artist every week or two (or four) and dive in, listen to as much of their music as I could and then pick a song to highlight. This text over to the right was ripped straight from those now-defunct pages explaining my love for music and my particularly un-extraordinary history.We lived in a small southern town with access to about one good radio station which played a consistent mix of Top 100 music. I remember listening to Casey Kasem every week to find out what was the new #1 song. I still have tapes I made listening to the radio with my finger poised on the "rec" button so I could catch my favorites. These are the artists I grew up with. [Madonna, Michael Jackson, Queen] I was part of the MTV generation. Later in that decade, I expanded to include to a lot of Big Hair pseudo-metal bands. [Def Leppard, Poison, Bon Jovi] In college in the 90's, I added to that whatever my friends were listening to, mostly pseudo-grunge pop hits, creating a mildly eclectic mix. [R.E.M., Pearl Jam, Nirvana]
Meanwhile, I listened to the radio less and less. Which is surprising, because you'd think that the college scene would be ripe with a variety of musical listening choices. Maybe it was. I had a particularly bad experience with my freshman-year roommate who would sit around and listen to They Might Be Giants all that time, and as much as I wanted to like what everybody was calling Alternative Music I just hated that guy and probably wrote off TMBG by association (for far too long, sadly). That whole genre, I just never got into it. Besides, most of my friends were, like me, still listening to the music they grew up with.
Meanwhile, I had a friend at the time who turned me on to some really good classic jazz, so I started investing in a CD collection. [Mingus, Monk, Miles] And for reasons unknown, I stumbled onto the world of musicals and invested deeply into that area, too, despite my ironic last name. [Sondheim, Lloyd Webber, Menken] I explored the world of classical music, which because of my mother I had a keen ear for, and really enjoyed that. And later in that decade I decided I really liked electronica [Moby, The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers] which led me even further away from whatever was playing on the pop radio stations at the time.
Eventually, I graduated from school, got out, moved on, got a job in the "real world" and kept listening to basically the same stuff I had been before. I kept a few of the popular radio stations programmed in my car and occasionally shuffled through. There have been a few artists in the last 10 years that I've added to my collection. The Barenaked Ladies is a great example. I love those guys. Beck is another. I have a tendency to find an artist I like and then go out and buy all of their CD's, backdating my education in that way. When I finally discovered how much I liked Sting, I had to go back and start with Dream of the Blue Turtles, and I remembered buying that tape for a friend of mine 15 years ago for his birthday party without ever knowing what great music that was.
I picked things up from movie soundtracks. The Grosse Point Blank CD stayed in my car for years. But so did the two Forrest Gump CD's. Go figure.
I started making mix CD's from my favorite songs and kept a selection of those in my car at all times. I upgraded my old Honda Accord to a Nissan Maxima, (with a 6-disc in dash changer) and kept it loaded up with a good selection and pretty much stopped listening to the radio altogether. It seemed my musical education, which had been grinding down for years, had finally stalled.
Then, three years ago, something interesting happened. We moved to North Carolina. Down here in what they call The Triangle we are nestled in between 3 big schools: NC State, UNC and Duke. (Thus the name, the "Triangle.") Despite all of the other benefits associated with having a constant flow of educated kids graduating and entering the workforce, there is also a lot of interesting culture down here. And one thing I discovered right off the bat is a great little radio station out of NC State, WKNC. I link to them happily. They play music that I don't think I would have ever heard on any of the pop radio stations of my youth. There is no Christina Aguilera. There is no Brittney Spears. (Thank God.) There is, however, a lot of local bands, and lot of independent bands, bands from England or similarly overseas.
I found myself listening to the radio to and from work, just this one station, and remembering to myself that there was this great song at 8:46am or 5:32pm (or whatever) that I needed to find. When I got home I'd go to their website, look up the song on their playlist (which was
Pandora has been great for this, too. I plug in an artist I like and it plays for me others like it. The internet is an amazing resource. When I was a kid, would I have ever thought that entire CD's would be available for streaming? That music videos would be a YouTube click away? That I could buy a single track instead of owning an entire shelf of discs that could be politely classified as one hit wonders?
Anyway, these pages share the wonders of my discoveries, and hopefully you will find something in here that you like as well, and that discovery takes you places you would not have gone otherwise.
Here's hoping, anyway.
Anyway, I hope to do more with music in here soon (for reasons detailed to the right), but for now, let me just add a little list of artists I've been listening to lately, that I've "discovered" (big air-quotes around that word) by listening to the local college radio station.
If you'd like to know more about any of these, just drop me a note. I can recommend all of these and talk at some length about most of them.
- !!!
- American Aquarium
- Arcade Fire
- Beck
- Belle & Sebastian
- Big Pretty and the Red Rockets
- Bloodhound Gang
- Blur
- Bombadil
- Brendan Benson
- Buck 65
- Built to Spill
- Cake
- Calexico and Iron & Wine
- Calla
- Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
- Cut Copy
- Daft Punk
- Dan Sartain
- David Byrne
- Death Cab for Cutie
- Deerhoof
- Don Cavalli
- Donita Sparks & The Stellar Moments
- Dressy Bessy
- Eels
- Emmy The Great
- Feist
- Film School
- Fleet Foxes
- Fountains of Wayne
- Franz Ferdinand
- Gogol Bordello
- Gorillaz
- Grandaddy
- Her Space Holiday
- Iggy Pop
- Immaculate Machine
- Interpol
- Ivy
- Jamie T
- Jens Lekman
- Junior Boys
- Kasabian
- LCD Soundsystem
- Lily Allen
- M.I.A.
- Marcy Playground
- Matt Pond PA
- Midtown Dickens
- Moby
- Mos Def
- Mumford & Sons
- N.A.S.A.
- Neutral Milk Hotel
- New Young Pony Club
- NOFX
- Nous Non Plus
- Of Montreal
- OK Go
- One Ring Zero
- Over the Rhine
- Pretty Girls Make Graves
- Puddle of Mudd
- Pulp
- Radiohead
- Red Hot Chili Peppers
- Regina Spektor
- Rilo Kiley
- Say Hi
- School of Language
- Scissor Sisters
- She Wants Revenge
- Single Frame
- Sleater-Kinney
- SNMNMNM
- Snow Patrol
- Sondre Lerche
- Spoon
- Sublime
- Sufjan Stevens
- The 88
- The All-American Rejects
- The Avalanches
- The Beta Band
- The Big Pink
- The Blow
- The Boy Least Likely To
- The Breeders
- The Chemical Brothers
- The Cure
- The Dandy Warhols
- The Fiery Furnaces
- The Flaming Lips
- The Go! Team
- The Greenskeepers
- The Jesus & Mary Chain
- The Minus 5
- The Mountain Goats
- The National
- The New Pornographers
- The Old Ceremony
- The Orion Experience
- The Pipettes
- The Proclivities
- The Raveonettes
- The Russian Futurists
- The Saturday Knights
- The Shins
- The Strokes
- The Sunshine Underground
- The Unicorns
- The Walkmen
- The White Stripes
- They Might Be Giants
- Tunng
- U2
- Vampire Weekend
- VHS or BETA
- Wax Fang
- We Are Scientists
- Weezer
- Yael Naim
- Yeah Yeah Yeahs
- Yelle
- Yo La Tengo
