My dad loved the Beatles and the Eagles and Dr. Hook and Creedence Clearwater Revival. I can remember when I got old enough to be able to lower the stylus onto the records, and soon after purchased my first ever cassette tape: The Cars Heartbeat City, followed not long after by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the Sex Pistols, Iron Maiden and Falco.
And while I was playing in bands and hanging out with other music nerds, by the time I was in the last year of high-school I was the only one who was listening to Bad Brains and Peter Gabriel. Steve Reich and Verdi. Branford Marsalis and Rush. Brian Eno and Pantera. The Art of Noise and Henry Rollins.
By my mid-twenties, I was reading NME, Mojo, Q, the Wire, Downbeat and Gramophone religiously. I was devouring everything in the ECM catalogue; buying remastered reissues from Sony Classical Masterworks, Columbia, Impulse and Blue Note; tracking down obscure dark ambient works on now-defunct labels in the Netherlands; recommending Julie Miller, Nina Nastasia and Gillian Welch to anyone who’d listen; mining indie/post-rock/electronica/free-jazz artists on Chemikal Underground, Warp, Hathut, Touch and Go, Tzadik, Thrill Jockey, Apollo, Axiom, Earache, Screwgun, and JMT, et al; and finding my male singer/songwriter itch scratched by Joe Henry, Ron Sexsmith and Robbie Fulks.
Now in my early forties, as my posts in "What’s Spinning Tonight" perhaps attest to, I still find it pretty easy to discover new music. I don’t buy as much as I once did, though that’s partly because I used to buy an album a day if not more, and that I’ve become more discerning about what I do buy (I really didn’t need all of those Keith Jarrett albums, but they looked good stacked together on the shelf). That, and I now have other priorities aside from food, shelter and a massive record collection.
And though my appetite for new music is as insatiable as perhaps it ever was, it’s also true to say that there are many genres I’ve simply never connected with. If anything, I’d say my tastes have become more refined within a select range of musical forms. I’d be the last person to claim I’m not stuck in a few well-worn ruts. Perhaps I'm fortunate those same ruts happen to be filled with artists and labels still committed to putting out new music and reissues, despite the fact many of them are little more than passion projects.
Best,
853guy
