On the 1st of every month, one (1) email with a link to a ten (10) song Spotify playlist. That’s it and that’s all very specific.

LOL nothing? If you’re ever appropriately independently motivated, give me a shout and tell me if you liked some song in particular. That’s always interesting to me. Or maybe you really hated some song? I’m less interested in that to be honest. Do you have some recommendations? WORD. Send those for sure.

It’s songs that move me, and I think have general appeal. Full disclosure, I like some music that I can see how it can be objectively annoying but I think I have a decent grip on that, so this won’t veer into like Kleenex Girl Wonder, Kimya Dawson, Ima Robot, or Jogger, etc. What this will be is stuff that I have thought way too long and way too hard about and can proudly label as “GOOD MUSIC”.

I’m not too concerned with genre, point in time, or popularity. In my experience none of these really track with how good music is or isn’t. It wasn’t better in the 60’s, and it’s not worse now. There are garbage songs on Spotify with over 250M plays, and there are gems with less than 10K. And vice versa. 80% of any genre is trash, which by definition means 20% is good and like .01% will change your life.

Easiest thing is probably just to subscribe and check it out, you can always bail if it’s not your thing. I’ll try to add a history of playlists down below at some point so you can see… ( truncated due to time constraints, WIP).

I sometimes think I know A TON of music, but I also don’t know anything really.

My experience with music is strange, and this is too many unfinished thoughts about that.

Take my playlist thing for example, which is borderline pathological. My Spotify playlists go back to 2012. The offline ones back to 1999. It’s twenty years, over 5,000 playlists in total and it’s how I experience music. Which is both good and bad. It’s bad because I really have no idea what is happening in the zeitgeist most of the time.

It’s good because it’s really my own thing, and I have explored, found and fallen in love with music in an organic way that in my head feels like one continuous story. My first album was Sixteen Stone by Bush in ’95. Well, that was my first Compact Disc purchased for a boom box my parents got me for New Years/Christmas that year. I was 14, and the term is “late bloomer”.

But, no. I guess in ’93 I bought DIESEL by Shaquille O’Neal and Ozzmosis by Ozzy Osbourne. And I found Use Your Illusion II by Guns ‘n Roses left by the previous owners of the house we moved into. These last three were all tapes though. The term here is, “wtf?”

My first concert was Foghat, and the first song I ever remember liking is “Losing My Religion” by REM.

In ’97, Arthur, who would go on to be a life-long best friend, introduced me to punk with a mixtape that kicked off with Skankin’ Pickle. Less Than Jake changed how I thought about music. I started reading a DIY zine called APKWIAB. It was the funnies and coolest thing I had ever come across. By the following year, armed with a CD burner, a 56K dial-up modem, and fly-by-night FTP sites I started selling custom mix CDs in high school. Like, in 1998 I literally told people at school, write me a list of any songs and I’ll find them and put them on a CD for you. (Not a great way of making money since a single song took 2 hours to find and 6 hours to download).

Then came Napster, and Punkrock.net (again, via Arthur). I was VERY guitar music oriented coming in, but at some point Garbage released Version 2.0 and the electronic music front suddenly opened up.  Shortly thereafter I very briefly met DJ Shadow and actually said to him, “I love what you’re doing for hip-hop”. Imagine. He signed my hat and a bird pooped on it next week (years later it came out that what I had thought was bird poop was actually toothpaste, and in fact the hat was ruined not by chance but deliberate sabotage. I would describe my relationship with my younger sister at that point as acrimonious).

From DJ Shadow I wandered over into  Solesides, holy crap first time I heard Blackalicious and Latyrix. But on the more mellow side I also branched into Slowdive, and Air, and Morcheeba, and Hooverphonic. Into Massive Attack, Tricky, and Portishead. The origin story of the last three I traced obsessively. Tricky in particular beguiled me as a person and artist. Portishead felt like the most important thing I’d ever heard. Meanwhile, my favorite band in the world was Incubus, who at the time blended everything I loved and had not yet broken my heart. We followed them around on tour practically. I saw Incubus play at a bar in Scranton, PA. Met Brandon briefly also, this time I was mature enough to keep my fool mouth mostly shut and let my young sister fire off fan classics like, “You look so much shorter and skinnier in person!”

The list of bands that would go on to break my heart is extensive and wonderful. In no particular order, and far from being comprehensive: Portugal. The Man, Metric, Noisettes, Jay Electronica, Mos Def, Guns ‘n Roses, Tool, The Ten Thousand, Black Kids, Silversun Pickups, Earl Greyhound, Danger Mouse, Kanye, Arctic Monkeys, At The Drive-in have all at one point just crushed me. Because at some point they were also all the most important thing in the world to me. And I have developed a real zen about that like, shit, I am glad we ever had it at all because I wouldn’t trade that time and those songs for anything. These are the songs in these playlists.