There was one radio station in town when I was growing up and it specialized in novelty songs and country-and-western that was about ten years out of date. I still get shivers when I hear "El Paso" or "Ghost Riders in the Sky". I remember in high school taking albums down to a young DJ so that he could play rock on the air. My older brother introduced me to the Kingston Trio, the Mamas & Papas and Paul Butterfield. In high school I listened to The Beatles and Rolling Stones like every other kid in America in the 70's. I also listened to Terry Reily and John Renbourn and John Mclaughlin. I had one group of friends that I partied with where I learned to like Frank Zappa and Bob Dylan. I had another group of friends with whom I drove around late at night listening to Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath and REO Speedwagon. One guy taught me to love B.B. King. There was a girl who explained Joni Mitchell to me. I was actually one of about ten people in the country with an 8-track recorder and I made copies of albums for people to play in their cars. I had a Sony reel-to-reel deck and made copies of albums for myself. I sold all of my stereo gear and music when I left for college because I wanted to be able to put everything in a backpack and hitch hike where-ever and when-ever I wanted to.
At Antioch I evolved a taste for The Grateful Dead - and learned about Marvin Gaye and Issac Hayes and Pattie LaBelle. I played Disco at dances (and mopped the beer off the floor afterwards) without ever really understanding it at anything more than a visceral level. I had more of a connection to the bluegrass and jazz I listened to on WYSO. After college I didn't have any money and neglected music for many years - listening to Spiro Gyra when everyone else was into Talking Heads and the Police and Depeche Mode. In New York I listened to jazz on WBGO (especially Ruben Blades and Tito Puente and Mongo Santamaria and all the afro-cuban stuff) . In Seattle I started out listening to blues and jazz on KPLU but soon switched to KCMU (now KEXP) and during the late eighties began hearing a lot of new stuff that I liked - indie and singer-songwriter mainly.
This is my collection of MP3s. It emphasizes stuff from the 70's and stuff with a west-coast influence. I suppose that says something about who I am and how I look at things. I use iTunes on a Mac and right now I have a couple hundred gigs of music. Most of it I bought as CDs or from AllofMP3, but some of it came from Will or from friends or was downloaded from Dime or Indietorrents. (I have a 20 gig iPod so I go through a triage process every time I update.) When Will left for college I started a project of logging every album I added. Since I was grabbing album art and track lists in order to properly tag the music, I started creating a page for each album with that content. Later I included a copy of a review on each page (mainly clipped from Pitchfork .) Then the server hiccupped and we rebuilt the website with a CMS and the dynamic pages Will could set up were a lot more appealing than the effort involved in redoing all my old pages.
Here is a photo gallery documenting our upgrade of the music library hardware. We took Will's external hard drives for back-up devices and bought him his own 2-TB NAS so that we could mirror each others' collections.
Here is a log of the music I've acquired during the last several months.
Click here to go to the search page where you can search my iTunes library. Here's a list of the albums in my iTunes library. Here's a list of the artists. Here's the album art locator. Here's my wish list.
Here's what I'm listening to right now:
Here's what I listened to last week:
Here's what I've listened to since November 2004: