What should I listen to?

What should I listen to? This is a question that I’ve wrestled with since I was a kid (which, spoiler alert, was a long time ago). It used to be hard enough to figure out which of the hundreds of CDs or cassettes I owned to put on. Then the Internet made it so that it wasn’t just limited to albums I’d bought or copied. I could listen to basically anything, whenever I wanted. It’s a great feeling that people don’t appreciate if they didn’t grow up depending on listening to the radio or spending your paper route money on tapes to discover music. But it’s not easy, and it doesn’t help that I have a wide array of musical tastes.

I felt for the last few years I had a hard time getting new music to stick in my brain, or even to appreciate things I used to love when I was younger. And the reason, really, is that I didn’t spend much time on it. A quick spin through a few songs on a new album, sometimes even just the first minute or so of the songs, and I’d be on to something else. That’s partly necessary, because there might be 40 hours of new music just this week that I’ll never to listen to all of, and there’ll be another 40 hours next week, plus all the other weeks, plus all the stuff I already know about and could listen to again.

So I decided at the beginning of this year to pay more attention, even if only in a small dose, and listen to my musical choices more intentionally and deliberately. I figured part of that was keeping a bit of a log about what I put in my ears, so I don’t forget. This is really just a brain dump, but if you found it, maybe you’ll find something you haven’t heard before, or rediscover something you’d forgotten. That’s all I want to accomplish.