I’ve come a long way in my musical tastes, and I think it’s kind of interesting to map out the evolution. (Caution: long winded personal anecdote ahead!)

As a kid, my dad listened to country, my mom bounced around radio stations, going on an oldies kick, or warm98, or contemporary christian.

I wanted nothing to do with any of that. I listened to classical music. I listened to Cincinnati’s WGUC every night before going to bed, and during the day on a pair of headphones. I distinctly remember my mom being especially confused once when there was a vocal piece, with some monks chanting or something, and making me turn it off and go to bed because “you don’t want to listen to that”. She’s gotten much more open minded since then. But that’s another story.

Anyway, the point there is I totally and completely missed out on pop music for most of my childhood. The only memories i have involving most of the songs my peers grew up on were at skating parties. I knew it as skating party music.

It wasn’t until I was in fifth or sixth grade that I started exploring the radio airwaves, listening to the pop and rock stations. I remember the first time I realized I knew the words to a song (I don’t remember what it was called, or the words, but I bet if I heard it I’d be able to sing along…). I remember being frightened and fascinated by Metallica’s Master of Puppets.

After a year or so of this flirting with the radio, I found myself listening more and more to the hard rock station and less and less to the pop stations. I started making tapes of the songs I liked the best, listening to thhe radio on my stereo boombox/tapedeck and pressing record as soon as the song came on. The local rock station, WEBN had a segment they called “Mandatory Metallica” every night at 11pm. I remember staying up anytime I could, just to listen to it and record any tracks I didn’t already have in my tape collection. Soon I very rarely listened to the radio, growing sick of ads and announcers. I started to focus on listening to my tapes.

Another year passed, with Metallica reigning supreme in my 7th grade musical world. Some of my friends started talking about this band called Slipknot. I didn’t know what it was, but I asked for a copy of the cd once, and fell in love. For the rest of middle school I listened to slipknot on my cd walkman, volume turned all the way up. Not sure my ears have ever quite recovered from that. I can probably still belt out all of the lyrics to their sophomore release, Iowa.

My preference for metal continued on into high school, and the next major player that came on the field was in tenth grade when I was introduced to Ani Difranco. The first song I ever heard was Untouchable Face; while the style of the music was completely different from anything I had ever voluntarily listened to in the past, the lyrics really pulled me in; they were simultaneously poetic and rebellious, combining metaphor, narrative, and imagery with rebellious coarseness (ani’s not afraid to give the man a big fuck you).

I continued with this odd dichotomy of tastes, listening to metal and ani difranco, for most of high school. My first taste of indie music was via a segment on the local alternative rock station that was on every sunday at 9pm; I happened to be working a shift that got out at that time so I ended up listening to it nearly every week. I appreciated the variety, hearing new things that weren’t normally played on the radio, but didn’t really fall in love with anything until they played a song by the Magnetic Fields. It was “I don’t believe you” (which places this occurrence firmly in 2004, when “I” came out.) I loved it. I had missed the announcer’s intro to the song, only recalling that she had mentioned that the album was coming out in the following week. As soon as I got home, I fired up the internet (still AOL lol) and shot the dj an email, asking for details about the song. She quickly replied, telling me the details and where to go to find it (first time I had heard of Shake It Records), and recommending 69 Love Songs, calling it a “worthwhile investment for your music collection”. I ended up finding “I” at Best Buy and while I enjoyed it, it didn’t immediately do all that much for me.

As a side note, around this time I was also listening to a lot of electrogoth, ebm type stuff; the Crüxshadows were my favorite artist, and I loved things like VNV Nation, The Birthday Massacre, and others… These still lurk in my library and on my ipod, and still crop up every now and then…

One night during a particularly bad bout of insomnia, I randomly put “I” on again; this time, it clicked. I didn’t know why, but I couldn’t get enough of it and needed more. The next day, I went to shake it and bought 69 love songs. The rest, as they say, is history. The Magnetic Fields shot to the top of my artists, and to this day remain one of my very favorites.

This era of music, with a mixture of The Magnetic Fields, Ani Difranco, and “neogoth”, continued through the rest of high school and carried me into the beginning of my lastfm account. This is where I start to have a concrete musical history, with statistics and everything. Lastfm is really where I discovered the joy of finding new music; I both used my recommendation radio and just would randomly choose a band or tag and start listening. This is where my musical tastes really began to broaden; lastfm took the seeds I had sown in neogoth, metal, alt-folk, and indiepop and grew a magnificent, vast forest of music.

From there things have taken plenty of interesting twists, and I have discovered all kinds of new music, from a wide range of genres. I have become a kind of “musical slut” — I will listen to anything, and like it.  New favorites have clearly emerged and risen to the top among the reigning champs; Portishead, of Montreal, Animal Collective, and Sigur Ros being notable examples of bands I found via lastfm. For most of this time I didn’t know a single other soul (irl) that listened to most of the music I did; I carried on in my journey without others telling me what was good or not. I’ve never subscribed to review sites like pitchfork or anything like that; occasionally I’d look at top-albums of the year from various places, just to get some new things to listen to that clearly someone thought were worthwhile, but mainly my ears were my judge.  It’s only been within the past year or so that I’ve run into people who actually know and like much of the music I do, and so for the first time in a decade or so, I’ve been discovering music based on recommendations from real live souls.

And now, it’s time for lunch.