The Conical Glass: The perils of discovering new music

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

The perils of discovering new music

One of my favorite podcasts is NPR's All Songs Considered, a weekly program which presents an eclectic mix of new music. Sometimes it bugs me -- the show's host, Bob Boilen, and its guest contributors are often too predictable in their tastes, touting hipster/rockcrit faves like Joanna Newsom, Cat Power, Bright Eyes, the Decemberists and the Arcade Fire. However, there's no denying that if you listen to the show regularly, you'll be a much more informed music fan. And occasionally Boilen will champion something less predictable, like one of my favorite discoveries of 2006, J. DiMenna; he was also an early booster of English pop princess Lily Allen. Sometimes he throws some interesting world music acts into the mix, like Irish folk band Lunasa.

Anyway, I listened to last week's show twice, mainly because I was interested in hearing the new Arcade Fire song. Yesterday, I was driving home and happened to hear a really fantastic song on KFOG. The station has a cool feature in which the name of the artist and song are displayed on the car radio's control panel; however, this one showed up as Bob Dylan's "Tangled Up In Blue," and it definitely wasn't that. I tried remembering bits of lyrics so I could Google them when I got home. I'm usually pretty bad at making out lyrics and this song was no exception. The only phrases I could remember were "foreign lands" and "spray-on tans." I rushed upstairs and typed those words into the search engine, which instantly told me that the song was "Phantom Limb" by the Shins.

Not only do I own a Shins album (Oh, Inverted World), so I should probably have recognized their sound, but when I looked at the playlist for last week's All Songs Considered, it turns out that "Phantom Limb" had been played on the podcast. So I'd already heard it -- twice. And I guess it made no impression on me. I was most likely working while I was listening to it. But on the car radio, it captured my full attention and blew me away.

A couple of days ago, I listened to the MP3 of Sloan's "Money City Maniacs," which was posted on the music blog Idolator. Now, I'm sure I must have heard Sloan before; it wouldn't surprise me if I have some of their tracks on mix CDs my friends have made. I might have dismissed them as Posies wannabees. But at that moment, "Money City Maniacs" sounded like the most perfect power-pop song ever. Within five minutes, I'd downloaded a bunch of their stuff from eMusic, and I'm thinking, how could I not have realized how brilliant these guys were back in the mid- to late-1990s, when these CDs were released?

My iTunes playlist, where all my eMusic downloads wind up, demonstrate quite succinctly what a short attention span for music I've developed in the past year or so. It seems like every couple of months, I discover a new "favorite" -- DiMenna, Jose Gonzalez, the Pernice Brothers, New Radiant Storm King, the Raconteurs, fill in the blank. Then I discover something else, and who has time to go back and listen to everything that's already been downloaded? iTunes keeps track of how many times you play something, and my most-played tracks are the first two songs from the Raconteurs' Broken Boy Soldiers, which I listened to 11 times each. That doesn't sound like much. Most songs, even ones I really love, show between three to seven total plays.

I feel like my life would be poorer if I hadn't discovered Sloan and Grandaddy and the Celebrity Pilots and all those other bands I've downloaded, but I can't help but feel a little nostalgic for the days when I could only afford to buy one album a month and I could spend all day lying on the floor in front of my stereo listening to it. Everything's background music in my busy life today. On the other hand, I love the instant gratification; going to a record store seems so 20th century (and yes, I am going to try to get more of the 125 Records catalog on eMusic this year).

posted by 125records @ 2:05 PM

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