2018 Review

December 27, 2018

A year ago, I started this blog to help me keep a New Year’s resolution. I wanted to spend 2018 listening to more music and less politics. I wanted to discover some new (to me, at least) music, but I felt that I had lost the ability to do that. So, here are my thoughts to recap the year.

Some new artists I like and how I found them:

  • Jason Isbell - browsing around Spotify
  • Darlingside - recommended by a record store owner (what is this, 1985??)
  • Superorganism - Tiny Desk concert on YouTube
  • Everything Everything - browsing around Spotify
  • Arvo Pärt - recommended by my piano teacher
  • Oscar Peterson Trio - my friend Curt gave me one of their records

If there’s a lesson from this list, I think it’s this: The secret to discovering new music that you like is to be looking for it. I had to be on Spotify, in a record store, talking to friends, browsing YouTube, with the intention of discovering some new music. That’s it. I expected that algorithms from Spotify or Apple Music (which I also tried) to rule my musical life this year, but they really haven’t. They are useful, but so is digging through the clearance rack at Half Price Books.

Now, there are several things I wanted to post about over the last few months, but since I haven’t done so, I’m going to at least mention them here.

I recorded some covers. I thought it would be fun to record my own covers of some songs I discovered this year. I’ll be honest and say that in the end, I don’t love my versions of these, but I’m posting them anyway. I only got 2 recorded; if I’d done a third, it would have been a pretty embarrassing piano cover of the excellent song “Warm Healer” by Everything Everything.

In college (when I was the most into music), if I recorded a song, I usually liked listening to it (narcisism aside) – I’d typically listen to it over and over for a while. Lately, that hasn’t been the case as much, and I don’t know why. Nonetheless, here are my versions of:

My favorite comedian is Daniel Kitson. He’s British and has not put out any albums, which makes it a little hard to be a fan. He has very few (and short) videos on YouTube, and they are quite old. But he does have several (also old) stand-up recordings on Bandcamp, and the one from The Stand (2005) was the first I ever heard. He stutters, goes on long (sometimes show-length) tangents, starts late and goes long, and is absolutely delightful.

In May, he spent a week hosting a morning radio program on Resonance FM in London. Unlike most of their shows, the live stream of his program was explicitly NOT recorded for people to hear later. You either got up and heard it in the morning, or you missed it. He’s curmudgeonly like that, which I can respect.

I decided I wanted to catch these, but 7am in London is 1am here. So I figured out how to record the live stream and made my own recordings, which I have hosted here (along with an XML file that makes it possible to load the recordings into a podcast app). His talking between the songs is pretty great.

One day he played a Darlingside song that I emailed to him, so that was cool. And his show was where I first heard the Dirty Projectors song I covered (Swing Lo Magellan).

Other bands: (just dumping my notes for things I wanted to write about at this point…)