The Intermission

One of the things that irritates me is when people talk as if their personal music tastes are “correct”. I suppose it irritates me because I have abnormal taste in music, so I’m often on the wrong end of someone’s soap box speech against my favorite band. So I prefer to talk about peoples’ music preferences with terms such as “like my own” or “not like my own”, rather than “good” or “bad”.
Perhaps your music tastes are like my own, or perhaps they are not. Either way, I think we can be friends.

So here’s some music I’ve been enjoying lately…

Mockingbird by Derek Web
I love Derek’s intelligent lyrics and obvious dedication to living a godly life. He doesn’t accept clichés in life, and he doesn’t write clichés in his music. Also, he has a pretty good sound. It’s sort of a muted, acoustical sound that took some time to grow on me, but it suites the tone of the lyrics really well. If you want to download a single from iTunes, I’d recommend “Mockingbird” or “I Hate Everything (But You)”.

Derek’s latest album is The Ringing Bell, which I’m also coming to like. It sounds very different than Mockingbird, but again, it suits the tone of the lyrics. I’d recommend trying “I Don’t Want to Fight”. (In fact, I’d be very interested in hearing someone’s interpretation of those lyrics.)

Credit for this find goes to Cindy Wallace, who mentioned Derek Webb on her excellent blog.

Our Time in Eden by 10,000 Maniacs
10,000 Maniacs is one of those bands that I remember hearing about in high school, but which I never listened to. So I’m just now discovering some great music from 1992. The songs do get a little repetitive sounding, but they’re very mellow and make a perfect background for working or hanging out with friends. I don’t know the album well enough yet to recommend any specific tracks.

Credit for this find goes to Kyna Southworth, who played this a couple months ago while Sarah and I were at her house.

Everything by Buckcherry
No, not literally every song. The only Buckcherry song I’ve ever heard is the one called “Everything”. I like it a lot. I remember when I first heard it on the radio, I couldn’t decide if I liked it right away. It’s pretty repetitive and the lyrics straddle that line between “interestingly confusing” and “totally meaningless”. But the song is a lot of fun and has made its way into my regular rotation.

Credit for this find goes to 94.9 The Sound, my new favorite radio station in Cincinnati.

I owe a lot of my recent musical discoveries to 94.9. Back in college, I had a friend with her finger on the pulse of unknown, upcoming music, and she would send me songs and CD compilations all the time. But since graduating, I’ve dramatically slowed my adoption of new music.

Just a quick comment on the disappointment I’ve had with some of the online music discovery systems out there (such as Pandora and Last.fm). Pandora and Last.fm are pretty cool, and I enjoyed them greatly… for about 3 days. But the problem is that they just feed you music you’ve already said that you like. My college friend regularly gave me stuff I didn’t care for. But hearing that music helped to evolve my tastes and broaden the scope of music I like. Pandora only ever gave me 5 or 6 knockoffs of the bands I already know. So, all you Web 2.0 gurus out there, take note: If you’re going to create an intelligent music recommendation system, can you make it so it builds into my music taste, not just creates a feedback loop into what I already have?

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 10:48 pm and is filed under Blogroll, Web 2.0, rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.