#oneaday Day 773: Locked-in tastes

I'm increasingly convinced that there comes a point in your life where your tastes — in every respect — are just plain "locked", and it becomes very difficult to change them. This even extends to stepping out of your comfort zone when it comes to other works by people that you like.

I am thinking of this with particular regard to musical tastes, as I went out for a walk this evening, and rather than taking the opportunity to listen to something new to me, I decided to put on DJ Yoda's How to Cut & Paste Mix Tape Vol. 1. To be fair, this is an album I haven't actually listened to for quite a long time, so in a way it was a bit of a change from constantly spinning one track from the Gal*Gun 2 soundtrack (this one, if you were curious) because said track makes me smile. But there are also other DJ Yoda albums that I have never listened to — and, going on the fact I enjoyed How to Cut & Paste Vol. 1, 2 and '80s Edition plus Unthugged, I will probably enjoy them also. And yet. And yet. Here I am, hitting Play on things I've been listening to since 2001.

I'm conscious of this every time I put on Dream Theater's Octavarium, an album I like 100% because I enjoyed Panic Attack in Rock Band on the grounds it "sounds a bit like Castlevania", instead of trying out any of their other albums.

I'm conscious of it every time I listen to Movement in Still Life by BT — and it has to be the version of it I'm familiar with — because I remember being introduced to that specific album by my brother, and buying a copy the next time I had the opportunity.

I'm conscious of it every time I listen to Time by ELO, because it's an album I have fond memories of listening to with my Dad.

And I'm conscious of it every time, when faced with the limitless possibilities today's streaming platforms provide, I inevitably revert to the exact same few albums, time after time. Which were likely the ones I ripped and uploaded to Google Play Music before they made it shitter and turned it into YouTube Music anyway.

I don't have a physical CD collection any more, aside from a bunch of soundtrack CDs I've acquired from various limited edition releases of video games. For many years, I didn't regret getting rid of the pile of CDs I had — a collection which dated back to my teenage years, and Oasis' Definitely Maybe, the first piece of popular music I bought for myself with my own money — but just recently, I have been missing them. I have been feeling tempted to make an attempt at rebuilding a collection — with the main thing that is stopping me being the fact I don't think I have a lot of room for CDs. (Although I feel like I could probably make room quite easily.)

I know what will happen if I do that, though: I will inevitably pick up all the albums I remember owning, and probably not anything else. After all, why on Earth would you take a risk on buying some music that you might not like?

This is silly, of course, and it's in direct opposition to how I used to feel about buying music. I used to have absolutely zero shame in the music I bought, as it happens — and I still do feel that way in some respects. I'll listen to pretty much anything, regardless of how cool or uncool it might be — although I do tend to draw the line at tedious X-Factor ballads.

It's just that, as I've grown older, I've felt more and more ensconced in that one canonical set of "albums I like", and stepping outside of that always feels surprisingly difficult — even when it comes to artists whose output I, generally speaking, know that I like.

So y'know what. In an attempt to broaden my own horizons, when I go out for another walk one evening later in the week, I will make an effort to pick something I have never heard before from an artist that I know I like as the accompaniment. I might even discover some new favourites!

As for tonight, I had forgotten about the track called Stupid Poo on How to Cut & Paste Mix Tape Vol. 1 that uses farting as a significant part of the beat, and I thoroughly enjoyed rediscovering it. I will leave that with you.

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1694: Spinning Some Tunes

When I was growing up, I wasn't massively into popular music — my peers found it hilarious that I bought my first ever album, Oasis' Definitely Maybe, literally a single day before (What's the Story?) Morning Glory came out — though I did, on occasion, purchase an album containing a song I particularly liked. (Sometimes I inexplicably also purchased albums containing songs I didn't like, though this sometimes led to surprising discoveries.) I would listen to music while I was doing things like homework or reading, and later, when I could drive, I'd record albums onto tape so I could listen to them in the car.

At the time, I didn't feel like a lot of the music I was listening to was particularly "iconic" or defining of the era. I certainly didn't feel like I was living in a particularly noteworthy era of music in the same way that those who grew up listening to, say, The Beatles or The Rolling Stones would have been able to. While my tastes were initially defined by what everyone else liked, I gradually started the pattern that I continue to this day of exploring a wide variety of different creative works, and sod what anyone else thinks. Consequently, my CD shelf contained everything from The Spice Girls to Bernard Butler and all manner of things in between. I enjoyed it, indulged in it and, like most people these days, gradually migrated my music library from a collection of CDs to a vast iTunes folder, 95% of which I never listen to.

Just recently, I've been starting to feel nostalgic for some of this old music. This can be attributed at least in part to the fact that both Andie and I have taken to listening to a lot of Jack FM, which tends to play a lot of the songs we grew up with, plus some earlier stuff from the '70s and '80s, too. While Jack FM has its annoyances — most notably its repetitive adverts and truly dreadful attempts at humour — it's led me to rediscover a lot of the songs of my youth, songs that, in some cases, I haven't listened to for literally years now.

I've long since parted with a lot of the original CDs — Music Magpie took a whole load off my hands a couple of house moves ago — but thanks to services like Google Play Music, I'm able to call up old favourite albums with the click of a mouse and enjoy them on my phone, in the car, on my computer. It's pretty great.

And I've been discovering that many of these tracks were a lot more "defining" than I thought. Or perhaps it's just that I have good memories associated with them. Either way, spinning up a copy of something like Prodigy's Fat of the Land or Mansun's Attack of the Grey Lantern is like slipping on a comfortable pair of earmuffs and losing myself in times past. If I listen on headphones, it's exactly like that, in fact.

I've never really been one for just sitting and listening to music as my sole activity — I prefer it to be an accompaniment to something like driving or working — but it's been kind of pleasant to rediscover a lot of these old favourites recently. I anticipate that my drive to work each morning will be accompanied by a lot more singalongs in the near future.

#oneaday Day 978: This Was A Triumph

The other day, Andie rather luckily spotted that Jonathan Coulton was performing a show in Bristol today. We hadn't "been out" for a little while, so we decided on a whim to grab some tickets and head along to the performance.

I'm extremely glad we did. It was a wonderful experience. I've only ever seen videos of JoCo's shows before, but being there live was even better — particularly as he was also accompanied by his usual companions Paul & Storm, who also acted as the "warm-up" act.

Paul & Storm are the perfect warm-up act. Blending some light-hearted stage comedy with some genuinely amusing songs, they have a wonderful sense of chemistry with one another and with the audience. They can adapt to the mood of the room at a moment's notice and engage with hecklers faster than any dedicated stand-up I've ever seen. Plus their songs are just plain good — and The Captain's Wife's Lament always brings a smile to everyone's face, however long it ends up going on for.

Jonathan Coulton, meanwhile, is a little more understated than the antics of his friends. His songs are often amusing, but in a way that ensures you have to actively listen to the lyrics in order to "get" them. Some of them assume knowledge of certain mathematical and scientific concepts — he does a love song as sung by Pluto's moon to Pluto, for example, as well as one about the Mandelbrot Set — but he also does a great job of explaining to the audience what his songs are about.

He describes his music as being '70s-style soft rock, and beautifully encapsulated this in a self-parodying song in which "soft rock" was used as a not-terribly-subtle euphemism. This piece also included a variety of spectacular, seamless and possibly improvised homages to various popular songs

More than being amusing, though, his songs are clever and often quite touching. Even when he's singing about scientists destroying the world with robot armies, you know that he's channelling concepts that the audience can relate to — loneliness, alienation, a sense of not fitting in with "normal" society — and that's what makes him such a beloved performer among the "nerd" community.

While sitting in that venue this evening, listening to the songs and laughing at the silly jokes, I got a very similar feeling to what I felt when I went to PAX a couple of years ago. A sense of "this is for me. This is something I am a part of, and I like being a part of it." It's not a feeling I have particularly often, so I relish it when it shows itself. And that, really, is all I could have asked from this show — I'm happy it delivered.

It's 3:30am now. I should probably get some sleep. (I'm up so late because I was attempting to finish the latest visual novel I'm playing, Deus Machina Demonbane, but it's just going on and on and on. It's good though. Watch out for a writeup on Games Are Evil tomorrow.)