It's Beginning To And Back Again

About a month ago I received an iPhone from the IT guy at my job.  This was to replace the Windows Phone that I hadn’t really used for several years at work and rarely pulled out of my desk drawer.  The sad fact is, the Windows phone was my first smart phone and it was terrible.  My personal cell phone is very very old.  It was a free knock off Blackberry.  The only reason I bought a cell phone in the first place was when I was on the kidney transplant waiting list in 2004 and I didn’t trust the beeper the transplant clinic provided me.  I get made fun of a lot when I pull out my antiquated old phone, but I never really had much of an interest in having a smartphone.  My biggest fear being that as soon as I had one, I’d be somehow connected with work all the time.  I can barely mentally take a full day at the office as it is, why would I want to deal with the constant crises 24/7?  This is the same job where someone urgently called me for some simple question while I was being poked and prodded in the ICU a few years ago.  There is a level of helplessness that many of my beloved co-workers seem to possess that constantly flusters and frustrates me.  Being reachable at all times worries me.  If you’re still with me, you’re better than me, because writing that paragraph bored me.  At any rate, I have decided to actually give this 21^st century phone thing a try. 

Yes, I have found that I now check my work messages during evenings and answer work phone calls on weekends.  Yes, it has already spoiled a night’s attempt at sleep a few times.  In fact, I just reflexively checked the work Outlook for emails as I’m typing this on a Saturday.  WHY?!  I don’t want to know even while I’m in the office!  However, what I didn’t think about is the easy access to music that this new-fangled phone provides.  I also discovered that my ears quickly eject the earbuds that came with the phone by spitting them out every few minutes. 

Music has been my lifeline since I was about twelve.  When I was first able to get a job at the age of 14, I began spending all of money on records and it rarely slowed down since.  It has all evolved ever so slightly over these way too many years, but the search for new-to-me sounds seems to be part of my DNA.  I don’t play any instruments, my voice is like some sort of nasally appropriation of a Peanuts cartoon adult (come to think about it, so is my writing voice), but I can handle listening to music intently and with purpose and telling anyone and everyone I can about the stuff that inspires and energizes me.  That’s been predominantly what this blog I’ve mostly abandoned is all about – sharing my love for the music I choose to purchase (and yes, I do purchase it) and doing my best to get others to do the same.  Alas, I’ve never been able to find much of an audience over all of these years, so I crawl back into my shell and keep to myself. 

The last few years my music passion has admittedly cooled.  I actually went through a period where I purchased no music between August 2015 and April 2016 (I did receive a couple of crowd-funded CDs in the mail during this time), which was disconcerting on many levels.  However, this smart phone has changed things.  Now, when I leave the office, I head to a place where I can walk in a forest, or quiet neighborhood, and jam those earbuds in for a few minutes at a time, and walk with a soundtrack of fantastic music!  These are all things I could’ve accessed before on my laptop, but just didn’t - things like: Jack Rabid’s weekly Big Takeover Radio show (I’ve been reading his magazine for 27 years!!), or the When the Sun Hits show every Wednesday on DKFM preceded by Louder Than Bombs on local station House of Sound (Wednesday evenings have become a new version of my old Sunday nights in High School with the New Music Show on Q105 and MTV’s 120 Minutes!).  What this phone has taught me is that I had stopped seeking as much as I used to.  That I was falling into complacency.  I had followed the When the Sun Hits blog for years via Facebook, but only barely paid attention to the posts.  Most of the artists mentioned were unfamiliar, so I skimmed by and I regret it.  Now that I’m actually listening to host Amber Crain’s carefully curated show, my ears have been opened again, and I feel pretty damn excited about it.  I haven’t been introduced to this much new music in such a short span of time, since I was in my early 20s and it is refreshing.  And DKFM!  An internet radio station that plays so-called “shoegaze” music 24/7?  Are you kidding me?!  A couple of Sundays ago, I went for a morning stroll (awkward stumble?) and tried out DKFM’s Classic station and heard eight straight songs I spent time and effort tracking down in the late 80s and early 90s!  It was as if I ran across an old mixtape and popped it into my Walkman.  The source material is expanding too, as I have been turned on to The Kitchen Sink (Elizabeth Klisiewicz's show on Strawberry Tongue Radio) and This Radiant Hour (Girl Afraid's show on on DKFM).  I’m sure there will be more.

Here I am, not jabbering on about the music I think you should be listening to, but instead where you can find the great music you should be listening to.  

This image is the Decayfm.com logo.

http://bigtakeover.com/radio
http://whenthesunhitsblog.blogspot.com/
https://decayfm.com/
https://www.mixcloud.com/louderthanbombsus/
https://www.mixcloud.com/Girl-Afraid/
https://www.mixcloud.com/eklisiewicz/
http://houseofsound.org/