Coda

I am a musician. I am a music lover. I am a music critic. Music has defined me one way or another since birth. Until yesterday, however, I hadn't looked back on the various musical periods in my life.

To be clear, this is not a walk through the soundtrack of my life. I look back often at what music was playing at the milestones of my life. This is a different concept.

Yesterday I received a seemingly random email from someone recommending to me a band of whom I had never heard. It came from someone using Last.fm. I had been a member of Last.fm back in 2005 when it was called AudioScrobbler.

For those unfamiliar with Last.fm (AudioScrobbler), it spies on what you are listening to, collects that data and shows you what you have listened to, other people who share your same musical interests and recommendations of other artists in which you may be interested.

I had completely forgotten about the site because I had lost their software along with a lot of bookmarks after The Great Crash and Reformat of 2006. After several false starts due to having to remember a three-year old password, I finally got back into my account.

I spent some time looking over the artists and titles I was listening to in 2005-early 2006. It was mostly indie stuff with a little bit of down-tempo thrown in. There were old favorites (Beatles, Nick Drake, Liz Phair) there too. I began to think about what changes my listening habits had made since that time. I went through a heavy indie phase, then a vocal trance phase, then an emo rock phase. I am now, and have been for some time, in a chillout, lounge, down-tempo phase.

Perhaps phase is not the correct word. I still listen to those genres, some of them almost daily. Maybe it would better to describe these phases as periods of discovery. I would find an artist I really liked and then that would lead me to another, similar artist and then, before you know it, my catalog brims over with these new sounds. And, looking back, it's been like that since I was a child. First, there was the music my parents listened to; cheesy 70's adult contemporary. Then I started buying my own albums and got into synth-pop and then new wave, post punk rock. In junior high, I dove into the Beatles heavily and stayed there until I was in high school. I was a freshman in college when grunge hit big and, as a rebellion against that, I guess, I was big into shoegaze bands. A few years later, it was post-alt-rock. Then I went through a direction-less phase where I just seemed to wander aimlessly through whatever sounded good. I actually regressed back to a cheesy 70's phase for a while in 2000. Then I hit my indie phase which lasted to about the time I joined AudioScrobbler.

It has been an interesting journey. I still listen to all of these genres and styles on a regular basis, they just aren't my focus anymore. I'm curious where my thirst for new music will lead me next. You can follow me on this journey here or you can just look at my 'Now Playing' list to the right.

Welcome to the roller-coaster.

Let me figure it out for myself

Finally saw Cloverfield over the weekend.

Loved it

I have always thought that the idea behind the Blair Witch Project was genius - that of making a movie out of so-called 'found footage'. BWP, however, wasn't executed very well. Cloverfield got it right.

Beyond the gimmick of the hand-held camera, the thing I liked most about the movie was its lack of exposition. I prefer my movies to unfold without being given too many details. Unless those details are absolutely essential to the story and I have no other way of finding out about them without someone telling a story, I don't want to hear it. Abrams luckily did not include a scene where we heard something such as "authorities report that at 7:02PM a monster came crawling out of the East River..." and the like. The fact that you are given no information whatsoever added to the movie's tension. More movies should be like this. This is one of the reasons I love Lost in Translation so much, even though it is a completely different genre. You are dropped in Japan and given no explanation for any of the things you see. When Charlotte is in Kyoto and sees a wedding, we don't have some other person walk up to her and start explaining the symbolism of the ceremony or their dress. Likewise when she's in the hotel and she wanders into a group setting flowers, there isn't an American tourist there to say, "She wants you to do so-and-so". The fact that neither her character nor the audience knows what she is supposed to do adds to the connection between the two. It means more because we are sharing in Charlotte's awkwardness and possible embarrassment.

It is often times easier for me to enjoy a film by only seeing a slice of the characters' lives, whether it be several hours during a monster attack or several days in the middle of Japan.