Thoughts on 2010, the "Renaissance Year"

Maybe you saw it coming, ye few dedicated souls who actually read this blog on a regular basis, or read it back when I actually bothered to post things that weren't just playlists for the radio show. Maybe there were clues, like THIS or THIS, but I have to say I did not see it coming. When I say "it", I'm referring to the fairly massive musical renaissance that occurred in my life this year. I went from barely wanting to hear anything new, not caring about most things other people were excited about, having a bad attitude about just about every new sort of "indie darling" band that came out, to, as things stand now, feeling like I'm more likely than not to enjoy most things coming out that people are excited about.

How did this happen, you ask? I know that doing the radio show had a great deal to do with it. It's like if you suddenly got a job putting together floral arrangements but had disliked most new kinds of flowers you had encountered over the last five or six years. Things would change REALLY fast. I think you'd learn to love flowers again, and you'd have things that became your favorites, or that you found new, unexpected beauty in. I started looking for flowers to make my little two-hour "arrangements" out of, and lo and behold, I found some really great stuff.

I think I have also finally escaped the shadow of my career in corporate music retail. And (my apologies if anyone I used to work with in those stores takes this personally...it's just how I feel) I have finally realized how toxic working there was to my ability to truly enjoy music. I didn't spend much time during the day there listening to anything I really cared about or enjoyed that much, usually (especially if it was new music) because I didn't want to associate that music with work (I wrote a whole blog entry about records I feel I sacrificed to the work god, but I can't seem to find that entry right now). So I sat through a lot of things that were just mediocre...records that I didn't hate, but didn't like enough to want to own and enjoy on my own time. Then, by the time I got out of work, I wanted to hear something I loved and had some sort of attachment to so badly that I would just listen to a bunch of older music on my iPod that I had loved for years. This was not a path to continued musical growth. And even though, in September of 2008, I officially quit my full-time management job in corporate music/movie retail, I was part-timing it at one of my old stores off and on for another year and a half-ish after that. I finally cut that tie for good in February of this year, and it has made a huge difference.

I also feel as though I'm finally starting to get some sort of grasp on how to organize my collection in iTunes, or am becoming more comfortable with the iTunes interface, feeling less irritated with it, etc. I still feel as though there's a better way to do it that I have yet to find, but it doesn't bother me as much as it used to. I also (very bravely, I think) deleted a whole bunch of older, more familiar music from my iPod last week, and dumped a ton of newer records (or newer records to me) on to it. Shuffle brings up a whole ton of stuff that is new and exciting now. It's fantastic.

So, there it is. A progress report on some of the issues I've discussed in this blog in the last couple of years. Hope that similar, awesome things are happening in your musical life...comment and share. More soon. This year I'm going to post a best records of the year entry, and then y'all can fight it out in the comments section.