music on Greg Moore

Blog Challenge - Music Edition

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 17:43:00 -0400

I was tagged by @Annie (read hers next) to answer this musical blog challenge.

What are five of your favorite albums?

Perennial Favorites - Squirrel Nut Zippers
Songs From The Cool World - Various Artists
Homogenic - Bjork
The Celts - Enya
Monster - REM

Honorable Mentions

Push The Button - The Chemical Brothers
We Are In Love - Harry Connick Jr
Violator - Depeche Mode
Tidal - Fiona Apple
Version 2.0 - Garbage
Long Distance - Ivy
The Eleventh Hour - Jars of Clay
Portishead - Portishead
Seven More Minutes - The Rentals
Becoming X - Sneaker Pimps

What are five of your favorite songs?

Pallin’ With Al - Squirrel Nut Zippers
Destroy Everything You Touch - Ladytron
Typical - Mute Math
Eden - 10,000 Maniacs
New Wave Jacket - POLYSICS

Honorable Mentions

How Do I Know - Here we Go Magic
Inner City Life - Goldie
Sweetness - Jimmy Eat World
Light Powered - Deastro
The Fear - Lilly Allen

Favorite instrument(s)?

Piano and guitar - Nearly all music can be created with these two pivotal instruments and they are intimitely woven into my family tree.

Do you listen to the radio? If so, how often?

I abandoned US commercial radio back in 1997 when I got my first car CD player and never looked back. The closest I ever came to returning was the year a local pirate radio station illegally broadcast from a house near my neighborhood or during my first job where I always played late night dance show internet streams from BBC Radio One.

How often do you listen to music?

Daily. There’s rarely a time when I don’t have music on.

How often and how do you discover music?

I flow between old favorites and new music as the mood strikes me during the day. There’s no rhyme or reason other than how I’m feeling in the moment. Life events and things like the temperature of the season often influences what I put on. For example, I play the Fleet Foxes warm me up during winter while the heat of the summer makes me listen to a lot of The B-52’s. Recommendations from my family and friends frequently keep me busy exploring new stuff. There’s so much amazing music out there to discover!

What’s a song or album that you enjoy that you wish had more recognition?

The Squirrel Nut Zippers first three albums are so incredibly important to me. They often get incorrectly lumped into the “swing revival” trend by people who either never actually listened to them or don’t understand musical genres. It’s a shame because all three albums are chock full of lively and inventive explorations through the diverse jazz sounds that immigrated into America from other places and cultures. Dixie, klezmer, Django, southern roots, blues, etc. If the 1930’s were ever punk, these albums would be that sound.

What’s your favorite song of all time?

Papua New Guinea (12” Original) - Future Sound of London

Back in the summer of 1992, my middle school friends and I were inexplicably into Ralph Bakshi’s terrible Cool World movie. I somehow saved up enough money to buy the soundtrack on tape and spent the bulk of my alone time that summer listening to it. Much like the film, the soundtrack was very flawed but one track in particular captured me so much that I used my dual tape deck to laboriously fill one side of a blank tape with the song so I could listen to it over and over without having to rewind every time. The song was Papua New Guinea by the boundary-pushing British band Future Sound of London. That song changed my musical life by being the very first track to open my ears to the then-new scene of electronic music that was blowing up outside of America.

Has your taste in music evolved over the years?

Definitely. Like nearly everyone, I started with whatever my parents were listening to. However, my mother was a music professor so she instilled me with a bottomless appetite for experiencing new sounds and taught me to take my pop music as seriously as the classical masters.

I wasted far too much of my youth attempting to weave my self-identity into whatever musical genre I was into at the moment. (I feel like young boys are particularly succeptible to this trap and sadly, many never escape it.) Thankfully, I was saved by almost none of my friends sharing my musical tastes so I never got deep enough into any particular “scene” for one genre to dominate my musical life.

My current north star is that there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure when it comes to music so keep listening to both the old and the new, forging your own path with whatever connects with you.

The Value of Art

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 12:45:23 -0400

Speaking as both a (largely wildly ‘unsuccessful’) musician and a corporate strategic consultant type, the conclusion I’ve come to of late is that the music industry can only ethically exist if it de-emphasises product/content/output as a determinant of value.

When you refer to the de-emphasis of artists via playlisting, I think of it as the logical culmination of a trajectory that began as far back as with early blues releases (if not further) and was only ever going to lead to AI slop - detaching the mechanics of value from the origin of the output. It wasn’t the artist that was valuable, it was the specific art. And, now, we move to ‘it’s not the specific art that’s valuable, but the vibe’.

But, in refuting that, I think we often fall into the trap of affirming the product-focus approach - ‘the artist is valuable because they create art’ - and continue to keep the creator’s value detached from their actual function. Because, the value of art has never been in how good or bad it is but in the people it connects. This is the function that art performs, in terms of social, health, economic, and community benefits. It is a mechanism through which we commune, reflect, connect, and decide upon our world’s values. And, that’s where the economic focus should be - supporting that mechanism.

It’s why I find the AI art and tech world mostly amusing. They’re refining and investing in recreating the product. But, the product is the least valuable part of the whole equation. You want to churn out a polished song in a couple of minutes? You don’t need AI - I (and lots of other people) can do that. The difficult part is getting people to come together. And, the more you detach a human investment from that process, the harder it will be to accomplish that. Especially if you don’t realise THAT’s the important part.

So, I think the solution is - forget content, embrace community, disregard all who prioritise the former at the expense of the latter.

Mjoneillnoisier, a comment on a Verge article

I’ve been chewing on this comment ever since I stumbled upon it. I feel like it describes a perspective that I haven’t heard as much in the AI vs art debate. A lot of harm is being done to both artists and audiences when people increasingly give away their agency to passive streams of plesant sounds they barely pay attention to. What’s insulting is that ad companies like Spotify infect this harm into something that used to stand for the opposite: mix tapes.

The mix tape, the mix CD, and human curated playlists were originally mediums of personal musical taste created for people to connect, commune, and reflect over. I’m old enough to have mixes from old friends that I still listen to. They are experiential reminders that take me to people, places, and life events. It sucks when corporations conspire to eradicate a vibrant part of our shared culture.

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 23:54:00 -0400

2026 Update: I have retired my music blog for both issues of cost and interest.

Since 2023, I’ve been writing micro album reviews. These are mostly for myself to remember albums I’ve enjoyed but I realize other people might find them useful for finding new music. I will be adding more as I listen.

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 09:19:35 -0400

I added three new albums to my music of summer 2024 playlist but, sadly, something has broken the RSS display on my site. Hopefully I can find and fix the error soon.

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 14:24:13 -0400

A “user-centered” approach to design has been replaced by what [Jarrett Fuller] has taken to calling a “corporation-centered” approach. Rather than optimizing for the user’s experience, it optimizes for the extraction of profit. If Spotify succeeds at turning us all into passive listeners, then it doesn’t really matter which content the platform licenses. As Fuller put it, “It’s about ‘How do you get through as much music as you can so you keep paying for it?’" -Why I Finally Quit Spotify

Quitting Spotify has been a huge improvement to my music listening.

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 13:31:30 -0400

My spring music recommendations may be late but I already have three albums on it.

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 21:01:23 -0400

My wife surprised me with an amazing concert of one of my favorite bands, Djangophonique (Link), at the Detroit Institute of Art.

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 12:03:07 -0400

I just discovered Paramore’s cover of Burning Down the House, which is apparently the leading track of Everyone’s Getting Involved: A Tribute to Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense, a song-for-song tribute to the original 1984 album and concert film. I can’t wait to hear more of this project.

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 12:11:28 -0400

Starting the new year with a fresh take on the shoegaze genre. Really loving this whole album. Alvvays - Blue Rev

New Musical Trails

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 14:28:44 -0400

Exploring new music was a lot easier when I was young and stupid. My brain, a hormone flooded blank slate, followed whatever musical paths the songs I was listening to lead me down. Now I’m older (only slightly less stupid) and I’ve traveled decades worth of musical trails. I’ve mapped thousands of them through these woods and I know which ones lead to places I enjoy and which ones lead to places I don’t.

Problem is, I’ve walked some of my favorite musical trails so many times that I no longer experience the things that caused me to fall in love with them in the first place. Their paths are now deep ruts that, once I’m on them, are difficult to clamber out of.

I’m betting that many of you around this campfire share this problem. (You’ve got the same mud stains as I do.) As much as you like the idea of walking new musical trails, you still find yourself back in the same old places. Well, I’m here to encourage you that it can be done and share what’s helped me explore new sounds the past five years:

Blazing New Trails

Trust your tastes. You have good reasons for loving those old bands and songs. Exploring new music doesn’t invalidate your musical tastes, it uses them as guideposts to branch off of so use them with when you can.
Tell the old crank in you to shut up. Musicians are always striving to create new sounds to appeal to new audiences. As you age, this can feel increasingly alienating. Keep yourself from devolving everything into a generational fights and remember that a lot of music sucked when you were young but you were still able to find the good stuff. It’s there so keep looking.
Don’t explore exhausted. New music activates a broad and diverse network of pathways in your brain (source) so treat it a bit like a physical activity.
Expect some discomfort. New music is mentally challenging to process so it’s ok if you don’t like a lot of stuff for a while. Focus on what you do enjoy in what you’re hearing and follow it to clear a path to more of what works for you.
Don’t let the distractions distract. Music is surrounded by many trappings that aren’t music. The thing is, none of that stuff is the actual music so keep your focus on the sounds. Remember that even your favorite band names are kind of silly, song titles only make sense after the fact, and album art can be just as bad as book covers.

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 00:30:36 -0400

Even Spotify Wrapped admits my Album Whale lists more accurately show my music listening this year.

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 14:40:32 -0400

❄️ I know that it’s technically not winter until 22 more days but, with snow on the ground, I started my new list of Albums for Winter 2023-24 anyway.

Sun, 19 Nov 2023 09:51:42 -0400

The family was lucky enough to grab tickets to a feast of knock-your-socks-off jazz last night at the Plymouth Penn theater. Dichi kicked us off with a bang before Cabare Boreale came and stole our hearts. Finally, Chris Plum brought the house down.

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:42:54 -0400

Whiteout Conditions - The New Pornographers

Neko Case and Kathryn Calder singing in harmony is my ASMR.

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 10:28:13 -0400

Summer is only a few days gone and I already have three albums in my Autumn 2023 music recommendations list. As the temperatures go down, my productivity goes up.

Wed, 23 Aug 2023 10:01:41 -0400

An intense explosion of joy escaping from gritted teeth. This is for you who turned down drugs at the music festival to be fully bombarded by the sounds the band played just for you and you will go home having met a part of you that you didn’t know existed before that day. Listen

Wed, 12 Jul 2023 09:00:49 -0400

The Pool by Jazzanova
Sampling, hybrid grooves, guest singers, etc. This is one of those bands that I can’t believe I’ve never heard until now. Thankfully, that means I have their whole back catalog to dive into and this album was a great start. Track recommendation: Everything I Wanted

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 09:30:10 -0400

I’ve finally been home long enough to add an album into my Summer album recommendations. This one got a lot of play on the family vacation.
More album recommendations can be found in my winter and spring lists.

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 10:10:50 -0400

I’ve been making seasonal music recommendations as a way to highlight good albums and encourage my own musical exploration. Only 8 more days left to check out spring before I start the summer list.