Not Completely Stuck in the 90s
My fondness for 90s alt-rock is pretty well-known, and with an iPod library well over 1000 songs I’m not actively looking for new music as hard as I used to. Plus, I don’t listen to the radio a whole lot, and even if MTV were playing music videos I don’t have cable anymore. So the opportunities to find new music have narrowed a lot.
However, now that the family commutes to and from school in the car, I do have a few chances to listen to the radio, and when the commercials on sports radio get unbearable I sometimes switch the station to Radio 104.5 Their playlist is a decent mix of a lot of stuff from the grungy side of the 90s (a decade the oldies and classic rock stations have not quite gotten up to yet) and current music that doesn’t sound out of place with the older stuff. I actually discovered two songs that have become staples of my “Oh God I need to wake up” routine:
There’s Morning Parade’s “Headlights”:
And Of Monsters and Men’s “Mountain Sound,” whose lyric “We sleep until the sun goes down” sounds like an awfully good idea to me:
Also, I do listen to Pandora on occasion. And for the most part, Pandora has me pegged pretty well, with a heavy diet of R.E.M., Matthew Sweet, Neil Finn and Crowded House, and other artists I’m familiar with. But it has occasionally given me a song I didn’t know, like Don DiLego’s “Falling Into Space:”
So maybe there’s hope for me after all. 🙂
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.