Come Round Soon - Sara Bareilles

Little Voice - 2007

Great song, great album. Nothing revolutionary but almost every track is very well built and executed. Of course Sara's singing is technical, powerful, directly at odds with the name of the album. But I'm not really here to write about this song.

I've wanted to write something akin to a methods paper for a while about my own music consumption. A though I've both heard from and had about other people is that one's music discovery is atomic and self-contained. That someone with good taste just seeks it out on their own, is just adept at hunting down new (to them) music. This is both true and not. I think there's a feedback loop of "I like interesting music I'm going to put effort into finding interesting music". But often I feel the magnitude of outside forces on one's taste is underplayed. We like to say we're amalgamations of influences when it comes to evaluating the creations we put into the world, but less so about our consumption patterns.

Mechanically here I'll be going down my Spotify's liked songs and highlighting tunes with how I came to be aware of them. Many will have overlapping methods of acquisition so I'll leave it to only unique sources. I still expect this to be a longer post so I'll try to keep descriptions short.

Come Round Soon - Sara Bareilles - A coffee shop downtown was playing Love Song, and after I thought that if I like that song so much I should listen to the album from which it came.

Surprise! - Dawes - My friend mentioned in a discord conversation that Dawes put out a new album.

Holy, Holy - Geordie Greep - YouTube algorithm. YouTube knows I like Black Midi and (former Black Midi frontman) Geordie's new single got recommended. From there I bookmarked the album for its release.

Go Easy, Kid - Monica Martin - First heard on the podcast CBB FM. This track was brought in by Dan Wilson of Supersonic fame.

Beatriz Durante - Carlos Aguirre - Recommended pianist from my piano teacher.

Cry for Me - Magdalena Bay - Music review YouTube channel The Needle Drop. Decided to listen to the album because my friend really liked a song of theirs last year (Killshot).

Conta outra, Ao vivo - Maria Rita - Was learning samba rhythms in my piano studies, got a list of Brazilian artists to check out, went through it methodically while also checking out the related artists that had fun names or pictures.

Bartender Say - Quasimoto - was doing a sweep through as much of Madlib's discography as I could get to.

Oro Di Miele - Bassolino - YouTube channel My Analog Journal brings on DJs to put on a set comprised of a specific genre for 30-50 minutes at a time. This DJ snuck one of his own tunes into the playlist. I really liked it and checked out the album.

GOODMAN - Ab-Soul - Roundabout discovery from the Kendrick/Drake beef. After watching the pop-out show Kendrick put on I went to read up on some of the artists he brought on stage. That's how I learned about Black Hippy, the supergroup he's a part of. From there I grabbed each member and listened to one album from their discography. Ab-Soul was the only other non-Kendrick member that connected for me.

Guerilla - Klark Kent - Radio station 91X has a sunday morning show called Resurrection Sunday that plays some real deep cuts from the 80s/90s. If I'm on the road early Sunday I will usually put this on. One such song was off this album. That song wasn't great but I checked out the album because turns out this was Stewart Copland's solo project.

25 or 6 to 4 - Chicago - There was an ad for Amazon that played extremely often during the NBA playoffs.

Use Me - Ester Phillips - Podcast in which a Vulfpeck leader Jack Stratton was talking about how great the production and arrangement on this was. This led me not only to Phillip's album, but also Bill Wither's - where this song cover originated.

Wichita Lineman, Live at the NY State Woman's Prison - The Moments - Amoeba Records has a video series called "What's in my bag", in which they bring in artists and set them loose on the store to buy a bunch of music. After getting a bagful, they sit down and go over their picks, with what they like or what drew them to it. I usually tune in for an artist I know or like.

The Partisan - Leonard Cohen - My siblings has a medium-running collaborative playlist on Spotify where we'd each upload one song a week, just any song we were vibing with that week.

Further Down the Road - Sylivie - Went to see Cut Worms with a friend and this band opened.

Happy All the Time - Danny Schmidt - Going back into a folder stored on an external where I had backed up my laptop from like 8-10 years ago. There was a big music folder on there I perused.

The Royal Scam - Steely Dan - This song was referenced in Theo Katzman's One Bedroom.

the boys i mean are not refined - Brad Mehldau - I periodically check in with my favorite artists that I know put stuff out without me hearing about it.

It Always Happens This Way - Toulouse - Song was featured in an episode of Letterkenny.

Dr. Beauchef, Penguin Dentist - Kneebody - Pulling up Ben Wendel's bio/wiki after getting interested in him and then just finding other projects he's been a part of.

Peur des filles - L'Imperatrice - Recommended by a friend.

There it is. What's missing from this list is a weight towards which methods feature heavily in my life and which are one offs. It's hard to pin down exactly but I can say confidently that two of these ways of finding music stand above the rest.

First is person-to-person. If someone I know tells me about some music they like or just heard I'm almost guaranteed to put it in my ears soon after. Most often this is friends talking about bands they discovered or shows they went to, or my piano teacher pointing me to artists he's been checking out.

The other method I lump in as curiosity. When I learn about an artist, I've developed an instinct to check out a full album, or to go read up on them and what other groups they've been a part of, and listen to an album from that project. If I like what I find I'll often turn the curiosity into a discography deep-dive, or a looksee through the related artists section of Spotify. This is when I feel most like I'm the person doing the music discovery, but always the entry point is from an outside source.