Everyone makes pledges, or sets themselves up on quests, or whatever that other word I’m—shit, it’s resolutions. Everyone makes a resolution for the New Year, things they are going to do to improve themselves or make the last year better than the one they just endured.
(And we all endured a very weird 2024.)
Recently my social media diet has shifted to listening to a lot of interviews with musicians, bands, production crews for tours and festivals, and the like. Some Rick Beato gets in there. My favorite is Coffee Time with Ola Englund from The Haunted, one of the best bands to come out of the Swedish Metal scene and remains vastly underappreciated for their pure riffage and beautiful fusion of thrash metal, groove, and my favorite genre which is Melodeath.
But I listen widely to other genres. There’s a lot of current hip hop and Celtic folk rock that goes into that blend of Melodeath and Synthwave. I also secretly indulge in mid-90s to early 2000s Pop, which is basically no longer a secret. And yes, Backstreet boys were the superior boy band both in musical offering and quality of presentation.
Yet I know I leave a lot out. There’s a lot of genres I just don’t listen. There are also things I do listen to that I wish I listened to more of and of a wider variety. But it’s easy to stay in your silo.
That has always bothered me, because music is one of those places where I think a life well-lived means you listened to a lot of music, and while I have, I also haven’t. The modern millennial music experience coincided with the progression of siloing and streaming while local music scenes were shutting down. Things like Apple Music quickly spun into Spotify, all the while also giving birth to great places for musicians and music lovers like Bandcamp and SoundCloud. Needless to say, it’s harder for new artists to get the word out about their noise, and it is harder to tune into the noise you want to hear.
Enter Henry Rollins.
Rollins is a huge influence on me. He is one of the few punk icons I actually paid attention to in the early 1990s, being a fixture on MTV when it was still about music. I have always found him philosophically and intellectually honest, which are two things I respect immensely. Would I like to hang out with him? Maybe for a little bit, but I also detect we’d probably need to separate fairly quick. We’re both very intense about our opinions and there’s things in my musical taste he’d probably despise and vice versa.
However, he has done several interviews where he talks about his musical “diet”. From what I gathered, the rules are roughly this:
- Monday through Friday, listen only to albums you’ve never heard before. This is your “protein” or “brain food” listening.
- Saturday and Sunday are for listening to the music you always go to. This is your “carbohydrates” or “soul food” listening.
So in 2025, because I will have the time to do it among the many, many things to be done, I’m going to spend my weekdays listening to albums I’ve hopefully never heard before in their entirety and curated off of suggestions I get from my friends if they have time. Otherwise I will do a lot of hunting on my own.
That’s 261 albums.
I’d prefer to be able to find artists that are featured on Bandcamp. Spotify is not a terrible place to discover music, but it doesn’t pay artists and bands what they deserve, and places like Bandcamp do.
And here’s what I want to listen to:
Mondays – Korean or Japanese Pop
Tuesdays – Independent Country Music
Wednesdays – Reggae
Thursdays – Emo music
Fridays – Indie Rock and Singer/Songwriters
Two of these are things I want to listen to, like Reggae and Outlaw Country. I know nothing about Reggae. I could know more about Independent Country. I have had no interest in Korean and Japanese Pop, but realize the global fandom behind it, so I’m willing to give it a shot. I grew up hating Emo and I’m a metalhead. It’s not my thing. I’m open to being shown differently.
Indie Rock and Singer/Songwriters are going to be a tough one. I have a hard time looking past my preconceived notions of this genre being full of pretension and capitalist market forces (yes, I know they all are), but again—I’m here to stretch my bounds and hopefully find what everyone else has.
But that’s part of this adventure.
And off we go.
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