There’s no shortage of ways to find new music.  There’s the old traditional standbys of TV and radio and banners ads on the internet.  Then there’s services like Pandora and the like—things that diagnose the elements of various music that you select, and give you recommendations based on similar sound patterns, etc.  While something like this is fun, new music by algorithm has never sat quite right with me.  I hate math.

I’m more inclined to give something a good listen based on the recommendation of someone I trust or respect.

One of my favorite albums I’ve bought recently is When I Pretend To Fall by The Long Winters.  I don’t really like to play music critic, so I won’t.  I’ll just say it’s good, smart, melodic Indie pop.  Every time I listen to the album I think two things: 1) how damn good it is straight through, and 2) I remember how I found it.

I’m a fan of The Decemberists, and I’ve followed lead singer Colin Meloy on Twitter for a while.  One of the things I like most about Twitter is that you can easily find new and interesting people, especially when paying attention to other people you “follow.”  One night Colin Meloy made a reference to John Roderick.  I clicked through saw he was the guy from The Long Winters.  Now look, The Long Winters were part of that big group of Indie bands that somewhere in the back of my head I had heard good things about, but had never listened to (if I should have recognized Roderick’s name immediately, or have a copy of his albums somewhere on my hard drive already, I didn’t).

So I make my way to The Long Winter’s site and start poking around.  Soon I discovered that they have a whole zip file of songs that you could download for free.  An instant sampler pack.  Not a “fill out this big form and when you’re done you’ll get one track” type of deal.  No, this was one click, and you had a folder of MP3s on your desktop—easy.  It was late at night, and I started listening to them.  I really liked what I heard.  I must have listened to those MP3s three or four times in a row sitting there messing around.  I was a fan.  The mp3 worked.  Next thing I knew, I was on iTunes at 2am buying When I Pretend To Fall.

What’s the big deal about that?  Nothing really. It’s just how it’s supposed to work, or how—I imagine—that you hope it does. John Roderick is on Twitter.  Seems like a funny dude.  He’s the type of musician I enjoy the most in a format like that.  Just there to shoot the shit and interact with people, not to necessarily pimp his own stuff.  I’ll tell you what though, there’s a pretty direct line from me seeing him on Twitter→going to his website→sampling the free mp3s→buying his album.  Sure I’m one guy, one album purchase, etc. etc. but something about the process sits well with me.  It may have started with CNN’s favorite buzzword social media tool of the moment, but the end result was me making a purchase that felt authentic, and memorable.  On some level, it makes me like the album even more.  There’s a story there.

Postscript

Lately I’ve had this phrase running through my mind: “the internet is small place.”  I couldn’t help but laugh when a few weeks after going through this process and listening to the album a bunch, I’m reading a long and excellent essay by Merlin Mann (who fits neatly into my other main area of interest—the Apple/web/tech nerdery world) when three-quarters of the way through the piece I click on one of his links, and see who he’s interviewing.  Small place indeed.

The Beatles are probably my earliest musical memory.  I had a little Fisher Price record player and I remember listening to “Penny Lane” over and over again (I loved the piccolo trumpet, though I didn’t know what it was at the time.)  The Beatles came from my parents, from my Mom—this was her music passed on to me.

I don’t remember where Thriller came from, but it felt like my own.  I know that being a kid in the early eighties you couldn’t miss it.  Biggest album in the world with no exaggeration.  I just remember it being there, everywhere.  And I couldn’t get enough.  I listened to that tape over and over and over.  ”Billie Jean,” “Thriller,” “Beat It,” those were my songs.  Over and over again.  Especially “Beat It.”  I didn’t know what “pop” music was. I was too young to draw any lines between Michael Jackson, or The Beatles, or the Elvis songs my Dad played in the car.  It was all just music. I liked some of it more than others, and for a big chunk of time the only thing I wanted to listen to was Thriller.

My family jokes to this day about some charity party thing we went to, and of course the DJ was playing Thriller songs all night.  Shit, I was probably requesting them non-stop. The details are fuzzy, but he had a fake white MJ glove and I ended up with it.  I begged him for it (in hindsight my father probably slipped him $20 to get it).  Whatever.  I absolutely loved the thing and ran around with it at all times.  What an image image—a little blond six year old kid from Connecticut running around with a Michael Jackson glove.  I wish I had a picture.

Fast forward a whole bunch of years to when I’m in college.  I had just driven all night from a Phish show in New Jersey to another show in upstate New York.  We’re exhausted.  The sun in coming up as we’re pulling into the campgrounds to park for the weekend.  Everyone is asleep and out of it.  Suddenly “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” comes on the radio and we roll down the windows and fucking crank it.  Everyone’s looking at us, but people are into it.  That song has a goddamn groove.  I’m half delirious running on fumes and Mountain Dew and this song was a jolt right through everyone’s spin.  I will never listen to this song again and not think of that exact moment.

So Michael Jackson died today.  Music has been an enormous influence on my life, and Michael Jackson had an enormous influence on how I know music.

Have you ever had an old album pop up out of nowhere and demand that you listen to again?  That’s what happened to me back in the fall.  The album was Elliott Smith’s Figure 8, an album that I’d owned for years, but which felt like I’d never really heard.  It’s funny how that sometimes happens with certain albums; how for some reason the time is right for an album to be re-discovered.

The end of 2008 was a roller coaster ride. On one hand a once-in-a-generation financial meltdown that left everyone feeling like the world as we knew it could crumble with the next ATM withdrawal.  Enormous companies disappearing in the blink of an eye.  Junk Bond Trader indeed.

On the other hand there was a wave of hope and optimism like none I had ever seen in my life.  It was hard to stay level.

With this as the backdrop, I couldn’t stop listening to Figure 8. Even though it was written a decade earlier, it seemed to fit perfectly. It was my soundtrack to an uneven and emotionally turbulent ride that I never bought a ticket for.

Maybe it’s wrong to project my own emotional connections onto someone else’s work, especially someone as haunted as Elliott Smith. But maybe being able to do so is what makes us connect with great music, even if just on a subconscious level. It’s a comforting thought.

Last week I was in Los Angeles for the first time in a few years. I made sure I headed over to Silverlake and spent a few minutes at 4334 Sunset.  I thought about the past year, the ups and downs; the good and the bad.  There were messages written out all over the wall, and I shied my eyes away from reading them.  They weren’t for me, but I understood the connection.  I was glad my wife was there with me.  I still can’t stop listening to the album.  It’s fused to that period of time in my brain, but it still makes me think about the future.  For me, for us.  I’m glad the time was right.

Love it or hate it, everyone seems to have an opinion about Twitter right now.  One of the results of this Twitter boom is seeing well known people jump on board, and watching how they use it.  For some it’s a one way window into the little details of their lives, and for others it’s a way to actually connect with people on their own terms.

Coming from the music industry, I’ve been especially fascinated with a lot of the musicians, and how they are using it to change the way that they interact with fans.  If you can’t go two feet without hearing about Twitter these days, then you can’t go ten feet without hearing about the changes that the music business—really the entire entertainment industry—is painfully going through.  There’s an enormous paradigm shift happening in the music industry.  Some artists are jumping on this opportunity to bypass a lot of BS and connect directly with their audience.  They’re takin’ it to the streets—metaphorically speaking—in 140 characters or less.

Enter Bob Lefsetz, the curmudgeonly old-school critic of all things music.  Say what you want about him, but people at all levels of the music industry are aware of what he has to say.  And for as much as Lefsetz makes me cringe sometimes, he’s also dead fucking spot on pretty often.

Not many weeks go by where Lefsetz won’t post an email from a big name musician or producer or label head.  He recently shared an email from Amanda Palmer that I haven’t been able to get out of my head.  Palmer has been going through a very public feud with her record label, going so far as to ask them to drop her.  She’s also very active on Twitter.  These things as, as you may have guessed, are related.

Palmer tells stories of fans lining up to meet her and buy her album.  They follow her on Twitter and ask her questions.  And she answers them.  She shares little bits of random info and photos and thoughts. A lot of fans would love to receive this stuff from their favorite artists, but this unrestricted avenue through which info could flow didn’t exist in quite the same way until recently.  Sure it could be posted on a website, but how many major artists are actually editing their own site?  Now anyone that can text message can send a TwitPic photo ten seconds after it happens.

As Palmer explained to Lefsetz, when she was in Australia recently, she did an impromptu gathering with fans in a park, announced only via Twitter.  150 kids showed up to have their records signed.

“LIFE IS BECOMING AWESOME.”

“no manager knew! i didn’t even warn or tell her! no agents! no security! no venue! we were in a fucking public park!
life is becoming awesome.”

I haven’t been able to get that line out of my head.  I work for a record company, and I’ll tell you, the chances of getting something like that to happen from my end are pretty slim.  It’s not to say that people wouldn’t like the idea, or that we couldn’t try to make it happen.  It’s just that there are too many people involved.  Too many people to say no. If we set up a promotion or event with an artist, it’s essentially on our terms.  If Amanda Palmer wants to choose a time and a place to meet people, and only tell them via Twitter, those are her terms.  And that’s pretty awesome.

And it’s not just Amanda Palmer.  Look at Lily Allen, and her scavenger hunts for tickets before every show—all via Twitter (or excuse me, “Twitta”).  I get a good laugh when I think of pitching an idea like that.

Or Dave Matthews, with his oddball humor—a perfect fit for this type of communication.  A lot of the responses he gives to people feel like a more authentic connection than physically standing in front of him for five seconds and getting a record signed.

So what does this all mean?  Does it mean that all you need to be a successful musician is a solid list of Twitter followers, an iPhone and a good sense of humor?  No, of course not.

There’s a reason that people are passionate about Amanda Palmer, and her music comes first.  She’s built the foundation.  Could she be successful from here on out with no label?  By just touring and putting out releases on her own that her fans buy to support her?  Yeah, I think she probably could.  Could she start over today with none of that history and achieve the same results with only those tools?  I tend to doubt it, but I’m not so sure.  Someone’s going to do it.

So as frustrating as it can be to see a respected member of the old-guard media make a fool out of themselves when talking about something “new” like Twitter, it makes it that much more exciting to see more and more well known artists grab hold and use this new technology to connect with their audience in a way that didn’t exist a few years ago.  In that sense,  I completely agree with Amanda Palmer, life is becoming awesome.

It’s the little things—the moments and opportunities—that have kept me going at my job.  Being at a special show, meeting someone I admire, or just having a night where I remind myself that this is what I’m doing for my work, my career—this is part of what I get paid for.  For every fifty grids and reports I need to fill out there may be one of these little moments, but they can really carry me.

Last week was one of those nights, and frankly it’s been a while.  I was invited to a sort of unofficial (friends and press) album release party by Sarah Borges and The Broken Singles.  The show took place at Camp Street Studios in Cambridge, where they had recorded the album.  There’s an enormous amount of history at the studio, with music from The Pixies to Radiohead to The Lemonheads being recorded or mixed there.

I hung out early before the performance started and soaked in the scene.  Wine and cheese and PBR—from a keg—was mixed with old recording equipment and colored lights that were strung from the walls.

The back of the room was covered with bins of vinyl records, and in front of them was a combination soundboard and dusty old record player.  As people mingled, records were swapped out and played on the old deck.  It was a cool scene.

I soon realized that Paul, the studio owner and house producer, was manning the turntable.  I later found out that the entire wall of vinyl was his personal collection that he loaded into the studio years earlier when moving apartments.  Lucky for us.

Sarah and the band took the “stage” (really a corner of the room where the gear was setup) soon after.  The songs had an Americana twang with a touch of punk rock styling bubbling under the surface.  She was wearing cowboy boots.

At one point Sarah told a story about how when she was starting out as a musician and playing open mic nights around town, she would sing a cover of “Ride With Me,” by The Lemonheads.  She went on to say that it wasn’t until years later that she found out she had been playing it wrong, and that the original version of the song had actually been recorded in the same studio, by the same guy that produced her record.  The same guy that was spinning the records before the show, and the same guy that was standing at the soundboard at that moment doing the sound.  The same guy that owned the studio that we were all standing in.

That’s one of those moments.  I didn’t sing the song, and I didn’t record it.  But it’s a little thing—a little twist of history—to be standing in that same studio hearing that story.  It’s a moment I won’t forget any time soon.

I grew up in a small Connecticut town.  My options for buying new music were limited in the eighties and early nineties .  There was the Record Town a few towns over, and the Record Town even further away at the mall.  That was it.

Before I was old enough to drive, I’d have to get one of my parents to bring me to get a new album every now and then.  I specifically remember being thrilled to find Achtung Baby on the wall when it came out.  Years after that I remember asking the kid that worked there to dig around in the back room to find the one copy of Phish’s Junta that the store received.  He’d never heard of them.

When I got older and was able to drive myself around, a buddy and I discovered a real Indie record store half an hour away.  They sold live bootlegs, which back then had to be imported from Europe.  This was a whole new world.  They were pricey, so you better take your time, choose, and get something good.  Over the years my friend bought tons of great Pearl Jam and Nirvana live discs.  I bought old Dead and Dylan shows.  The guys that ran the shop turned me onto Dylan’s famous ‘66 show from the Royal Albert Hall (“Judas, I don’t believe you. You’re a liar!”) when it was just part of the great unreleased Dylan lore.

We’d drive around with a handful of tapes, and later CDs, and listen to them over and over and over again.  Supply was limited, and you became very familiar with what you had.  The concept of actually wearing out a cassette was very real.

Skip ahead to today.  Generally speaking, almost every piece of music you would ever want is literally a few mouse clicks away—whether you live in Connecticut, Los Angeles, or North Dakota.  Everything is at your finger tips.  If you take away the price barrier (which, let’s face it, is a big reality) anyone can have access to as much music as they want, with the only limit being how fast they can download it, and how much free space is on their hard drive.

So the question that I keep running into with some of my most serious music friends is this:  Is this the golden age of being a music fan?

You can read about an obscure jazz musician that influenced your favorite artist and be listening to his work minutes later.  I’m pretty sure that Record Town didn’t even have a jazz section.

In a lot of ways, it doesn’t get much better than that.  But still, is there something missing from the experience?  With everything so easily available, it’s almost overwhelming.  ”I downloaded that, but haven’t listened to it yet” was not something that you heard when you had to plan out your monthly trips to the record shop up the coast.  When you decided to buy something you listened to what you bought.  They you listened to it again.  And again.

Does that mean there aren’t kids out there that are listening to Terrapin Station endlessly on repeat, or locked in their rooms trying to find all the hidden secrets on the new Mastodon record?  Of course there are.  But I know that when I fire up iTunes it’s so easy for me to skips tracks and jump from artist to artist that I find myself doing it all the time.  And I’d guess many others are doing the same.

The fundamental ways in which I listen to music have changed, but along with that, the musical possibilities have expanded endlessly.

I’ve heard passionate arguments from serious folks on both sides of this discussion, and I don’t think either is right or wrong.  Ultimately, access to a wide range of music—that would have been impossible to find not many years ago—is a good thing for any serious music fan.  I just need to stop and remember how some of my favorite music of all time was burned into my head over and over again when I was a kid, because that’s a good thing too.

Man, it hit me hard last night.  I went to the new House of Blues on Lansdowne Street to see Bloc Party. Before the show we’d been talking about the music scene in Boston, and how it’s changed.  Someone mentioned Mama Kin, Aerosmith’s old Lansdowne Street club that I used to go to in college.  And of course the House of Blues is built on the spot that used to be Avalon and Axis and many more longtime Boston music venues before them.

I guess I’ve been in Boston for a long time, but I rarely stop to think about it.  Going to college here in the mid-nineties, all I did was go to shows around town.  All these old clubs.  A lot of them still there, some of them now the House of Blues.

Standing at the Bloc Party show got me thinking.  The kids down in front jumping up and down to the music; college sophomores that’ll hop on the T after the show and go back to their dorms.  Those kids used to be me.  That’s a fairly generic and clichéd thought—but not one that I have very often.  The thing that fucked with me is that I was those kids when I was in college, and that was a long time ago at this point.  Going on fifteen years ago, my god.

The funny thing is, that period of my life—all that time I spent bouncing around clubs in Boston—lead pretty directly to where I am now.  I met people through that scene that ultimately lead to me getting a job in the music industry.  A job that I still have.  I’ve been at this gig for the better part of a decade at this point, which I guess is no small feat given the insane changes the industry has gone through during that time.  I mean right now, in 2009, it’s hard to imagine the iTunes Music Store not existing.  It’s downright insane to remember the fact that the iPod didn’t even exist when I started this job.

It’s also crazy to realize that the kids jumping up and down in the front rows of the Bloc Party show were maybe 12 years old when I started this job, because it doesn’t feel like that long ago.  And I don’t feel that different.

Fifteen odd years is a good chunk of time, especially when it’s from your late teens to your early thirties. Don’t get me wrong, this is no “oh to be young again” lament.  I like right where I am.  I’ve been lucky. I’m still going to the same clubs and walking down the same streets—except now I’m trying to remember where I parked the car and wondering if I’ll make it to the encore, instead of trying to remember what time the last train leaves.