The Music Never Stopped…
- Caetano Veloso
It happened somewhere in the middle of the nineties, when the music stopped for me. I felt like I had run into a dead end and I couldn’t find a way out of there. There was no new music that satisfied me and I was somewhat bored with the old one.
The transition from vinyl to CD:s a few years earlier wasn’t really helpful either. I had hoped that I would appreciate the better sound and enjoy the comfort in being able to play music for hours without swithching CD:s (I had a 5-CD-player). What happened instead was that I was struggling to build up a new music collection that would replace all my vinyls, realizing that I couldn’t afford to have it all and I ended up buying a lot of best of-albums or the latest albums from favourite artists that made their best work ten years earlier. The comfort just got me lazy about choosing what to play, and the real music experience wasn’t there anymore. On the radio they were playing R’n’B hits all day long and I thought: “They don’t create good music anymore”.
But hey, it’s only music, it’s not the end of the world! For me it was almost like that, though. I was starving and there was an emptiness inside of me that I didn’t know how to fill. Lucky for me, I was saved by love.
I met this wonderful Spanish-Brazilian woman, who walked right into my life and later on became my wife. One day she received a package of CD:s from her brother in Brazil, containing music from some of her favourite Brazilian artists. Instead of snearing at it, as I would have done some years before, I decided to give it a try and listen without any preconceptions. And in that decision I must have unhinged a closed door in my mind, for what entered through my ears was a completely new music sensation I hadn’t experienced before, and my world changed.
I didn’t understand a word, but the new harmonies and soft voices spoke directly to me from across the world. Djavan, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Maria Bethania, Chico Buarque all knew how to open my eyes. Instead of stopping there I decided to look for more, everywhere I could. When I went to Spain later that year, I spent hours in record stores listening to music, and I travelled home with a lot of new music. Rock and pop in Spanish, flamenco singers, jazz and other stuff.
When music started to surge through Internet about ten years ago, I dived into it wholeheartedly in a quest to push my boundaries further and further, and I still do. Even though I listen to a wide range of music, I feel today that I’ve only scratched the surface and that there are so much more to discover for me. Compare that feeling to what I felt in the beginning of this story, when I obviously told myself that there was nothing more to discover; a horrible sensation.
I do believe that most people would have richer lives if they opened their mind for more new music and not only for what is served on the radio. 20 years ago, the possibilites were limited by the size of the record store shelves and the record label wallets, but now everything you could possibly imagine is just a click away. It sounds easy, but now the problem is the reverse, finding the true gems with your name on among loads of other gems.
The radio won’t help you. On the radio, with few exceptions, they don’t want you to hear new music, they want you to hear music you already know, because otherwise they believe that you will switch to another channel. The people below, though, can help you. These podcasters and bloggers are the ones that dive into those heaps of music trying to find something they like, and they play it for you, hoping that you will share their love for this new music.
Here are some podcasts and blogs that have played our new single “Come Together” or in some case one of our other songs in the past month; a good starting point I thought, since you begin here with us, Bus Stop Dreams.
Parasites and Sycophants is a great music blog with a tag line that led me to write my music discovery story above: “No, the music never stopped. You just let yourself get old.”
Michael Angel’s Cosmic Grab Bag
/Pär
