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I grew up in a house full of music -- mom's Neil Diamond and Nutcracker LPs, dad's love of blues, funk, and soul. I had a brief classical period when I went to prep school for two years (ever the kid trying to seem cooler and smarter despite being bullied and having zero common sense), but I mostly gravitated towards rock later.

It helped to have friends like Chris to deluge me in R.E.M., Genesis, and weird prog rock. R.E.M. was my gateway to “alternative rock” like the Cure, New Order, and the Smiths. Alt-rock was a form of rebellion against the blandness of Oklahoma radio, tho I had my Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd phases. Mostly, though, I learned to be a musical omnivore.

The college years intersected with the grunge movement, so a lot of Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Soundgarden made it into my CD player. Speaking of CDs, most of my $4.25/hour college job pay went straight to CDs.

My love for dream pop and shoegaze started during this time, especially Lush and the Cocteau Twins. Wasn't into the Dead, though; being in a college with Deadhead prep school kids who as mean as they were stoned will do that to you. (After college I came around.) The folk/singer-songwriter side started here as well, between old Neil Young records and Bruce Cockburn.

After the breakup with that girlfriend, I felt like I needed a change of scenery... the end result being I went to work for a charity in the UK for a year. The change in perspective also changed my music tastes. For the better? For the worse? Probably both, but it was definitely different. Somewhere in all this I met my future wife who had her own love of Celtic music.

At the time Reading had both an HMV and a Virgin Megastore, though CDs were spendy compared to America so I mostly bought what was on sale. And, of course, there was Radio 1.

I mostly blame Singles for being the thing that got me set on Seattle, tho by the time I'd arrived the scene was already fading out (from the drugs and the deaths of Mia Zapata and Kurt Cobain.) I lived in a sharehouse down in the Rainier Valley, most of whom had very different tastes in music from me. Some of it rubbed off (e.g. one roommate's thing for 1950s musicals), some of it didn't (e.g. the chirpy Christian music of the time).

The End was the soundtrack. It was the soundtrack for most of us, I think. Tower Records took a lot of my money. I dated a Seattle native who liked the local stuff, and she also (perhaps inadvertently) introduced me to trip-hop. This is also around where I really got into Lyle Lovett and discovered Uncle Tupelo.

I became a dad in 2004. What they don't tell you is how you can just blank out on pop culture for a couple years while your life is diapers, Dora, and the dead-eyed stare. By this point I was ripping my CDs to MP3s which ended up on my iPod. It was around this time I discovered Last.fm, which is why you have this monster report in front of you.

Work was UDub, and between heads-down work and the commute, I had a lot of time for my headphones. (If anything, it gave me a respite from the wonderful-but-still-a-toddler kid.) KEXP and their online stream came into play here as well — thus Sufjan Stevens, The Decemberists, and a lot of other brainy, baroque music. And the music blogs were going too, so there was discovery around every corner.

In 2011, I left higher ed for the tech world. (Well, returned to it after a stint during the Dotcom Boom then Bust.) Things moved fast, hours were long, and burnout was always around the corner. I switched jobs four times during the period, some by layoff, some to go to another job, some to just leave because I was not kidding about the burnout. Worked in the office, worked for myself, worked remote.

Somewhere in here my music habits shifted. Less iTunes, broken connections, and a too busy work life led to a dearth of scrobbling. At least until Spotify came along. And it had last.fm integration. These ended up being my peak years logging music. It was during these years I went head first into ambient and minimalist music along with having an Australian music obsession.

Then COVID hit, and I, like a lot of people, retreated inward. More bedroom pop, more “sad girl” music to go with the “sad dad” music, and more classical and neo-classical. Listening to Glenn Gould’s versions of the Goldberg Variations became a default if I just needed sound in my ears to not feel lonely. Moreso when in 2024 I got laid off for (perhaps) the final time in tech.

This was also the period where virtual friendships became even more important. To tie us together there was Music League — a competitive game where you were trying to find the right song for the round’s theme. The round playlists were music discovery catnip. And Ryn (and Elaine) pulled me back into the Mountain Goats after many years away.

1,533 plays. The most-listened artist in twenty-one years of scrobbling. Matt Berninger's baritone showed up around 2009 and never left — sad dad rock for a sad dad, world-weariness as background radiation through a depressing decade. The numbers peak in 2019 at 340 plays, which tracks.

It started as a Twitter experiment — a crowdsourced playlist built from followers who worked the same way. I was looking for working music, background sounds for the hours of trying to get my brain to focus long enough to do the nuts and bolts of UX design. I called the list ‘Heads Down, Thumbs Up’ after the elementary school game.

Over time, ambient, neo-classical, electronic, and minimalist music became a constant. I started seeking it out intentionally, digging into Steve Reich, Max Richter, and Nils Frahm. Who'd have thought an old indiehead would be into bleeps, bloops, and drones?

I want to say it started with Courtney Barnett going on Triple J Like A Version and sending me down a rabbit hole into her two EPs at the time. And from there... next thing I knew, I was tossing off Aussie and Kiwi band names at every conversation.

Aussie music of the late 20-teens was a lot of things: punk, post-punk, folk, slacker rock, indie… all stuff that fit into my musical happy spots. My list of low audience artists is stacked towards musicians from ANZ.

Being unemployed has driven me to do something, anything, to stay occupied. So, of course, I signed up as a volunteer DJ at Hollow Earth Radio and got my own radio show. I even started making my own music, perhaps coming full circle from learning piano and violin back in the day.