Listening to New Music After You've Turned 30
Perhaps it's time to add some new songs into your daily rotation.
What kind of music did you listen to as a teenager? In college? During your 20’s? How about now? Are you incorporating as much new music into your regular rotation as you used to? Me neither.
For most of us, our new-music listening tends to taper off sometime around our late-20’s. Maybe it’s because you’ve had kids and suddenly the soundtrack to the new Chipmunks movie is in your Spotify Wrapped List. Maybe you just don’t have the time, energy, or enthusiasm to seek out new tunes. Or you’ve heard some of what’s currently in the Top 40 while riding in an Uber and thought that quite frankly it sucks. Maybe you just enjoy listening to the same songs over and over. There’s nothing wrong with that; you’re entitled to listen to whatever you want.
But maybe if you spent a little time seeking out new music it could still be rewarding. I can’t honestly tell you it’ll be like that time when you were 14 and first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or “Paper Planes” or Beethoven’s Fifth, or Seals & Crofts’ greatest hits (hell, I don’t know what turns you on), when your arm hairs stand up on end and you swear you’re in the presence of a god. I hate to break it to you, but ya ain’t gettin’ that time of your life back again. Sorry! That doesn’t mean you should stop listening to new music altogether and have all your pop culture references frozen in time. There’s still so much joy to glean from coming across a new artist or genre or maybe even a decade of music that never piqued your interest before.
Between Spotify, YouTube, Tidal, SoundCloud, TikTok and the many other streaming services out there, we have very cheap or free access to so much music right now. When I was teenager (oh god, here we go…), I used to go to the music section of Barnes & Noble, collect an armful of interesting looking CDs, and park myself at one of those kiosks with the headphones that let you scan the CDs and listen to 30-second clips of the songs for free. This was a miracle! I could listen to the album first before paying upwards of $20 for it. I also copied and burned (look it up, kids) an insane number of CDs from my local library, which honestly had a pretty decent selection. And, of course, there were websites like Napster, iMesh, Limewire, and Kazaa where you could tie up your home phone line for a few hours (remember dial-up?) to illegally download a single song with no guarantee that the quality would even be listenable.
But today, it’s so much easier to listen to entire, high-quality songs for free and add them to custom playlists. (That doesn’t mean it’s fair to the musicians, who are likely earning fractions of pennies per stream, but that’s another conversation for another time.) At a certain point though, there’s almost too much to choose from, like those 12-page diner menus that offer everything from cheese fries to lobster. Periodically, you stumble around a bit, maybe check out Spotify’s “Discover Weekly” playlist (which inexplicably always sucks), get overwhelmed, and just head back to your comfort zone of the same songs you’ve been listening to since college. It’s nice here; everybody knows me!
If you’re looking for some new music though, here are a few suggestions of ways to find good new music.
1. Whip out the Shazam app on your phone while you’re watching TV or a movie. I get a lot this way. Behind every show and movie there’s at least one person combing through massive catalogs of music, looking for the perfect song for a particular scene. Often, these songs are by lesser-known artists who are still trying to break out. So, support the little guy!
2. Check out the calendar on your favorite local music venues’ website and see who’s playing. You don’t necessarily need to get tickets to the show (though you certainly could!), but you could also just add a couple songs into your rotation. For those in NYC, LA, and Chicago, Oh My Rockness is a great resource that features an exhaustive list of all popular music venues in the area—from tiny clubs and ballrooms to arenas and stadiums.
3. KEXP (a non-profit radio station in Seattle) has excellent in-studio live performances that you can find on YouTube. They also have a “Song of the Day” playlist on Spotify that offers an astonishingly wide range of genres and artists. With playlists like this, I encourage you to listen (maybe only once or twice, but maybe more!) to even the songs that you don’t think you’ll like. I’m a firm believer in not forming an opinion about a particular piece of art until you’ve actually listened to/watched/participated in that piece for yourself. (Reading about it doesn’t count).
4. When a friend suggests a particular song or band to you (whether it be on social media or in a face-to-face conversation), actually check it out. I’m sure we all have the best intentions in these situations (or not), but your friends can be one of your greatest resources to finding great new tunes and a potential future concert buddy!
Speaking of friends suggesting music… here’s a playlist of songs I love that I found using Shazam.
Also, if you’ve never seen the Adult Swim show, Joe Pera Reads to You, you owe it to yourself to watch this episode where he discovers “Baba O’Riley” by The Who. Nothing on earth makes me laugh harder.
What I’m Up To
In my continued quest to find air-conditioned places in NYC this summer, last weekend I decided to check out Fotografiska, the New York branch of the Swedish photography museum. This was my first time going (it opened in 2019) and I mostly went for the Terry O’Neill exhibit. On the ground floor of the museum is a large coffee shop and a gift shop (this is America, after all!). I took the elevator to the top floor where the O’Neill exhibit was (open now through 9/2) and browsed that for maybe an hour (it wasn’t huge, but I wanted to take my time). O’Neill had early access to bands like the Beatles and Stones as well as other musicians like David Bowie, Elton John, Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen, Amy Winehouse, and tons of others. He also photographed at lot of actors, including most of the men who played James Bond, along with Frank Sinatra, Brigitte Bardot, Faye Dunaway, and so many more. O’Neill has a great eye for capturing his subjects, sometimes while they’re posing for the camera and other times while they’re simply lost in thought backstage.
The museum feels far more intimate than your usual stark-white, high-ceilinged palace. The rooms were typically fairly dark with spotlights focused on each of his photographs. And unlike other museums, it’s open until 11pm on weekends and features a chic bar that allows you to buy a drink and browse the entire museum with it. Tickets are pricier than they should be ($30, though I got mine for $26 with a Groupon deal), but it was cold, dark, and filled with art – that’s my kind of place.
What I’m Watching
The Barbie movie, of course! If there’s a buzzy movie that I want to see, I really like to go opening weekend without reading reviews first, so I can watch it with fresh eyes and form my own opinions. It was almost impossible to do that with this movie though since there was a truly insane amount of marketing around it. (I swear, Margot Robbie as Barbie even made her way into one of my dreams last week. Ryan Gosling is always in my dreams, so no difference there.) I mostly really loved this movie and thought it was witty and silly and just hilarious. There was so much going on in the plot though, that I think I’d need to see it another time or two just to fully absorb everything. Margot is wonderful as Barbie and Ryan Gosling makes a hilarious Ken. He absolutely nailed it and I bet will win some awards. Kate McKinnon was perfectly cast as Weird Barbie, though I wish we’d gotten to see more of her. Same goes for Michael Cera as Allan. I do think the movie could have benefitted a little from some paring down and not trying to accomplish too much. It was still very fun and visually stunning though, and I’m sure just the beginning of a whole string of a Mattel movie franchise (can’t say I’m eager to see the Uno movie though). Shout out to my girl, Greta Gerwig, who just made box office history with “Barbie,” which is the biggest opening weekend ever for a female director. Well done!
Fun fact: Aqua, the group responsible for the 1997 hit song “Barbie Girl,” is the most profitable Danish band ever. They’ve sold an estimated 33 million albums and singles.