Something On Sunday.
Moods for Moderns. Keep the lighthouse in sight when you stray from your music. When you find it again, it's a new kind of happiness. Re-appraising Apple Music. Plus, two great music Substacks.
Isn’t it great remembering something you love but forgot? It’s like a little bonus gift out of the blue. A microscopic bit of happiness.
Especially when it’s music that pops up on a playlist. Now, here’s the first aside: While I don’t aggressively hate them or anything reactionary like that, I don’t particularly like playlists that are made for me.
I’m a big boy. I can make my own playlists. In fact, that’s a passion, just one of the many joyous sparks that loving music shoots off. Why would I need someone to make me a playlist? I’m a musical explorer, not stuck on one continent, in one genre, trapped in some formula.
I contain musical multitudes.
Here’s the second aside: Other people can make great playlists.
I’m keenly aware of this and it, too, produces a different kind of joy (usually revelation — you can’t know everything and shouldn’t think you do). It’s why I like Amaya Lim’s “Record Store” Substack, which you should also check out. She’s been quite the surprise as a younger writer who has a real gift for the craft, is reliably curious and has an insatiable appetite for sharing all kinds of music — a trait not always shared by all younger or older music writers.
*(I’ve always found it interesting that musicians tend to be age/decade/genre agnostic, but their most die-hard fans are not nearly as curious and generous about exploring. Lim is a music artist as well).
Anyway, on to the obvious and inevitable: Do I like Spotify making me playlists?
Let’s just say that the whole of Spotify, the entirety of Streaming Music That Killed the Industry is very, very complicated. I’m not going to break it all down here other than to say, yes, I subscribe, like millions of others, but I try to buy all the physical media (and merch) from my favorites. If I end up streaming a band or artist that is new to me and then becomes, over time, a straight up lock on my sensibilities — like Middle Kids — then I begin the process of adding their physical media.
But I’d be lying and disingenuous if I said I don’t like a lot — just not all — of the playlists that Spotify creates. I mean, when Spotify gets me wrong, it gets me really wrong.
The lists that hit? I shouldn’t like them, so shoot me, but I do. I’ve long since forgotten to get worked up and judgmental about it — Spotify playlists are just an accepted parts of my musical life. It’s not like I’m getting my coffee at Starbucks, relax.
Wait, maybe it is? Too late.
But Apple Music? Oh, hold on.
If I think about it too long, I get an early-adopter iTunes migraine — all those lovely hours in my room burning physical CDs into ones and zeros by placing them in CD trays that don’t exist the same way they did back in the day.
*(Are physical, hardware plug-in CD/DVD players going to be the romantic new record players? Probably not, but I’ve got a compact DVD player for my TV and CD player in my backpack that you’re never going talk me out of as being essential.)
Sure, I still have access to “My Library” on Apple Music — loud and large may it roar — but when iTunes became a relic of “Why are you burning all your shit when you could save time and just pay a flat fee and stream everything?,” it wasn’t Apple that I turned to, of course, but Spotify.
Just walked right into that cult.
But I was still paying for all things Apple, since I am nothing if not all things Apple from a tech perspective; yet I was almost never using Apple Music. There’s a reason for that, of course — it paled next to Spotify. But in recent years Apple Music has more or less got its shit together and while you don’t need both, I have both, and so not that long ago I started leaning in to pressing the Apple Music app on my phone and not just the Spotify app.
Here’s the lead of this post again:
Isn’t it great remembering something you love but forgot? It’s like a little bonus gift out of the blue. A microscopic bit of happiness.
All of that is about rediscovering, re-appraising Apple Music. Because as soon as I started clicking on playlists that Apple Music created for me — and especially Tim Goodman’s Station; my own little self-reflective radio station — I laughed first and then fell into amazement about how little the Apple algorithm knew about me, since I’d been playing in the Spotify sandbox for so many years.
What Apple Music knew about me, it turned out, was a bunch of artists and albums I used to listen to but (for the most part) don’t any longer, at least not with the same frequency. It was really weird — refreshing and surprising — to discover the “old” me. The current me of the last decade on Spotify listens mostly to female singer-songwriters who fall roughly in the 20 to 35 demo, plus a rambunctiously varied collection of mostly obscure indie artists.
Almost none of them pop up on my Apple Music algorithm, which is some kind of wonderful for a different reason, but more on that shortly.
Yes, my reliable all-time favorites like Belle and Sebastian, Wilco, Decemberists, Pernice Brothers, Jenny Lewis, Camera Obscura, The Smiths/Morrissey, etc are popping up all over my Spotify fingerprints, but call me morbid and call me pale but Apple Music showed me that in reality I ported over only a small percentage of ride-or-die favorites.
It first hammered home the obvious:
Nobody loves Elvis Costello more than I do.
Duh.
He’s my Hall of Fame First Ballot hero, my Spirit Animal, my Can’t/Won’t Put Him On Any Greatest Of Lists I could conjure because, duh, he’s my greatest musical love, high school to present day. He means so much to my musical life that I basically never played him for my kids growing up (!!!) because I knew that’s all I would play and they would grow up as freaks, asking people if they like “When I Was Cruel No. 1” or “When I Was Cruel No. 2,” better and scoffing at them if they didn’t say No. 1, double duh, then adding, “You know, the first time he played that live was in Oakland, where we grew up, in 1999, before either of us was born but my dad was there.” And one or the other would say, “Fun fact: My dad put all the lyrics of that song on his shins!”
I loved them too much for that. But as my partner says, it’s one of the oddest glitches in my make up — barely playing for anyone else, even her, my favorite artist.
It’s complicated.
But on Apple Music it’s not — hoo, boy, they know my dark secret.
More intriguing, I think, is discovering the less obvious — bands I loved but just don’t play as much on Spotify (maybe because I had meticulously made my playlists on Apple Music?). I don’t know.
I think I went to Spotify and just became a different person?
Yet, there lies the joy in this discovery.
The Jam? Style Council? All of Paul Weller? Apple Music. XTC? Talking Heads? Dinosaur Jr.? Guided By Voices? American Music Club? Jonathan Richman? Peter, Bjorn and John? Jens Lekman? Matthew Sweet?
Apple Music.
All my music from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Karen O, alternative rock goddess and slayer, is there.
Metric! Damn, I love that band. Never played them, even once, on Spotify. Is Emily Haines related to Karen O?
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Eighty-five percent of my Bright Eyes/Conor Oberst love is on Apple Music. ALL of my insane but justified devotion to Lloyd Cole — who actually got better the older he got, which 74 percent of his biggest fans probably don’t know — resides on Apple Music.
Let me play “Backwards and Forwards” or “Mattress Of Wire” from Aztec Camera for you people, because it’s all on Apple Music, rushing at me like a great 80s/90s memory, then flooding me with all those Roddy Frame solo albums where I wonder if I’m the only one listening.
All my Frightened Rabbit is on Apple Music. All my R.E.M. Oh so much R.E.M. Every Replacements song. And Paul Westerberg. (That’s a shit ton of songs!) Oh, my, God: Sam Phillips and her lovely voice? Stars!? Apple Music.
(Checking out what I have there…Look at all those Canadian bands! Not as many as my Scottish bands, but still — strangely a lot.)
Every album from Grant-Lee Buffalo and, better yet, Grant-Lee Phillips? Apple Music. John Wesley Harding? Prefab Sprout? Ben Lee? Death Cab For Cutie? Clem Snide/Eef Barzelay?
My little Apple-created radio station/playlist just pumped them out, all the memories washing over me, making me wonder why I never bothered to create these playlists on Spotify, or, for that matter, really search out these bands all that much.
Strange.
All that Crowded House, Neil Finn, Tim Finn etc. music? There. Graham Parker? There. Billy Bragg? There. Pixies? Buffalo Tom? Portastatic? Eels? Fountains of Wayne? Modest Mouse? The Hold Steady? Spoon?
Over on Apple Music. Not much of a fingerprint on my Spotify world.
OK, enough, you get the picture. But trust me, it goes on forever and ever. Every single ‘80s band you can think of, from the Cure to ABC and We’ve Got A Fuzzbox And We Know How To Use It is there. Oh dearest music lords, I did love me some Colourbox and Felt.
Oh, impressionable young child.
I think you see the point here. I had left all of that behind. Not on purpose, of course. The musical universe, like the book and now TV universe, is vast and deep and dangerous. You can drown out there. Some of it was bleeding over to Spotify simply because it’s not like I’m going to forget, say, Elvis Costello, but I wasn’t making any playlists of the other artists, mostly.
And that’s why stumbling on Apple Music — if you can actually stumble on something you’re paying for — was such a surprise reveal. I have written plenty about the beauty of listening to music on “shuffle” without looking at what’s next — don’t ever look at what’s next, because then you’ll press fast forward and miss the revelatory experience; but you won’t if you don’t see the song and it comes on, trust me.
Emotions over logic. More heart, less head.
*(By the way, here’s a music critic I’ve loved reading for years and followed here on Substack as well, just finally shifting to paid recently because of his exceptional depth and the value that it brings — Stephen Thomas Erlewine. Check out his “So It Goes” Substack):
Anyway, this Tim Goodman Station nonsense (isn’t it all nonsense?) on Apple Music has brought me down memory lane as all great music does, and it all comes flooding back, time, place, moods, memories — visceral, alive-making mood-shifting moments.
It’s like I forgot it all existed. It’s like I forgot how big the world of music was — and how much I burned into iTunes all those years ago. Not many people tell you this, but you can love something and still forget it. Don’t let anyone tell you forgetting/not playing an artist or band in heavy rotations means you don’t love them. It’s a big world; we all get lost.
And maybe you’ll love them more when you find them again.
Off-topic, but relevant to anyone who's been concerned about the potential of another strike in Hollywood: a tentative deal has been reached between the producers and unions. It'll have to be ratified by the rank and file before we can relax, so we'll see -- but this is the first good news on this issue in a while.
Truth be told, it's the first good news of ANY sort in a while...
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/iatse-tentative-agreement-studios-streamers-1235932608/
This is great, Tim! I am also a dual subscriber to Spotify/Apple Music. I use them differently. I would argue it's probably smart to create two personalities for each service! I haven't hit my station, though. I will check it out. But basically I use Apple Music to listen to soundtrack music and to peruse their non-algorithmic playlists to see what's going on. Like the big alternative playlist ALT CTRL (I think it's called) which tells you what is new in that genre. But like you, I have a vast iTunes library made from ripping CDs and that is probably a lot different from what I listen to now. Metric!! Love them.
Apple Music has some advantages. You can turn on Lossless to get a better quality stream and there is the Classical Music app which I really enjoy (it kind of hooks into my soundtrack listening as well.)
Okay, playing the station. You're right! It's a tad dated, which is nice!