The Internet loves a list, so when @Annie invited me to participate in the music blog challenge, I had to accept.
Updated: February, 2025

What are five of your favorite albums?

  1. Perennial Favorites - Squirrel Nut Zippers
  2. Songs From The Cool World - Various Artists
  3. Homogenic - Bjork
  4. The Celts - Enya
  5. Monster - REM

Honorable Mentions

  • Push The Button - The Chemical Brothers
  • We Are In Love - Harry Connick Jr
  • Violator - Depeche Mode
  • Tidal - Fiona Apple
  • Version 2.0 - Garbage
  • Long Distance - Ivy
  • The Eleventh Hour - Jars of Clay
  • Portishead - Portishead
  • Seven More Minutes - The Rentals
  • Becoming X - Sneaker Pimps

What are five of your favorite songs?

  1. Pallin’ With Al - Squirrel Nut Zippers
  2. Destroy Everything You Touch - Ladytron
  3. Typical - Mute Math
  4. Eden - 10,000 Maniacs
  5. New Wave Jacket - POLYSICS

Honorable Mentions

  • How Do I Know - Here we Go Magic
  • Inner City Life - Goldie
  • Sweetness - Jimmy Eat World
  • Light Powered - Deastro
  • The Fear - Lilly Allen

Favorite instrument(s)?

Piano and guitar - Nearly all music can be created with these two pivotal instruments and they are intimitely woven into my family tree.

Do you listen to the radio? If so, how often?

I abandoned US commercial radio back in 1997 when I got my first car CD player and never looked back. The closest I ever came to returning was the year a local pirate radio station illegally broadcast from a house near my neighborhood or during my first job where I always played late night dance show internet streams from BBC Radio One.

How often do you listen to music?

Daily. There’s rarely a time when I don’t have music on.

How often and how do you discover music?

I flow between old favorites and new music as the mood strikes me during the day. There’s no rhyme or reason other than how I’m feeling in the moment. Life events and things like the temperature of the season often influences what I put on. For example, I play the Fleet Foxes warm me up during winter while the heat of the summer makes me listen to a lot of The B-52’s. Recommendations from my family and friends frequently keep me busy exploring new stuff. There’s so much amazing music out there to discover!

What’s a song or album that you enjoy that you wish had more recognition?

The Squirrel Nut Zippers first three albums are so incredibly important to me. They often get incorrectly lumped into the “swing revival” trend by people who either never actually listened to them or don’t understand musical genres. It’s a shame because all three albums are chock full of lively and inventive explorations through the diverse jazz sounds that immigrated into America from other places and cultures. Dixie, klezmer, Django, southern roots, blues, etc. If the 1930’s were ever punk, these albums would be that sound.

What’s your favorite song of all time?

  1. Papua New Guinea (12” Original) - Future Sound of London

Back in the summer of 1992, my middle school friends and I were inexplicably into Ralph Bakshi’s terrible Cool World movie. I somehow saved up enough money to buy the soundtrack on tape and spent the bulk of my alone time that summer listening to it. Much like the film, the soundtrack was very flawed but one track in particular captured me so much that I used my dual tape deck to laboriously fill one side of a blank tape with the song so I could listen to it over and over without having to rewind every time. The song was Papua New Guinea by the boundary-pushing British band Future Sound of London. That song changed my musical life by being the very first track to open my ears to the then-new scene of electronic music that was blowing up outside of America.

Has your taste in music evolved over the years?

Definitely. Like nearly everyone, I started with whatever my parents were listening to. However, my mother was a music professor so she instilled me with a bottomless appetite for experiencing new sounds and taught me to take my pop music as seriously as the classical masters.

I wasted far too much of my youth attempting to weave my self-identity into whatever musical genre I was into at the moment. (I feel like young boys are particularly succeptible to this trap and sadly, many never escape it.) Thankfully, I was saved by almost none of my friends sharing my musical tastes so I never got deep enough into any particular “scene” for one genre to dominate my musical life.

My current north star is that there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure when it comes to music so keep listening to both the old and the new, forging your own path with whatever connects with you.