The strangest method of album discovery I've ever heard of
Over the weekend, I got a wonderfully nostalgic reminder of how I have discovered new music for most of my life. The YouTube algorithm fed me this video of a 1994 countdown of the "top 500 songs of all time" aired on the Washington, DC-Baltimore modern rock station WHFS. This was the radio station that got me through grad school at the University of Maryland as well as my stint as a political science professor at Towson University in the late '90s. The countdown is loaded with recency bias and limited to songs that fit the station's format, but it truly transported me back to those pre-9-11, pre-streaming, pre-COVID, pre-collapsing-of-the-facade-of-American-democracy times.
That was the last era in which I was glued to the radio and the last one in which radio played such an important role in my music discovery process. It's been surprising to me that few, if any, of my guests have cited radio as a source of discovery for the artists and albums they come on my show to discuss. The modal form is discovery is word of mouth. Guests usually first learned about the album they picked from a friend, parent, sibling or bandmate. I have a few guests who got hooked on an album after buying it solely on the basis of the cover art. That has come up more often than I would have expected, and I never would have predicted that cover art would be a more common gateway than radio airplay.
Unless I'm forgetting something, the guest who had the most unusual story about discovering their chosen album was Kelley Deal. She picked Julian Cope's Droolian for Ep 100, and she first came across the album while working for a music aficionado in Cincinnati. Kelley's job was to sell his large collection of CDs (a "roomful," in her words) on eBay. Droolian was one of those CDs, and Kelley put it on without looking to see who the artist was. She enjoyed it so much that she played it repeatedly, still without knowing who made the album. It was only after several listens that she bothered to see who the artist was, and her immediate reaction was, "It's fucking Julian Cope? Seriously? Oh God, that asshole?"
I recently recorded an upcoming episode with Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Johanna Samuels, and her story of her initial discovery of Sparklehorse's It's a Wonderful Life rivals Kelley's. You'll get to hear her anecdote about her first encounter with Sparklehorse later this month. Before then, I'll be publishing my interview with classical guitarist Tomas Rodriguez and our discussion of Kaira by Toumani Diabate.
I wish I had a cool and unusual story about how I first encountered a particular album. I suppose starting a podcast to learn about hundreds of new-to-me albums is pretty unusual, now that I think about it. If you have a story about an unusual way that you discovered an album, let me know in the comments!
What's new on You, Me and An Album?
Since I last checked in here, I've published three new episodes. Kira Roessler gave me a second shot at getting into Bright Eyes by introducing me to Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. (For Ep 168, Sarah Gargano chose Fevers and Mirrors.) Bob Bert provided me with a long-overdue introduction to no wave by choosing the Brian Eno-produced compilation No New York. On the most recent YMAAA, Anne Richmond Boston and I talked about the self-titled album by The Glands, which belongs on a growing list of albums from recent episodes by artists who should be much better known (see also Plumtree, Girls at Our Best! and No Knife).
Past YMAAA guests making great new music
It's been just over a year since I chatted with JF Robitaille and Lail Arad about Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water and their beautiful album debut as a duo, Wild Moves. JF and Lail's gorgeous harmonies are back on their new song, "Where I'm Supposed to Be," which they recorded to be the closing music for an episode of the podcast Strangers on a Bench.
It's hard to believe it's been nearly a year-and-a-half since Deep Sea Diver released Billboard Heart and almost as long since Jessica Dobson joined me for a discussion of Radiohead's Amnesiac. It was a pleasant surprise to hear something new from Deep Sea Diver last week, as they released their cover of Massive Attack's "Teardrop." I would think this would be a tough song to cover, but DSD completely pulls it off in their inimitable style.