Phoebe Bridgers dropped her new album “Lost Weekend” today, and I’m in love. I’ve had “Lost Boys” on repeat since June, and I love the acoustic version, too:

So good.

Will Anybody Ever Love Me?

Yes.

The other day, I asked a friend to recommend me some country music artists that I could listen to. I told her that after 11 years living in Montana, it was time for me to get into this genre. She recommended me a few artists, and the one I’ve gravitated toward the most is Zach Bryan.

But I miss you in the mornings when I see the sun
Somethin’ in the orange tells me we’re not done

His lyrics are heartfelt, heartbreaking, and beautiful.

He said the sun’s going to rise tomorrow
Somewhere on the east side of sorrow

I wish I didn’t take so long to get into country music. It is something else, and Zach Bryan is incredible. I am happy to own a few of his albums, and that I’ve let go of whatever stigma I once had about country music. It is a great genre of music.

Been jamming to this song over the last day. Love it.

Didn’t know there was a French version of it and now I’m hooked!

This might be the best version. So damn sexy.

One of my favorite YouTube channels is Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games, and a few days ago, he released this video of some of my favorite video game music (Zelda! Xenoblade Chronicles!) being performed live in Japan by an orchestra as part of the Press Start: Symphony of Games concert series. If you’re a fan of these video games, or really, video games in general, you should definitely watch this. A whole nine plus minutes of Xenoblade Chronicles music? Oh my goodness.

One of the reasons why I buy music I enjoy and love is because when I was a kid, I used to pirate all my music. Like many, it started with Napster, then moved on to other peer-to-peer file sharing programs like Soulseek, and ended with torrents. I spent all my free time during my late teens and early 20s simply reading about, downloading (pirating), and listening to music. And I wasn’t discriminate about it. I downloaded everything—my focus was on full catalogs. Bob Dylan? The Beatles? Chuck Berry? Miles Davis? I found and downloaded everything they released. At its peak, my collection consisted of tens of thousands of songs, all of which I listened to regularly. I was addicted and a bit insane. At one point, I saved all these mp3s onto dozens and dozens of data CDs, then onto multiple iPods, and eventually, into a single, high capacity hard drive. This served me well for a long time… until I moved to Montana and this hard drive failed.

All my music, all that music I spent years collecting and organizing and listening to? Gone.

Except for the stuff I purchased legally. That stuff has stuck around. At the time, losing my hard drive full of pirated music (and movies and TV shows) felt like I lost a good friend or a family member. I was heartbroken, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I always knew pirating was wrong, but I was broke and acquiring all this media was easy, so I ignored that voice in my head and did it anyway. With the loss of this hard drive, though, came the opportunity to change my ways and to do the right thing. So I did, and I have.

I’ve been purchasing my music ever since, and I don’t see myself ever changing that. With that said, I purchased more music today on this last Bandcamp Friday until August, and here is today’s haul.

Even though I pirated a lot of music while I was in college, I spent a lot of money going to concerts. All the bands and artists I wanted to see (and learned about from my pirating habit) came through Los Angeles, so I was able to see a lot of bands.

One of them was Maxïmo Park, an alt rock band from Newcastle. In 2007, they released Our Earthly Pleasures, their second studio album, and they came by LA in support of it. I did not buy this album, but their first one, A Certain Trigger:

I hadn’t listened to this album in probably ten years, and all it did while listening to it was bring back memories of my late college years. I had purchased the Canon PowerShot A550 around that time, and I took it with me to their show. There’s a blurry photo of Paul Smith at the top of this article, and there are way more where that came from, but I’ll keep those to myself.

Around the same time I went to see Maxïmo Park, I took my friend Brian to see The Go! Team at the Echoplex. This was a really fun show, one I remember as the one where I saw Adrian Grenier in the audience. Entourage was big at the time, so I thought that was really cool. I still think Thunder, Lightning, Strike holds up, all these years later.

You know how I said I liked to download full catalogs? One of my main aims was to educate myself on music history, and one of those bands that popped up over and over in my research was Pavement, one of the best bands of the 90s. Since the great hard drive crash of 2012, I hadn’t supported this band… until now. Wowee Zowee is still as good as when I first heard it. What a classic.

I think in my research I also came across this band called Porcupine Tree, “the biggest rock band most people have never heard of.” I remember I had In Absentia on repeat for weeks, and again, I think it still holds up. I’m listening to it now, and I feel like I’m back in college, walking the streets of LA with my wired iPod headphones, and jamming out to my own personal soundtrack.

This next one is random, but one I’m glad I found on Bandcamp. I’ve never really been a big fan of death metal, but I remember when I first listened to this album, I felt like I could finally, sorta, understand the appeal. Disfear’s Live the Storm is probably the one and only death metal album I will ever enjoy and own, and that’s okay. It’s fucking good.

These next few albums are more recent releases, so I never pirated them in my youth.

I’ve been a fan of Yves Tumor since I first listened to Heaven to a Tortured Mind in 2020, an absolutely incredible album. Here is his most recent album, and judging by a few of the singles he’s released, I know I’m already going to love this one.

I hadn’t really heard much of Indigo De Souza, but when I saw her video for the song Younger & Dumber, I knew she was an artist I wanted to keep my eye on and support. To my surprise, she’s offering these two albums with whatever price you’d like to pay, so there’s no reason not to check her out. These two albums? 🔥🔥🔥

I realize not everyone has the same musical taste as me, and that’s fine. We’re each our own person. My hope is that maybe I introduced someone to music they’ve never listened to before, and in turn, they go and support these or other artists in the future. We all deserve to get paid, especially artists, for the work we produce. Let’s stick together and have each other’s backs.

I watched this performance by Hania Rani last night, and I immediately fell in love. I found her Bandcamp, and today, I bought two of her albums:

Without question, they’re good, and I love them. Along with Hania’s albums, I bought these four albums:

This music puts me in a certain mood, a mood I like to live in. Maybe you will, too.

I love music (who doesn’t?), and in America, you show how much you love something by how much you paid for it, so how much did I spend on music this year?!

I spent $937.22 on music this year. Is that a lot? I feel like that’s a lot. That’s an average of $78.10 a month, which, yeah, feels about right. That’s also about 93 to 94 albums in a year, or about 7 to 8 new albums a month, which, yeah, also sounds about right. I think one of the main questions some people will have is: why not subscribe to Spotify or Apple Music or another streaming music service? And my answer to that is:

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck streaming music services. Fuck them all to hell.

I used to subscribe to Apple Music. For a few years, actually. I paid for their $99 annual plan, which came out to $8.25 a month. For $8.25 a month, I could listen to all the music I wanted. It was great! I listened to everything, and I discovered many great new artists. All in all, I had a great time with Apple Music… until I canceled it during one fire season. I had plans to renew it later, but I wouldn’t need it during fire season because I would be in the mountains where service was spotty and where I wouldn’t really have the time or the energy to listen to music anyway. And when I canceled it, I saw the last few years’ worth of music—music I’ve spent time listening to and curating and rating—vanish. Of course it vanished, but I still felt like a big part of me just died. All my new artists, all my playlists, all the work I did to curate my library to my tastes—all gone. So what did I actually pay for? All those hundreds of dollars?

For limited access to an infinite number of songs. I was renting this music—it wasn’t mine. And right then it hit me:

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck streaming music services. Fuck them all to hell.

The only music left in my music app was all the music I purchased before I subscribed to Apple Music, before I spent hundreds of dollars on… honestly? Nothing. It’s like spending $20 for a movie ticket—the cost is in the experience, and for $99 a year, I was allowed access to this musical experience for a limited time, and if I wanted continued access to it, I would have to spend more and more of my money. I would have rather spent that money on buying my music—for sure, far fewer albums than before, but at least I would own them.

And so, that’s why I’ve spent $937.22 on music this year, and why I will continue to spend more than $99 a year on music, more than $8.25 or $9.99 a month on music. Besides, the artists making this music deserve to get paid, and they get paid more when I buy their music directly rather than if I streamed it.

Do I recommend you buy your music, too? I don’t care. If you want, I guess. If you’re happy renting your music from these big companies, then more power to you. For me, though, I’m just fine spending almost $1,000 a year on music, and I will continue doing so for as long as I have money to spend.

I forgot about Bandcamp Friday. Here are the (admittedly) few albums I purchased today:

• First things first, whenever there’s a new Doon Kanda album, I’m excited. Instant buy.
• Millions Now Living Will Never Die by Tortoise. Need I say more?
• Thanks to Last.fm, I found and bought Hyper Light Drifter by Disasterpeace. I played and loved the game last year, and the soundtrack was a big reason why. Glad to own it now.

Now to actually listen to all this music. Good times ahead.