Get to Know your Fellow D.B.Oer | Music (DBO)

by cheapLEY , Monday, April 09, 2018, 18:42 (2419 days ago) @ stabbim

my best friend (who has almost no interest or definable taste in music otherwise) got me into Meat Loaf. Yeah, I know - but the Bat Out of Hell albums do still kind of work for me, for some reason.

Bat Out of Hell II is still awesome. I've lost track of whether I like it ironically or unironically at this point, but I do love it. I have a real soft spot for that album.

During college, and the next 2-3 years after that, I started getting into the stuff I mentioned above. Emo, pop-punk, post-hardcore type stuff. While my own capacity to discover music was almost non-existent, I did make friends with a couple of guys who got me into things like Taking Back Sunday, Say Anything, and MCR. One of them also got me into Ben Folds - he played guitar and I heard him do a few Ben Folds Five songs. He also loaned me a few compilation albums. Warped Tour compilations, and a Drive-Thru Records/Fueled by Ramen sampler where I first heard my favorite band, Paramore. Side note: Paramore has probably been my favorite band since around 2007 when I got their second album, but I didn't actually realize that until more recently, like around 2014. It just finally hit me one day that I had never heard a song of theirs that I didn't love. For the most part, I kind of stuck to that same type of music, other than a brief fling with country music around 2005 or 2006. 4 or 5 years ago, I had a sudden epiphany that maybe pop music wasn't all terrible, but that realization really started around 2007:

Taking Back Sunday is another one of those bands that I have a real connection with. They're still putting out great stuff. The original band broke up after their first album with a rotating cast of members for every album after that until the original members got back together in 2010. My girlfriend at the time, two other friends, and I drove from here in Missouri up to Chicago to see them on the short little tour they did before starting work on their first album together since 2002. They've been together every since, and their stuff keeps getting better. They never made Tell All Your Friends 2 like every seemed to want, but I'm glad they haven't. Their latest record still has a great sound that's reminiscent of TAYF, but it's matured in a way that I really love.

I was working in an office at the time, and they had satellite radio rotating between a bunch of stations that the staff had chosen. Most of it didn't really interest me - I probably should have been excited to finally know what was playing on popular radio, but I was pretty thoroughly into my "I don't listen to popular music" stubbornness by then. But I do remember hearing my first Taylor Swift song (it was "Should've Said No," if you're wondering). Something about it struck me as different from the other stuff on that country station, though I didn't really know why. For the next several years, I always paid attention to her as she very quickly exploded, but I wouldn't have admitted it to anyone at the time. I actually remember a special about her coming on a TV news show when I was at my parents' place for Thanksgiving, and I very discretely made sure the TV stayed on that channel without really telling anyone why. A bit later, I think after her second album was out, a good friend of mine who is a MUCH more severe music snob than I have ever been, told he was learning one of Taylor's songs to play to his girlfriend (now wife), and he just happened to mention in passing "she writes her own songs, you know." This, in my mind, essentially gave me permission to become a shameless Stan. ANYWAY, the point of all this is that I remained one, and when 1989 came out I finally was convinced to listen to something outside of my guitar/bass/drums comfort zone, and admit that something that includes electronics could actually be creatively valid.

That sort of echoes my Taylor Swift journey. I didn't really start paying attention to her until Red, but 1989 was undoubtedly the album that made me really love her, and thankfully I had finally grown up enough to not care about only liking stuff that wasn't popular.