Listen Closely

You don’t choose your childhood soundtrack any more than you choose your childhood weather — you just end up permanently damp in some particular way, and later in life you call that damp thing your taste, your aesthetic, whatever.

Mine started in a courtyard.

The Courtyard

I grew up in UC Village (called “Married Student Housing” back then) in Albany — a large WWII-era apartment complex tract. The eight-unit apartment buildings were made of stucco, asphalt, and the general architectural ambition of a tall rubber boot. There were courtyards between them.

Every morning, the neighborhood kids were released (kicked out) and not expected back until the streetlights came on – not an uncommon Gen X experience.

My friend and I would sit in that courtyard for hours, letting it echo Beatles and Beach Boys harmonies back at us off the stucco. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was getting a free, extremely lo-fi seminar on reverb and decay time.

That same year my parents handed me my first LP for Christmas: The Planets composed by Gustav Holst, as conducted by William Steinberg. I played it so many times. I didn’t understand orchestras yet. Also Sprach Zarathustra was on side B, but I didn’t care much for it. I just knew that Mars sounded like it was mad at somebody, and I wanted to know who. Jupiter put images in my head like a coronation ceremony taking place on a grand flotilla. Et cetera.

This is where the habit started — sitting with a whole album, start to finish, no skipping, no multitasking.

Not because it was noble. Because I was eight years old and didn’t yet know you were allowed to leave the room. Besides, there was no scrolling back then, and nothing better to do than listen to music.

The Fog Years

At age nine we moved up into Kensington, which traded the flat concrete openness of the Village for trees and fog. The courtyard noise was gone, and unfortunately so were my friends in the courtyards. In its place: trees, silence, mist, and a house with a giant redwood sequoia tree that felt like it was being slowly absorbed into a cloud.

Naturally, I turned to radio.

By ten I was working the far-left end of the FM dial on that old JVC receiver, hunting for stations at hours when my parents were gone or when I should have been asleep. KPFA drifted through occasionally — My home was 90.7, KALX Berkeley, a station apparently run on the principle that no two songs should ever be allowed to resemble each other.

In a single shift you could get dub from Jamaica, pulsing techno, unhinged da-da sound collage, krautrock, noise that sounded like a fax machine having a nervous breakdown, and post-punk so gloomy it needed its own umbrella. It was chaos with a program schedule. And somewhere in there, my ear quietly rewired itself to expect texture and contrast instead of just “the pretty part.”

Dubbing in the Mist

My dad had a hi-fi system, and a part of that system was a dual cassette deck which was like an altar to me.

I’d clamp on his enormous 1970s aviator headphones — the kind that make you look like you’re about to receive instructions from air traffic control — and sit there for hours with a finger hovering over Pause and Record.

I’d grab stuff straight off the radio and splice it in next to songs from my dad’s record collection, learning sequencing and pacing entirely by accident, the way you learn to ride a bike by falling off it repeatedly in a garage when nobody’s watching. By high school I had a stack of these homemade mixtapes that made sense to exactly one person on Earth.

Those tapes weren’t merely music to me, they were survival.

I Was Always A Weirdo

My first cassette purchase, at just 13 years old for a whopping $7.99, was Chick Corea and Return To Forever’s Romantic Warrior — a tape I bought with my own money and played until the tape wore thin, not because I understood it (which I absolutely did not), but because it was the only non-dubbed tape I owned and so I had no choice but to listen to it over and over until it gave up its secrets, or until I grew enough ears to receive them, which took years. Romantic Warrior is a remarkable record — the fusion of jazz virtuosity and synthesizer architecture and harmonic ambition is unlike almost anything else from that era, Herbie Hancock’s Sextant surpasses it fundamentally —because it asks a different question — but Romantic Warrior was, and still is a fine album.

What that early Corea tape gave me, though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, was a tolerance for complexity — a willingness to sit with music that didn’t immediately resolve into something familiar, to keep returning to a thing I didn’t yet understand because some part of me recognized that the not-understanding was the point, that the music was larger than my current capacity to receive it and that the gap between us was an invitation rather than a rejection.

Cold, Dark, and Scary

My second cassette purchase at 14 was The Land of Rape and Honey by Ministry. I was embracing industrial music especially Front Line Assembly, Tactical Neural Implant was my favorite album by them. It gave me post-apocalyptic visions of a future where humans were hunted by autonomous cyborgs. This was cold, hard electronic music and suited my angst-ridden teen years just fine. My body was in the world but my mind was anywhere else. It was an escape to another dimension – a scary one.

I’ve always peered into the darkness of the human soul, out of morbid curiosity I guess. Maybe to shock my system, the same way some people like wasabi on their sashimi. It’s REALLY terrifying what we are capable of in large groups as a society. All this as the Internet was gaining popularity, I had seen The Terminator as a kid and the idea of it sent me reeling. I had always suspected it was predictive.

Ironically, and not heeding the warning, here we are 40 years later systematically bringing that grim, dystopian fiction into existence, so it seems.

I digress.

Music Deep As Any Ocean

There are so many musical detours I took as a youngster. Even now I’m still discovering new music, constantly. I could go on forever. I’ll cut it short but some day I may return to forever.

I was just a kid in some fog, turning a dial that never went past 94.1, trying to figure out why certain sounds stuck to him and others slid right off.

But that’s sort of the whole idea: your ear doesn’t get built in a studio. It gets built by accident, out of whatever circumstances you happen to grow up in. But, it also depends on your personality, your curiosity and whether you like to seek out new things or prefer the comfort of something familiar.

I’m all over the map musically.

For me personally, music went so far beyond a mere escape, it built entire worlds inside my head and colonized them.

I listen widely, and carefully. My listening style favors texture over virtuosity, and raw emotion over perfection. That’s just me, it’s not right or wrong, good or bad, it’s just my taste – and that’s a beautiful thing. Everyone’s taste is different, like a flower, and there’s room in this world for all of it.

I encourage everybody to be curious and listen widely, listen consciously and with intention. What images does the music conjure in your head? Think about the artists, what were they thinking when they made the album you’re listening to?

Look up different musical traditions on Wikipedia, turn your radio on and tune in to the left side of the dial, By that I mean freeform, listener-supported FM radio. Support live music, and get out of your comfort zone, go to a show you wouldn’t normally choose.

You may surprise yourself.