Time for a New Playlist

As a young person, I was convinced that as people aged, they became “stuck” somehow in the music of their teen years—if you were in high school in the 1950s or 1960s, the music of that era would be what you would think of as “real music” for your entire life, and you would never really like anything new. As an adult, I kept waiting for it to happen to me—kept waiting for the day when I wouldn’t find new music to listen to and enjoy, and would only listen to the same twenty- or thirty-year old tunes. It never seemed to happen, though. As I have aged, I have found new music to enjoy. I’m not an audiophile, really, and music is not something I’ve ever sought out with any determination. I just…listened, and the music came to me.

As a child of the eighties, I followed Bruce Springsteen, REM and U2 out of and then back into fashion. I have told my daughters that I want “Hungry Heart” played at my funeral, which always seems to alarm them; I will haunt them if they fail me in this. But I never felt like I had gotten stuck in the 80s. I tended to pick up the local music wherever I happened to live. In South Carolina in the nineties, Hootie and the Blowfish spawned mini-movement, and I picked up Freedy Johnston and Blind Melon right along with the music producers they drew to the scene. Driving long distances for my job, I developed a country music habit, favoring Alan Jackson and Mary Chapin Carpenter.

I moved to western Kentucky, and segued smoothly into bluegrass and old-time music. Much of my early twenty-first century music collection is obscure Bluegrass artists like King Willkie and Uncle Earl, together with classics like Doc Watson and the Del McCoury Band. I heard Doc Watson, Ricky Scaggs and Earl Scruggs play together live at the River of Music Party (ROMPfest) in Owensboro, Kentucky one year. When I moved to north Alabama, I went to hear live bluegrass at the Old Time Fiddlers Convention every year in the fall, and it was just a short drive to Nashville for concerts at the Ryman Auditorium.

Then my younger daughter became a teenager, and triggered our inadvertent excursion into Christian pop music. I had never really cared much for Christian pop music, and if you’d told me that it would grow on me, I would have given you the side-eye.

You’d have been right, though.

Here’s how that happened:

My younger daughter became a teenager, and mornings became War. Getting out of bed was her least favorite time of day. In an effort to get her up and going, I got her an old-fashioned alarm clock-radio, set it up on the far side of her bedroom, tuned it to a local pop-music station, and cranked up the volume. Every morning, while I sat at the kitchen table drinking my coffee, she buried her head in pillows and ignored the din for a good twenty minutes.

It had been a while since I had listened to pop music. I guess I really had gotten old; I found it horrifying. It seemed as though every single song was crude, vulgar, and just plain ugly. Cora, under her pillows, was resolutely ignoring it, but I was hearing every distasteful word, and frankly, it was spoiling my coffee.

When you spoil mama’s coffee, you get yourself banned from the house.

In an effort to find something less gross, I tuned her radio alarm to the local Christian pop station. Musically, it was unremarkable, but at least the lyrics were not trying to out-compete one another on the disgust-o-meter. And there was the odd song that was not too bad. In fact, there were a few artists Cora and I actually kind of liked. She picked up some music from Casting Crowns, and Lauren Daigle; we both came to really enjoy a group called For King and Country.  

There was other music during that same period. My older daughter was obsessed for a while with Hamilton, so we listened to that, branching out into other Broadway music old and new, and even going to local productions of In the Heights and 1776. My younger daughter went through a movie-musical phase, becoming particularly obsessed with The Greatest Showman. She and I spend a lot of time in the car together, so I can now sing every single song on that soundtrack. I briefly had satellite radio, and picked up a few new artists there—Imagine Dragons, One Republic, Bastille.

So, even though I had bounced hard off of current pop music, I didn’t feel like I had gotten stuck, like the adults of my childhood, in the music and clothing and hairstyles of my teen years. I was always finding something new to enjoy, across a range of genres, even though (much to my daughters’ disdain) I never bothered to sign up for Spotify or Pandora; instead, I defaulted without putting too much thought into it to my Amazon Prime music app.

At the end of 2019, my Prime music app created a playlist for me: my most-listened-to songs of 2019. It has a lot of For King and Country and Imagine Dragons; a chunk of instrumental music, mostly movie scores, that I listen to when I’m writing; a smattering of One Republic, Sara Bareilles, and Rachel Platten; Bastille, the Avett Brothers, and Fun.

Then, 2020 sucker-punched us all.

And when we came to the end of 2020, exhausted, wounded, cynical and low on hope, my Prime music app dutifully followed its algorithm, and made me a new playlist: my most-listened-to songs of the pandemic year.

It’s considerably shorter than the 2019 list. It has a lot of For King and Country, some Imagine Dragons, and a chunk of instrumental music, mostly movie scores, that I listen to when I’m writing.

There is not one single song on my 2020 playlist that wasn’t on my 2019 playlist. Not. One.

It seems, my friends, that I have at last gotten stuck, musically speaking.

2020 did in twelve months what the three decades preceding it had collectively failed to do: it brought my music-appreciation growth and development to a grinding, screeching halt.

And suddenly, I felt very old.

So, while everyone else is resolving to exercise more or read their Bible daily or lose ten pounds or whatever it is that they think is going to make 2021 a better year, I have decided not to ask too much of myself. I am promising myself just one thing, here at the beginning of 2021: I am going to find some new songs.

Like a river that don’t know where it’s goin’, I’ll find one new song, then I’ll just keep going.

Because in 2021, my heart is hungry for a brand new playlist.