I successfully found and downloaded all the music from my Spotify like playlist. It took fucking forever. Curating and expanding the list, adding in forgotten bands and tracks. It’s my music now. Mine! I take it with me now. No corporate gatekeeping.

My wife flew to her hometown in the Chicago suburbs today leaving me alone in the house with the cats. I’ll join her in a few days. I did some chores, then holed myself up in the guest bedroom where my PC is and decided to continue my personal music renaissance. I had written down a bunch of bands to add to the master liked playlist of downloaded songs. This was stuff from mostly from the 1994-2000 era. The teenage high school stuff. The CDs I bought with scrounged money from gifts and those first (sometimes shitty) jobs. Dollar store cashier. Hockey linesman and referee. Utility man in the chemical recovery plant. The NIN era. Smashing Pumpkins. Alanis Morrissette, Garbage, Oasis, STP and Soundgarden. AC/DC and Metallica. White Zombie and Green Day. Weezer, Nirvana, Pearl Jam. The Soundtracks – The Crow, Dumb and Dumber (surprisingly awesome), Natural Born Killers, The Saint, Last Action Hero. Etc etc.

Tonight I moved on to my Pandora liked songs. For the last ten years or so, I’ve been mainly using Spotify, so opening my old Pandora main station was like a nostalgia dagger to the heart. I loved who I was when I was listening to this music. This was mainly the 2003-2010 era. Fuck the music was so good.

Belle and Sebastain, Tegan and Sara, The Stokes, The Hive, The Kooks. Talib Kweli and good Kanye. The New Pornographers, Broken Social Scene and Alexisonfire. Cadence Weapon, Immortal Technique and Buck 65. Camera Obscura and The Arcade Fire. The Weakerthans, Constantines, Sharon Jones, Magnolia Electric Co. Phoenix, Passion Pit, MGMT, The Unicorns.

2005 might be my favourite year of music ever. There are so many adorable catchy indie one-offs around this time. This is when I started listening to college radio religiously at Western. I have so much gratitude to those young DJs that exposed me to so much new music. It helped me bop and jam through such a chaotic time. I love that I am reintroducing these songs back into my life. It feels like reaching into the past and pulling my younger self into now. Help infuse this old hardened husk with joy, kid.