One of the great things about Spotify for me is rediscovering songs that I first heard on blogs back when people downloaded music. I had a nice iPod Classic and I would religiously download the Sunset in the Rearview monthly playlists. A lot has happened in the world in the time since, technologically, culturally and personally. It was a time when you could hear a couple of songs from an artist and then they’d change their name or just stop making music and there’d be no trace they existed after a while. Now music just stays on streaming services, ticking away, getting a couple of plays a year. For me, it was a mad transitional period of going to college, living in Galway for a while and starting work. Between the life changes and and the global shift to streaming, I lost track of a huge amount of artists whose music I had digital copies of. I think that’ll be a project for this week, finding my iPod and chasing down musical leads.

Part of the problem of losing track of music is that I’ll be able to remember riffs or vocal melodies and often forget lyrics so I can never find the songs again. The other problem is not really knowing what I was forgetting. The technology was all about how many hundreds of thousands of songs you could have, so the list is impossible to keep track of in my little brain.

I had rediscovered a song from that time recently and up to this point I was writing with that song in mind. I started writing and reading at the same time, doing my regular research. I was midway through what was going to be my next paragraph when I found some very problematic stuff about the artist. I don’t really feel comfortable featuring the song on my blog anymore. If more information comes out and the story changes then maybe I’ll think about posting about it but I’d rather not write about the song right now.