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Over the past 30 years, my tastes in music have varied greatly. My first love was the new wave/new romantics sound of the 80’s but that’s for another blog post. Let’s fast forward to the mid 90’s, where my main interest was blues and R&B music. I had recently become obsessed with Stevie Ray Vaughan’s music, and was enjoying discovering his many influences including Buddy Guy, Willie Dixon and all the other artists on the Chess record label. I also discovered a number of modern blues artist that I enjoyed. As the 90’s wrapped up, I was hungry for more variety in my music library, and stations like WXPN and streaming internet radio allowed me to expand my horizons. Let’s examine some of the music released in the past ten years that has molded my tastes into what they are today.

The first few years of the new millennium I found myself channelling my appreciation for roots-based blues music into other roots-based sounds. For the first time in my life I was starting to appreciate country or country-inspired music. Let’s be clear, this was not country music that you would hear on pop country stations. New releases from Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris introduced me to a sound that was tough, gritty and beautiful – uncompromising.

After making these discoveries, to quote another band that I would soon discover, Son Volt, I was searching for a truer sound. This music felt honest, and while the lyrics at times made me feel like I was traveling back to the 30’s or 40’s, the sounds was timeless. With the help of the world wide web, and services like Napster, it wasn’t long before I discovered and purchased music by Whiskeytown and Ryan Adams, Drive-by Truckers, Son Volt, Wilco, Old 97’s and Neko Case.

Many of these bands were grouped into the sub-genre know as alt-country, since it borrowed elements from country music and alternative/rock/punk music and mixed them together into a hybrid sound. This had been done before by artists like Neil Young, The Byrds and Gram Parsons. This mixture of music inspired me to explore beyond just alt-country, and by 2002, I was starting to get into what could be called indie rock. After discovering KEXP out of The University of Washington, I was introduced to a wide variety of modern indie rock including Death Cab for Cutie, The Long Winters and The Flaming Lips.

It was this music that would shape my music tastes for the rest of the decade. I would go onto discover favorites such as Centro-matic/South San Gabriel, Pinetop Seven, Matt Pond PA, Josh Rouse, The New Pornographers, Pete Yorn, My Morning Jacket, His Name is Alive, Feist, Sun Kil Moon and many others in the following years.

As the decade came to a close, my hunger for discovering new music has continued. Stations like WOXY have fed my need for new music. More recently, music from bands such as Midlake, TV on the Radio, Bat for Lashes and Passion Pit have made been included on my list of favorite music of the past 10 years.

So there you have it. This is just a small selection of artists and songs that have shaped my musical tastes the past ten years. I could rewrite this post tomorrow and come up with a completely different batch of music, but this gives you an idea of my tastes entering the decade, and where they reside currently. I’d love to hear what you think, or how your tastes have evolved over the decade.

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