Tomorrow is my birthday. I'm turning 48, which feels both completely impossible and entirely inevitable at the same time. I won't dwell on the number — what I will do is what any self-respecting record collector does when faced with a milestone: think about music.
Because here's the thing about growing up as someone who cares deeply about what they listen to — the soundtrack changes with you. The bands that meant everything at fifteen feel different at thirty. And some of those bands change over time too.
So here it is. A decade-by-decade look at the bands that were there.
The '80s — The Foundation Years
I was a kid in the '80s, which means I didn't choose the music so much as absorb it. It came through the car radio, through neighbours, through whatever was on TV. But even then, certain things stuck. Certain sounds grabbed something in me that I couldn't explain yet but recognized as important.
The bands that were there: Poison, Bon Jovi, Honeymoon Suite, Billy Idol, Corey Hart and R.E.M.
The Early-to-Mid '90s — The Years That Actually Formed Me
This is the decade that did the real work. I was a teenager in the '90s, and if you were paying attention during that era — really paying attention — you know what it felt like. It was a genuinely electric time to be young and into music. Stuff was happening. Everything felt urgent and loud and like it actually mattered.
These are the bands I wore on t-shirts and argued about with friends and played until the tapes wore out:
The Doors, Led Zepp, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, RHCP, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Wilco, The Smashing Pumpkins, Beastie Boys, Radiohead, Soundgarden, U2, Stone Temple Pilots, The Who, Neil Young I dropped All the 80's bands back then except R.E.M.
The Late '90s into the 2000s — Finding My Own Taste
By the time I hit my twenties, I had enough of my own opinions to start going deeper. Less radio, more live music. Less what everyone else was listening to, more following threads — discovering that a band you loved led you to five others you'd never heard of. This is when collecting started to feel like a real pursuit rather than just buying music.
The bands that defined this stretch: The Age of Electric, Chixdiggit, The Tea Party, Tool, Incubus, Blind Melon, Foo Fighters, Sloan, Rage Against the Machine, Alice in Chains, The White Stripes, Korn, Weezer, Queens of the Stone Age, Nine Inch Nails. I also started getting into Elvis and Frank Sinatra around this time.
The 2010s — Settling In
Something interesting happens to your relationship with music in your thirties. You stop needing it to validate you and start just... enjoying it. You're less concerned with what's cool and more concerned with what's good. My tastes got wider in this decade, not narrower. I found myself going back as much as forward — revisiting things I'd missed, discovering classic records alongside new ones.
What was on heavy rotation: All from the previous two lists and I added The National, Band of Horses, City and Colour, Ryan Adams, Shooting Guns, The Black Keys, The Dead Weather, Arcade Fire, Elliott Brood.
The 2020s — Right Now
And here we are. I'm not going to pretend that being in your mid-to-late forties means you stop caring about new music — because I absolutely don't. There are artists releasing records right now that genuinely excite me, and there's something great about being at a stage of life where you have enough context to appreciate what's actually interesting versus what's just new. I also have started trying new genres.
What's been playing lately: Billy Strings, Eminem, Donald Byrd, Joe McPhee, Pharoah Sanders, Deftones, Angine de Poitrine, Mumford and Sons, David Bowie, Muse, Sunnsetter, The War on Drugs.
Forty-eight years. A lot of records. A lot of memories tied to specific songs, specific albums, specific moments where the right music showed up at exactly the right time.
That's the thing about vinyl, really — it's not just music. It's a physical object you can hold, and the act of putting a record on takes you somewhere. Every decade of my life has a sound, and I wouldn't trade a single one of them.
Here's to another year of finding new ones.