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Sea Wolf's Alex Brown Church Considers the New and Old Ways of Listening to Music
Sep 07, 2012 Sea Wolf
So I admit it. I subscribe to a music streaming service.
I won’t say which one it is because I’d rather not advertise, but it is like Spotify and MOG. Actually it’s one of those two. Anyway, I am a longtime music buyer, and believer in the power of owning the physical copy of an album. Along with the higher fidelity, the feel and look of the artwork and how it unfolds when you discover it for the first time, there is something about laying down actual cash money for a physical product that gives it extra importance and worth. But I never really realized this until I became a music streaming subscriber.
It wasn’t something I was planning on doing. Late last year when I was researching mixers for the upcoming Sea Wolf album (it’s called Old World Romance, out Sept. 11), I needed to be able to listen to a lot of albums I didn’t own. Joey, Sea Wolf’s drummer, turned me on to a music subscription service. It was a perfect solution. I could listen to high quality streams of virtually any album, which meant I could hear a lot of different mixes.
It was great. In fact, it was so great that I even scrapped my original plan of canceling the subscription after a few months. Now I’m still a subscriber, and I’m not sure I’ll be canceling any time soon.
I usually don’t listen to much music while working on an album because I don’t like having other people’s songs stuck in my head while I’m trying to write my own. So I haven’t listened to a lot of music for the past year and a half. Not even through my streaming service. Then last week I took a much needed break from all of the pre-album release hubbub and headed up the coast to Big Sur.
With it’s towering and perpetually foggy cliffs and serene dark blue-green water far below, Big Sur is one source of inspiration for the new Sea Wolf album, and is one of my favorite places in the world. Within hours I felt the chatter in my head melting away and the growing excitement I get whenever I travel to a place I really love. Suddenly I wanted to listen to music again.
I didn’t have many CD’s in the car, and hadn’t loaded my phone up with any new music, so I turned to my music streaming service’s app. At first it seemed great. All the music I could ever possibly want was there at my fingertips. I loaded a bunch of new music into the player and hit play. But after a while, I stopped paying attention. I was finding it hard to focus on any of the music, and wound up going back to one of the few albums I already owned and had loaded onto my phone.
It was High Violet by The National, which was the last new album I had really been blown away by before I went on a listening hiatus to make my own record. I found myself remembering where I was when I’d first fallen in love with that album.
It was late Summer, 2010 and I’d been prepping for my first solo acoustic Sea Wolf tour. For some reason It was the only CD in my car, and so I just had it on whenever I drove somewhere. I remember admiring the artwork, the photography, investigating the liner notes. All of that being part of the bigger picture. I wasn’t sure about the album at first, but after about a week, something clicked and I found that I actually wanted it on all the time, everywhere.
As I drove along that moody, majestic landscape, it occurred to me what was actually missing about listening to new music on a subscription service. When you have everything at your fingertips for free, or close to it, you don’t appreciate it as much. Music loses its value.
When you buy an album, especially a physical copy of an album, it automatically has a sense of value to it. You give it more importance than something you would get for free. Most often you’ve purchased it along with another album or two, and you go home with a sense of excitement in exploring your new music. If you don’t have a subscription service, you don’t have hundreds of new albums to choose from to listen to. You have two. And so you are going to play those two over and over for at least a week or two until you either fall in love with them or get sick of them. You are going to do so while holding the physical artwork in your hand, which will give added context to your new music and will influence your interpretation of it. In other words, you are going to listen to those albums the way most of their creators hoped you would, and you are going to give those albums their due.
I am back to my home base now in northeast Los Angeles, and as I sit here writing, occasionally admiring the grandeur of the tall San Gabriel mountains outside of my kitchen window, I am listening to my music subscription service again because some new albums came out today that I wanted to hear immediately. And now I realize there is no saving that old way of experiencing music.
Only those of us who grew up having to actually buy music, and those of you who didn’t but who have fallen in love with say, vinyl, will know the value of the old way. I can’t even actually say if the new way or the old way is better. I’m sure there are plenty of people who prefer the new way, but I can say that I personally like the old way better. And so, even though I will probably keep my subscription, I’m going to the record store today, with a fistful of cash, to buy myself some new music.
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October 19th 2012
8:25am
Thank you for all the enthusiasm to provide such useful data here. I hope you continue to write on the blog. Thank you for sharing this information.
January 23rd 2013
6:23pm
Alex- it’s so wonderful to stumble upon your music, love it, and then find out its you. This piece is a nice reminder of how special it was to grow up when we did. Hope to make it to one of your shows one day soon. Much love. -L