Discoveries in 2014

Listening to the track evokes a sensation like I have died and and I am watching my childhood in the early 1980s. It’s like my science-fiction dreams of youth are being played back to me as an older adult. If you shared a similar childhood, you may find this to be an equally powerful emotional experience.






One of my favorite new bands is Quilt, ever since I discovered them in late 2011 from the last post of the extinct music blog Altered Zones.  This is a video of them performing live for Seattle public radio here. If you know my taste in music, you’ll understand how their sound fits right in with my love for 1960s psychedelic music.









Although this song is 2 years old, I just discovered it and it’s one of my favorite earworms. The video is just OK. I discovered it as I completed my dissertation in July, so I associate it with finishing a hard 5 year’s worth of work with a night swim



Both the song and the title are goofy, but for different reasons.  This song helps me with my whimsy. It’s getting more difficult to be whimsical.




The last half of this song reveals the origins of the Beatles’ "Revolution 9," a song that blew me away when I first heard it when I was in 9th grade. I think this take is a good balance between Revolution 1 and Revolution 9, so I call it Revolution 4.5. If you haven't heard Revolution 1 or 9 for a while, this should be a refreshing revisit.



This song is for Autumn, who indulged me by enjoy a genre called “chiptunes” this spring. It reminds me of the early Nintendo days, even though I was bad at almost all of the games.



This song is also for Autumn, who claims that this song is often in her head. Hearing it is emotionally overpowering for me as it simultaneously makes me miss my years in Japan and conjures up my love for my growing little girl.



Discovering this song is a good wrap-up to my years as a PhD student, when I listened to a love of “chillwave” music, which was a very trendy genre for hipsters 2009-2010. I liked it even when it got old. Earlier this year, I discovered that this song is considered to the prototype of “chillwave,” thereby uniting my earlier love for 1960s music with chillwave.



I can’t leave funk out of this mix. I really like this as it shows Lionel Richie before he mellowed with easy listening pop music in the 1980s. This is also a great example of my ideas of 1970s dance music. You could say something like this was parodied in Freaks & Geeks:

Let me end with a hauntingly spiritual version of the Beatles’ “Because” Please use it for your meditation on what every you feel is appropriate with Beatle ghosts. Some may find it spooky, but I’m not unnerved. Awe is better describes the feeling for me.