When I was in college at Brandeis University, a friend of a friend¹ was in a band. A cool band. He played cello in Betwixt, which was, at the time, a critically-acclaimed Boston-based noise/art-rock band. They played a few shows on campus, and I’m pretty sure I saw them play in Boston at least once, too. It was always a blast to see them perform. Their onstage vibe was cool and sexy. The singer was always dancing and working the crowd, while the lead guitarist stood in the back doing everything he could to avoid playing a normal guitar line. His guitar, amp, and effects pedals were coerced into making the most unusual sounds, all rhythmically slotted into into cheerful, poppy tunes. All together, they blew my mind.

I found their music on Apple Music today and listened to their two albums, Moustache and The Salty Tang. It was a fun nostalgia trip.

Watch this video: “Hurt” by Johnny Cash. I dare you.

Everything about Cash’s performance is powerful. Honestly, though, the music video’s imagery is perfectly attuned to the music and to the singer. Director Mark Romanek and his small team who made the video were working at the top of the game.

(I didn’t just learn about this song or video. On Friday, I watched a short documentary about music producer Rick Rubin that reminded me of it.)

One of my favorite artists from the last few years, Frank Turner, has a new album out: FTHC.¹ It—at least parts of it—represents a swing back from his acoustic guitar-led singer-songwriter fare to his roots as a hardcore artist. Yes, that means it’s peppered with screaming and righteous anger. That usually isn’t my cup of tea, but I’m down with it. Frank Turner is cool and makes good records; you should listen to them.

What I love about Frank Turner is that he comes across as incredibly, even uncomfortably, open and honest. His songs mix together toughness with sensitivity, and cynicism with optimism, in a way that reveals both his maturity as a person and his cleverness when it comes to song structure. His lyrics range from poetic and clever to raw and emotional. His music ranges from quiet and beautiful to thunderous and anthemic—often in the same song. Overall, his albums give you the impression that he held nothing back in creating them. I very much respect and admire that.²

Unlike any other musician I can think of, Turner even did a very generous two-part interview with a tech podcast, Dialog, a few years ago. He talked about his songwriting process and what it was like to be a working musician who is a little older and wiser than the clichéd young rock star you might imagine.

🎵 I love the album All Mirrors by Angel Olsen. Everything about it is stunning.

🎵 A new album from an old favorite of mine dropped today: Lucifer on the Sofa by Spoon. A straight-ahead rock album is a great excuse to turn up my speakers today.

🎵 I’m enjoying “The Weeknd Essentials” playlist while I work this morning. I have learned to appreciate his music over the past two years. I was familiar with his biggest hits, but I wasn’t sold on his sound until Due Lipa’s “Future Nostalgia” came out and reminded me how cool and sexy modern 80s-inspired R&B can be.

🎵 I have listened to Adele’s new album, 30, about five times today. I’m into it!

🎵 I can’t wait to listen to Adele’s upcoming album, 30, which is coming out on the 19th. I have been looking forward to it for weeks.

One thing I didn’t expect when listening to Taylor Swift’s honest-to-goodness money-grab re-recording of her album Red is how good it is, and how many songs she added to it. Hell, Red (Taylor’s Version), even sounds better. The engineering and production are amazing, and I very much enjoy listening to it on my best speakers and headphones.

Now I am very much looking forward to Swift’s re-recordings of 1989 and Speak Now, which are my daughter’s favorite records. 1989 in particular already sounds fantastic, from an audiophile perspective; that’s going to be a tough act to follow.

This is my music find of the week.

I asked my Amazon Echo speaker to play “cool music” while I was making dinner and had no idea what I wanted to listen to. (I was hungry and tired, and couldn’t even name an artist of a genre at that point.) Alexa starting playing a “Cool Jazz” radio station on Apple Music, and it was actually perfect background music for making and eating dinner. Now I have an alternative to “lo-fi hip hop” which the rest of my family hates. (OK, to be fair, my kids hate the jazz music too.)

Do I like Foo Fighters now? Today I’m loving when their tracks come up on my randomized Apple Music post-album ∞ (“infinity”) playlist.

I have had a grudge against that band since I saw them in concert almost 20 years ago and hated their set. Maybe Dave Grohl was having a bad day that day. I thought he hated the crowd, of which a small majority, including me, were there to see the co-headliner, Weezer, who performed before him.

🎵 I listened to Lana Del Ray’s new album, Blue Banisters today, plus a new single by Beach Bunny, and enjoyed them very much. Adele’s new album is coming out soon, and I am really looking forward to it, too.

I have two collections that I love but cannot justify: high-end headphones (each is sub-$500, but still really expensive and good) and mechanical keyboards (each is $240 or less). It took ten years to build up these collections, so the embarrassing amount of money I have spent is spread out over a long, long period. I was wondering today if people who spend a lot more than I do on vacations do so because they forego (and don’t care about) material objects like pricy headphones and keyboards.

Getting into these “hobbies” (if buying stuff can be called a hobby) was entirely accidental. I’m part of a product review program where I can occasionally select products I like for no money up front, and then only pay taxes on their value months later. I got my first taste of better headphones and better keyboards through that program, essentially through the luck of the draw. (I’m not in charge of which products become available for me to review.) If not for that, I probably would have no other headphones other than my AirPods, and would probably have a $100 Microsoft or Logitech keyboard that I would have to replace (because of wear) every year or two.

I think I am finally nearing “endgame” in both of these categories. I have fantastic headphones of nearly every type (dynamic and planar magnetic, open-back and closed-back, Bluetooth and wired), and they cover every situation, that I need. Similarly, I have mechanical keyboards for all of my computers, have tried a bunch of different key switches (clicky, tactile, and linear), and have even bought a “weird” ortholinear board that I never thought I would ever want until a couple months ago. Any new keyboard purchases are going to be about fixing something that is broken (my wonderful and unacceptably buggy Durgod tenkeyless) or trying out a different type of keyswitch on my new, hot-swappable ortholinear board. At least I hope that will be the case. Collecting more and more of these objects sometimes feels like an obsession, and is not something I want to keep doing forever.

Sometimes when I’m working, I want music playing, but I don’t really know what I want to listen to, and I don’t have the patience to think about it. In these situations, I have tried listening to classical music, jazz, and lo-fi (hip-hop/trip-hop, etc.). Over the past week, I gave Endel an honest try, too.

While I enjoy classical music in a live setting, I don’t like listening to it in my headphones. Its wide dynamic range makes it so that I can’t hear some sections of it, and other sections are too loud. That doesn’t work for me; I want something that is not too loud, but is completely audible, all the time.

Jazz (especially classic jazz) was what I listened to almost exclusively during my senior year of college. It got me through reading and writing hundreds and hundreds of pages of text. However, I find my engagement with jazz to be all over the map. I love some of it and I hate some of it, and the kind of jazz you can just have on, not listening to—smooth jazz, I suppose—is just bad. All in all, I find jazz too distracting to listen to while I work, unless I listen to a single album that I already know and love.

Lo-fi hip hop is my favorite background music at this point. I appreciate its nearly constant beat, somewhat consistent tempos, and there appears to be a never-ending supply of it. My wife hates when I play it in the house when I am doing chores or writing, though, which means I can only really listen to it via headphones when I’m around her. It works great on my headphones while I read on my iPad, or through my loudspeakers when I work.

Over the past two weeks, I tried to get into Endel, which offers an AI-based soundscape that constantly changes and continually evolves as you listen to it. I like the idea a lot more than the reality of it, though I think it has a lot to do with my tinnitus. Endel is extremely treble-heavy and bass-light (really, there is no bass at all), and only one of its scenarios, Focus, has a beat. I would not describe the sounds as shrill, but they aggravate my tinnitus instead of helping me ignore it. Last week, I listened to Endel exclusively through headphones (my B&O H9s and my AirPods) while I did chores like the dishes and laundry. This morning, now that I am back at work, I tried listening to the Focus soundscape for a few hours through my loudspeakers. It drove my wife and both my kids absolutely bananas. Each of them yelled at me to stop playing it, even though it was not playing loudly, and they were on a different level of the house. After that experience, I think I will not be buying an Endel lifetime subscription.

Tomorrow I plan to listen to Lofi Girl for much of my workday. That is the best bet for me, when I can’t make up my mind about music and need to focus on my work more than what I am listening to.

I have been an Apple Music subscriber from the service’s very first day. I was an iTunes Match subscriber before that. I have been pulling an enormous electronic library of albums and songs forward with me since I was a teenager. We’re talking about thousands of albums, dozens of playlists, and a lot of complications that have stuck around in my library since the CD days.

Apple Music gobbled up all that music info and turned it into a frustrating mess for me. I have duplicate albums, duplicate tracks in my albums, unplayable tracks in some albums, and most of my library does not play in Apple Music’s new lossless format. A lot of music playing for me takes place outside my library, but that is in large part because my Apple Music library is an awful mess.

Today, I just couldn’t take the jankiness anymore, so I took the nuclear option: I deleted everything from from my Apple Music account. All my music is gone. I also turned off the “add songs from playlists added to library” option, which was inconsistently applied amongst my devices, and peppered my library with useless, one-track albums. I added some of the artists and albums I actually listen to now (as opposed to many years ago when I bought a used CD somewhere), and will rebuild my collection from there.

Despite my nuking of my Apple Music Library, None of the music I bought in the past is really gone. All the CDs I actually wanted to keep are ripped to a well-organized, if rarely touched, folder on my NAS. I will probably continue to ignore this, to be honest, and focus mainly on what’s new.

I keep eyeing the AirPods Max listing on Amazon. The price is dropping below $500 now. They don’t seem perfect and I only tried them for a second but the noise cancellation puts the NC in my Beoplay H9 to shame.

🎧 I turned on the crazy hi-res audio settings on my Mac tonight. I want to justify why I have an expensive DAC. 😀

I have been listening to Apple Music’s “Made for Spatial Audio” tracks all morning with my external DAC and my closed-back planar magnetic headphones. So far, I have decided that I prefer the lossless stereo mixes to the Dolby Atmos mixes. I guess I prefer a narrower soundstage.

I am appreciating the lossless tracks on Apple Music. I probably don’t have the ears to actually hear the difference anymore. But my equipment is good enough to make use of the extra bits, I am listening more closely than usual, and I am enjoying it.

Oh, cool: Apple Music’s lossless audio quality tier is now live. Check out iOS Settings > Music to turn it on.

‘60s pop like The Four Seasons sounds great from the tiny, terrible, mono Amazon Echo speaker in my kitchen. The music must have been mixed with transistor radios in mind.

🎵 I love the new Bleachers single “Stop Making this Hurt.”

The latest episode of Accidental Tech Podcast has a great discussion about lossless music, which is coming to Apple Music next month.

A software update at work pushed out the virtual backgrounds feature for WebEx. Since my home office—at least the part of it that is behind me and not under my control— is a mess, I enabled it.

Sadly, it looks pretty awful. The background mostly leaves a halo around me un-obscured; sometimes it clips portions of my face or shoulder off. I have a very high-end laptop and a “very good” Logitech webcam (all webcams are terrible, I think), so I have concluded that WebEx’s technology is way behind Zoom’s, which does the virtual backgrounds flawlessly. I think I will leave virtual backgrounds on, for privacy reasons, and hope no one minds the weird visual side effects.

I did not have to wait long for the Apple Music announcement to drop.