I am not your average music listener. I’m a guitar player, and that skews my opinion on music quite a bit.
I like to think of my music listening history in terms of B.G. and A.G.
Before Guitar and After Guitar.
Before I learned to play the guitar, I just listened to whatever was on the radio. Whatever was popular is what I listened to, and I fell into lockstep with the rest of the world like all the other sheep.
After I learned to play the guitar I started seeking out more diverse music to challenge my own abilities. I was looking for music that was difficult play; music that contained elevated musicianship and technical excellence. Music that was not confined by the stringent requirements for radio-friendly circulation. This is when I discovered Dream Theater and progressive rock. Rush, Yes, Enchant and a host of other progressive bands soon followed, and I quickly fell away from mainstream music. I turned off my radio and turned on my CD player, and never really looked back.
Progressive rock was the music that grabbed my heart and mind at the same time. It challenged me as a listener and a musician. It is the most diverse, complex, rich and rewarding music for me to listen to.
But that doesn’t mean that a more mainstream tune can’t strike a chord deep within me and resonate. I still have a lot of favorite mainstream music in my library: Where The Streets Have No Name, by U2, for instance. But in order for a “pop” tune to grab me, it has to be exceptional; it has to have something special.
When you fall away from mainstream music like I did, it can be difficult to find new music that you like to listen to. Progressive rock, for instance, due to the complexity and the length of the songs (frequently 8-10+ minutes in length) doesn’t get a lot of radio play. So discovering new music can be challenging.
Enter Pandora.
Pandora is a unique kind of internet radio station. You select a song or artist, and Pandora starts playing music that has the same qualities as that song or artist. Each time a song plays you can give it a thumbs up or thumbs down (or stay neutral and not do anything). A thumbs down causes Pandora to stop playing that song immediately, and try not to play others like it. A thumbs up and Pandora will try to find more songs and artists with those same qualities.
Because progressive rock is so diverse it contains many different qualities, from metal to rock, jazz to punk, classical to blues. So giving thumbs up to a few progressive rock tunes can give Pandora a lot of leeway to find matches (or so it seems). I’ve had some really interesting suggestions come across my radio station; some good, some bad. Quite often Pandora will suggest more “mainstream” (I hesitate to use the term “pop”) music songs to me. Most of the time I just pass, but then this song came across my radio station, and I stopped dead in my tracks:
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The song is “Roses” by the band RPLW. I had never heard of them before. You probably haven’t either. But that doesn’t change the sheer jaw-dropping greatness of this tune.
This is simply the best pop/mainstream song I’ve heard in a decade. It is from their 2005 album, and it’s a shame that it didn’t get any pub/circulation. I can’t think of any song to land on the radio in the last decade that I’d rather here more than this song.
With a new season of American Idol underway, I had to post this. This is what pop music should aspire to be. If everything were this good I think I could turn my radio back on.