Why Discovering New Music Matters
September 27, 2017
written by Drew Snavely
In this current digital age, we essentially have unlimited access to any music we want, whenever we want. This is great news for us, because as you probably do, I love music. I love finding new music. When I find new music that I love, I love it a little too much. About every two weeks I have two or three favorite songs I can’t get enough of and listen to non-stop… and then I’ve had enough of them. I still like the songs, I’m just tired of hearing them, so those songs end up collecting dust in my Spotify library. I tell myself when I find new songs I won’t listen to them as much so I won’t get tired of them, but this hardly ever works. This is why it has been so important to me to constantly seek out new music that I enjoy.
Listening to new music not only keeps the music you’re currently loving from going stale, but it also challenges your brain to process new sounds or lyrics that it isn’t normally accustomed to. Processing this new music has the potential to expand the genres of music that you are interested in. Throughout middle school and high school, the majority of the music I listened to was made by rock and hip-hop artists. Fast forward a handful of years later and a large majority of the music I listen to now comes from singer-songwriters like James Vincent McMorrow. I remember when my brother first showed me the song “Cavalier” by McMorrow off his second album “Post Tropical”. It was so different and weird; I had never tried to seriously listen to an artist quite like McMorrow before and there was this uncomfortable tension while listening to his music so I turned it off. A couple weeks later my brother told me that McMorrow’s album had been the best album of year in his opinion and it sparked my interested enough for me to give “Post Tropical” another try. As “Cavalier” came on it was weird, but not in the same way as before. I was expecting the same tension but it had seemingly vanished. I had heard the song before and the familiarity suppressed the tension enough to give me the freedom to fall in love with the song, album and artist all at once.
I’m so thankful to have a library full of awesome music from artists like Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens and Noah Gundersen since becoming a fan of McMorrow’s work. Listening to new music can be difficult at times, but you can often discover fantastic music if you have the patience to break through the initial tension of a different and new sounding song or artist. At Student Activities we love bringing in big artists that you love like NEEDTOBREATHE, Johnnyswim and Lecrae, but we also have a lot of joy bringing in artists you might not know. Young Oceans is one of those bands that some may be unfamiliar with, and we are so pumped to bring them in! They are playing a concert for us this Friday, September 29th in the LaHaye Event Space.