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Artists

Its unfortunate that today's radio stations play such a limited number of genres. If you were to remove top-40, country, classical, rap, and hip-hop from the airwaves, there wouldn't be much music left to listen to except for an occasional score on NPR). This is an odd situation given that most musicians don't fit into one of these five genres.

Because of that, I didn't discover my favorite form of music until after college. I had always called it "smokey bar" music--you'd hear a bass line, an organ, and the drums. The singer and a lead guitar would take turns carrying the melody, sometimes seeming to talking to each other. The words didn't matter because the sound canvas was so profound. I always imagined myself sitting in a bar, kicked back with my sunglasses on 1, and nodding my head with the beat. That style of music is called the blues and its one of the most expressive forms of music I've ever heard.

Given my interest in the blues, I don't listen to the radio much. Instead, I find music online with sites like Last.FM and Pandora and I buy online at (mostly at eMusic and iTunes). Most of these sites have similarity indexes so its easy to find other artists I like.

  1. I don't know why I'd be wearing sunglasses in a darkened bar room, but that's how I imagined it ↩