a partial list of music other writers have recommended to me

Troy James Weaver
troy DMd me through the back patio account at some point when i wasn't on twitter to ask for my phone number so he could ask me for music recommendations, and to just talk. we've only texted a few times - i'm really bad at texting (have ignored all texts from my family group chat for ~2 months). i recommended fiction by pope to him and he recommended deserve by weed to me. i like that we recommended each other single-word albums by single-word bands. the weed album is very good. i like the emphasis on good melodies and guitar noise. this album, like fiction by pope, feels like a very good post-shoegaze, riff-based album. troy and i also share am affinity for shoegaze and sparklehorse.

Benjamin DeVos

i interviewed ben in 2018 about his books and asked whether lord of the game was named after the death grips song, and he said that it was, and also that the bar is low was named after a song by pissed jeans. i listened to and enjoyed why love now by pissed jeans, but in particular a few songs, including "the bar is low", the video for which i would often send coworkers on my 'team' while shittalking other 'teams'.

Mike Andrelczyk

has recommended both extensive beat poet reading lists and phish playlists to me but i have, embarrassingly, never done anything with this information. i love you, mike.

 

Bud Smith

at some point in 2017 or early 2018 Bud Smith and I DMd on twitter briefly because, i think, he had tweeted about some music production documentaries/interviews, and i wanted to learn more. we mostly talked about music during this exchange. i told him i was holding my sleeping toddler and listening to turn on the bright lights by interpol. bud recommended like 4 artists or albums but i only really bothered checking out one, Light Information by Chad VanGaalen. i ended up listening to this album frequently, mostly during my morning/evening commute, while driving, and sometimes at home while cooking or doing other things. i really like it as an album. i think i described it, to bud, as something like if BAND had gotten into talking heads instead of OTHER BAND. i have since forgotten which bands i had thought of at the time. will come back to this. I don't think bud likes me. I can't remember the bands.

Cavin Bryce Gonzalez

cavin has almost exclusively recommended music by mac miller to me. I've listened to a playlist he sent me of mac miller songs. i enjoyed how depressing they all seemed but i had a hard time paying attention to the lyrics, as is typically the case for me.

Graham Irvin

graham and i have been emailing for a while, and 2000s indie rock has been a central discussion point for us, i think starting with talking about wolf parade. graham has recommended a lot of music to me because of this. i have been most excited about rozwell kid, who have a song about putting identifying information/clothing into a Wendy's trash can. rozwell kid feels to me like if weezer was still good and paid the guy from the mountain goats for lyrics. i keep intending to listen to more rozwell kid but my headphones don't work with my phone right now, for some reason, so i have been unable to 'listen closely' like I'd prefer. update: spent 30min driving around dark county roads at night with windows down while listening to precious art by rozwell kid. it smelled like rain and i got emotional while thinking about graham. gunned it through a thickly wooded road with my brights on, laughed at how it seemed like I was driving through a fantasy world tunnel of trees. update 2: i think too shabby is the best rozwell kid album, and i recently purchased it on vinyl.

Crow Jonah Norlander

crow and i both like some of the same bands, like early modest mouse, and for this reason crow will occasionally ask me if i am familiar with some B-tier indie band from the 90s. i am familiar with many such bands but somehow never any of the specific bands that crow messages me about. for example, he told me he's been getting into you're living all over me by dinosaur jr., which is an album i owned on vinyl but for some reason never actually listened to. i listened to it via streaming the day he recommended it and enjoyed it but felt distracted. i remember liking how apathetically the guy sings. i told crow a minor story about how j mascis is relatively active in the massachusetts shoegaze community.

 

Sebastian Castillo

late addition to the list bc i was trying to remember recommendations after i published originally. sebastian and i have emailed a few times and we talked about music a little bit. he recommended this bad Lilys, whose first album happened to be on Slumberland records (1992) while I recommended Henry's Dress, whose only albums happened to be on Slumberland records (1993-94). i like that we independently recommended each other music from the same label and time period. when i listened to the Lilys album, i realized i had already heard it, or parts of it, from back when i was really into shoegaze, and it was nice to listen to again. we talked breifly about how in many ways it's better than MBV's isn't anything while doing similar things, sonically.

i think i'm forgetting many other people, hence the partiality of this list