bands i was supposed to like

Well, would you look at that? I wrote about music again, finally. I hope you enjoy this exploration of alt rock royalty. It’s been another really hard month for us over at the Maps household. Deanna’s online banking got hacked and we got ripped off to the tune of her whole savings. The bank says she’ll probably get all of it back but in the meantime, life is ruff. I wrote this while we’ve been dealing with that, but if it feels a bit disjointed, that’s because I’m in the middle of working eight days in a row so I’ve had to write it in fits and starts. In any case, if you’d like to read it in its entirety, please consider subscribing to my Patreon, as always. Link at the bottom.

Every so often I go through a period or phase that can be best described as musical anhedonia. Most or all of the music that I regularly listen to will begin to sound, at best, tedious, and at worst, completely unlistenable. When things like this happen, my solution has become simple: dive deeply into a sound that, before, I wasn’t very well-versed in. The last couple times it happened, I threw myself into metal and then electronic music and discovered a deep well of music that’s already yielded some all-time favorites for me.

Lately, that anhedonia has been a bit worse than usual, and I sometimes find myself struggling to wring joy out of almost all of my hobbies, not just music. I’ve been alive and dealing with this long enough to know that this will pass, but in the meantime, I decided that once again, I would revisit music that I long ago dismissed as not for me and see if I can’t possibly extract some heretofore-unknown beauty from it.

However, this go around, I elected to do something a little different. Rather than explore a genre as a whole, I thought I’d reach back into the annals of alt rock history and dig into some acclaimed bands that have, for whatever reason, just never sparked my excitement.

The ultimate result was… interesting, if not uniformly transformative. In the process, I discovered some things about songwriting that I didn’t know I liked previously, learned how to appreciate things from a distance without necessarily needing to connect on an emotionally visceral level, and in the case of at least one band, changed my mind so drastically that I’d now describe some of their albums as some of my very favorites of their style and era.

I might make this a recurring feature in the future, but for now, I’ll focus on the three bands I’ve most concretely sat and spent time with: Animal Collective, Radiohead, and The Smashing Pumpkins.

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-xoxo, Ellie