Pump Up the Jam
Mixtapes, music, dopamine, memory, nostalgia, and "open-earedness."
There are some new things in my shop this week. Particularly for those of you who want to be a trilliumaire.
And don’t forget we have the April Creative Fuel Studio Session tomorrow with
. More info on that after today’s essay.
Creative Fuel is made possible thanks to paid subscribers. If you like reading this newsletter, please consider supporting.
Much of my middle school and high school years were spent making mixtapes. Hours could be devoted to doing nothing but listening and waiting for a favorite song to come on so that I could press record. There were no interruptions, no emails to check, no text messages making a phone light up. It was just me, the music, and the tape recorder.
The memory is visceral.
It’s the late 1990s. The radio is tuned to 107.7 The End. My pointer finger hovers just above the record button as one song begins to finish. I wait in anticipation, in the event that one of my favorite songs is queued up next and it needs to be added to this tape. I need to focus, press record right as it starts. If I concentrate hard enough, I even feel like I can intuit what song comes on next—able to press the record button a microsecond or two before it even starts, absolutely no interruption to the song, recorded in its glorious entirety.
I spent hours like this. Maybe you did too.
I have no idea where those mixtapes ended up, but one in particular comes to mind.
It was my senior year of high school. The year before, I had studied in Sweden and I returned amped up on early 2000s Eurodance music. That was also the year that I became the proud owner of Daft Punk’s Homework album. When I came back to the US, I was thrilled to discover the local radio station C89.5 (still alive!), exclusively devoted to dance music. I listened diligently to that small station—which, even when you turned the tuning knob just right, was always laced with an undertone of static—playing all kinds of dance music that certainly none of my friends were listening to. A lot of those songs went onto a mixtape.
In the springtime, I ran track, and after school was out for the day I would move my car from the senior parking lot up to the track field for practice. I would roll the driver side window all the way down, blasting that mixtape as loud as possible, in the hopes that I might differentiate myself from my fellow track team members. Returning from a year abroad, fitting back into high school wasn’t an easy feat. I really wanted an identity that felt different, ideally erring on the side of cool. I’m not sure anyone was convinced, but for a brief moment, I felt like I had a musical edge.
I had music that I wasn’t trying to learn to like or fit into, but something that felt like me.
Whether it’s the mixtapes we used to make, or the playlists we put together now, what we’re really trying to say is, “this is who I am.”
I don’t consider myself a “music person.” I enjoy listening to music, but I never feel that I’ve paid enough attention to be able to have informed opinions on it. Concerts have never really been my thing, and I’ve never been up to speed on new bands. I’ve come to terms with the fact that while some of the most intelligent and creative people around me love Radiohead, I don’t have to keep trying to like it. Except for “Fake Plastic Trees” which elicits a special kind of nostalgia for me.
Like many in my generation, my tastes were formed by the radio. But in my adult life, most of the music that I love is thanks to friends. Looking through a list of favorite artists over the years is like tracing my hand over a tapestry of people and experiences. AIR and St. Germain were staples of my roommate’s music collection when I studied abroad in France, Röyksopp was an introduction by a fellow attendee at a conference my senior year in college. A summer with Khruangbin’s Mordechai album on nonstop repeat was thanks to my friend Paula after she made us a playlist for a road trip, and pretty much anything moody and Icelandic or poppy and Scandinavian is on account of Roshni.
Music suggestions from friends are special. When someone shares something with you that you like and that you haven’t heard of before, it feels like being let in on a really good secret. “Surround yourself with good people” as the saying goes, although I’d add, “surround yourself with good people who like music.”
The majority of what we listen to these days is not carefully selected by a friend, but instead, served up by an algorithm. It ensures that we get what we like, but it takes some of the surprise out of it. We don’t sit listening to Spotify wondering what will come next like we used to with a radio. If we get fed up with one song, we just click forward to the next one.
There’s not the same sense of discovery as when a friend passes something along to you, or the feeling of hearing a new song playing on the radio that you just can’t get out of your head. Those are glorious gifts.
However we come to music, we use it as a demarcation for what we like, what we want to be seen as liking. It’s very much a matter of taste, of how we project ourselves into the world, of the groups that we want to align with. For example: of course I like the Ólafur Arnalds’ Island Songs album. That’s not just about the music, I want to be the kind of person who likes that music. Whether it’s the mixtapes we used to make, or the playlists we put together now, what we’re really trying to say is, “this is who I am.”
I turned 40 last year and I live in a rural town, which means that I have shed almost all desires of being cool, or “in.” Despite the acceptance that I am no longer in a generation that defines culture, there’s still a part of me that wants to distinguish myself. I’m an artist after all, it’s kind of part of who we are. I want to listen to and know about music that says something about me, that helps to indicate to the outside world who I am. I like singing “pour que l’orage s’announce” at the top of my lungs because “Saint Claude” by Christine and the Queens is a song that makes me feel things, but let’s not kid anyone, I also like being a person who can sing a French lyric. I like the Röyksopp and Robyn Do It Again album because I believe that it says something about my Scandinavian sensibility. I finally came around to Nils Frahm, because I want to be the kind of artist who is immediately put into a flow state with the song “Says.”
If music is about identity, then it’s also about memory. When we hear a song from our past, we are catapulted back in time. A few months ago I put on Smashing Pumpkin’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. I got that album in the 6th grade, the first CD I ever owned. Listening to it, I immediately felt a little weird in my body, as if I had been thrown right back into the drama, emotion, and uncertain sense of self that came with middle school.
Music doesn’t just revive memories, it stimulates pretty much all parts of the brain, making it a powerful tool for our neurological health. In the documentary “Alive Inside,” which I saw several years ago, you watch powerful scenes of Alzheimer’s patients coming to life when they don headphones and listen to the music of their youth.
Modern tastes harken back to more youthful days, and even with new musical tastes, you can probably trace those style preferences back to earlier roots. A New York Times analysis of Spotify data showed that our musical preferences peak in our teen years—it’s likely that you were about 13 or 14 when your favorite song came out. Hence why in my mind Daft Punk is a fairly new band, despite the fact that after almost three decades, they’re not even together anymore. Or why many a dinner party with friends who also spent their middle and high school years in the PNW in the 1990s usually devolves into playing the assorted hits of Presidents of the United States of America. And while we’d all be horrified to admit to it, and entirely sure that we’ll lose all credibility in terms of taste and culture, yes, of course we do want to occasionally listen to Dave Matthews Band’s Crash album for a few minutes, just for a nostalgic throwback.
It’s not cool, but it feels good.
There is comfort in returning to the music that we associate with certain emotions and moments, but craving what we know is exactly what stops us from looking for new stuff. A 2018 study by Deezer found that we stop discovering new music around the age of 30. "Open-earedness" is a term that has been used to describe how receptive we are to new music, something that decreases as we age, leading to “musical paralysis.”
“What we think of as our ‘taste’ is simply a dopamine reaction arising from patterns our brain recognises which create the expectation of pleasure based on pleasures past,” writes Mick Haupt for The Conversation. “When we stop actively listening to new or unfamiliar music the link between the musical pattern and pleasure is severed.”
Turns out that what we like musically isn’t a matter of taste, but more a matter of dopamine.
I have music for middle school feelings. I have music for high school feelings—there’s a specific song that’s linked to the night before graduation, when everything felt like it lay ahead. I have music for the sense of potential and joy I felt in my 20s. I have music that makes me feel like a camp counselor again. I have music for the elation I felt while living abroad. I have music for feeling like I am back in my studio apartment in Portland. I have music that conjures up the melancholy, the bittersweet. I have a song that I played every single time I took off and landed on a plane last year, simply because I wanted my future self to be reminded of the exact feeling felt in that moment.
You probably have some version of all of the above. Going to music that we know is reliable. Opting for something new and different? That’s unchartered territory for our brain, and the unknown can be uncomfortable. “When we hear something that hasn’t already been mapped onto the brain, the corticofugal network goes a bit haywire, and our brain releases too much dopamine as a response. When there is no anchor or no pattern on which to map, music registers as unpleasant, or in layman’s terms, bad,” writes Jeremy D. Larson in a great article in Pitchfork on why we need new music.
Because our brain is plastic, the good news is that we can change that. Listening to new music might actually help with neurogenesis, allowing us to regenerate new neural pathways. Pushing our own music boundaries may also change how we see and interact with the world around us. “We have conducted studies that show a definite link between openness to listening to new and different music and open-mindedness,” Lyz Cooper, founder and principal of The British Academy of Sound Therapy, told The Huffington Post.
Put your own experience aside for a second. Think of the impact that all of this has on today’s musicians. What does it actually mean to make a living as a musician in this world where nostalgia and algorithms meet?
In 2022, old songs represented 70% of the U.S. music market, as reported by
for The Atlantic, “Never before in history have new tracks attained hit status while generating so little cultural impact. In fact, the audience seems to be embracing the hits of decades past instead,” writes Gioia. “Success was always short-lived in the music business, but now even new songs that become bona fide hits can pass unnoticed by much of the population.”Our own cravings for comfort and reliable emotional satisfaction combine with modern streaming platforms to make a world that isn’t very conducive to new artists. That’s not good for them, and it’s not good for us as listeners. We might need to work a little harder.
“I listen to two to three hours of new music every day, and I know that plenty of exceptional young musicians are out there trying to make it. They exist. But the music industry has lost its ability to discover and nurture their talents,” writes Gioia, who just this week penned a piece about how much “sonic treacle” we’re currently being served up.
I don’t always listen to music when I work. Most often, I just want silence. Or the Alive 2007 album if I really need to crank. But there are certain styles and artists who help to elicit a sense of flow, and that’s probably the style of music where I’ve happened upon the most new-to-me artists. These days, I’m drawn to more instrumental, contemporary electronic/classical stuff. That’s why
has been such a fun discovery in the last year, and I really love the newsletter . But for shaking all that creative energy out and boosting my mood? Give me a good dance song please. Yes, I would like to pump up the jam.The more that I think about music, particularly as someone who cares about art and creativity, the more that I realize I want to pay attention. The more I want to be surprised. The more I want to know what other people are discovering. Not to be hip, or cool, or edgy, but because—as always—creativity offers a bridge to connection. Music is yet another language for doing that.
It’s wonderful to be able to connect on the old stuff, but it’s just as fun to find a place for the new stuff, the unknown, the unchartered. The stuff that brings just a little more magic into our everyday.
That’s the mixtape I want.
-Anna
April Studio Session This Sunday!
Since I spent this entire newsletter writing about music, I hope that you come join
and me tomorrow, Sunday April 14, 10-11am PT for this month’s Creative Fuel Studio Session.Fog Chaser has prepped a special playlist just for this session, and I’ve made some prompts to go with it, so come ready to get into a good flow state. You can also come if you just want to hang, listen to music, and work on a creative project of your choosing. Hosted on Zoom. Sign up here.
Upcoming Creative Fuel Workshops + Events
Next Create+Engage workshop is Wednesday April 17, 2024, 5-6:30pm PT featuring artists Heather Bird Harris and Renee Royale. More info here. It’s free to attend, all you have to do is register.
There are TWO spots left for the spring session of DIVE, the seasonal Creative Fuel writing group facilitated by
. Starts April 29th, meets monthly, and includes weekly writing prompts. Snag a spot.
Do you enjoy Creative Fuel? You can support this work by becoming a paid subscriber. You can also order something in my shop, attend one of my workshops or retreats, or buy one of my books. Or simply share this newsletter with a friend!
My car is old enough that it still has a tape deck. 😆 send me your mix tapes!
I second finding a local indie radio station as a gateway to new music!
Those points about there being plenty of musicians but the industry being unable to find/support/promote them hit home unexpectedly -- I see publishing and writing in general as in much the same boat. The major parts of the industry keep trying to hang onto what they think are safe bets, and refusing to take bets on new, wonderful work.
I only ever made a few mix tapes (my favorite interspersed music from Last of the Mohicans with a lot of stuff I don't remember now and that tape has probably turned to dust), but my younger sister always made a lot. She's the one who introduces me to music, and her husband now (mostly black metal in his case), and they both send me playlists they make on Spotify. Not quite the same thing but it's nice to have people still creating their own modern form of mixtapes. It has the flavor of "them," and appreciation that they wanted to share what they love.