It occurred to me the other day that it’s been twenty years since I’d moved away from my hometown in Massachusetts. For some people that might be just another life event, but for me it was something pretty big. Until that day in March 2005 (the 6th, to be exact) I’d always lived in MA, five years of them in Boston, then spending just shy of ten years back at the family house getting my affairs, finances and creativity in some semblance of order. All of that changed near the end of 2004 when I started going out with A. in a long distance relationship, then turning that into frequent road trips down to New Jersey (a little over two hundred miles one way) to spend the weekend. It was a three hour drive but it was totally worth it.
All of that changed in early 2005 when we finally made the decision for me to move down there with her and her roommates. We both felt it was something I’d needed to do, and a long time in coming. I was ready for it, and had been looking to moving on for quite some time. The plan was to move down to NJ and eventually find a place somewhere near her workplace, but that ended up going in an altogether different direction later that summer.
It was a year of a lot of major life changes for me, so I allowed my writing to fall by the wayside for a bit. To wit: moving out of my old hometown, moving away from family, moving in with said girlfriend, springing the question and eventually marrying said girlfriend shortly after, visiting another country (that was not Canada, and which included acquiring a passport and flying on a commercial airline for the first time), doing office work instead of warehouse or retail for the Day Job, and eventually moving to the west coast where we’ve been ever since.
I made the above mixtape the night before I left, even though I dated it to the day I got in the car and drove away. I listened to it a few times on the way down to Jersey along with the other mixes I’d made around that time. The themes of the mix were moving out, moving on, escaping, feeling free, and looking toward the future. Little did I know just how much my life would change in just a few months, but I wasn’t going to complain.
I was just thinking earlier yesterday about how some of my music listening habits tend to be on the fleeting side these days, and how that sometimes bothers me as it feels like don’t allow myself to resonate with these songs as I once did.
It’s definitely not that I’m just not into anything new these days, far from it. My obsessive listening to KEXP (both online and its local terrestrial outlets) has me latching onto new bands and songs all the damn time. No, it’s the sheer volume of it all that distracts me from letting it burrow deep and stay in my head for months at a time. My music brain can only work one way or the other, it seems.
During my ongoing review of my Bridgetown Trilogy playlist, I noticed that may just be the case, especially when it comes to the mixtapes I made at the time. Many of the songs on those tapes from nearly a quarter century ago still play crystal clear in my mind. And why is that? Because this was stuff that got a high amount of repeat play.
It wasn’t just during my writing sessions in the Belfry, either. It was also on my commutes to and from work at Yankee Candle — an almost exact thirty-minute drive from driveway to parking lot meaning I could listen to most of side one of a mixtape or a full album on cassette. It was also during my weekend road trips around New England, whether it was my weekly visits to Boston, local bookstores, or just driving around the back roads in central Massachusetts.
Alas, this is something I haven’t really been able to do all that much these days. Mind you, I am certainly not complaining that my current commute is ten minutes/eight blocks on foot (and shorter if I take the car or bus), but that doesn’t leave me time to listen to my mixtapes or albums I want to listen to.
Instead I’ve been trying to retrain myself to latch onto songs that capture my attention and keep them there for a while. I’m essentially relearning how to listen to the music I love so much, and it’s turning into an interesting experience, to be honest. Not everything completely clicks, but a lot of it is starting to burrow in there like I hope it will.
I’ve been listening to a lot of music from 2000-2001 lately, and this song popped up on my playlist. Blur can be kind of odd at times, but this one’s strange even by their standards. It was a new track to sell up their Best of album that dropped on 30 October 2000, but it pretty much sounds like an extended jam session set in a single key, feedback and all. It might be filler, but it’s also infectious and demands to be cranked up.
Still, one of my favorite songs of theirs, and I absolutely love the oddball video they made for it.
I’ve been going through my music library for the year 2000 to revisit what I would be listening to in the Belfry, and I think I’ve figured out the point where I knew the HMV days were truly over and when the Belfry days kicked into high gear. It’s actually a surprisingly stark line that jives with when I was given the quit-or-be-fired ultimatum from my terrible boss. It’s August of 2000, and by the end of the month I’d be gone.
The Dandy Warhols, Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia, 1 August 2000. Although I’m almost certain I bought this in my final days at HMV and listened to it around that time, I want to say this was an album I spent more time listening to in the Belfry. I wasn’t even the biggest DW fan; by this point I’d heard their earlier hit “Not if You Were the Last Junkie On Earth” for the zillionth time on WFNX and did not like it to begin with, hearing “Godless” turned the tables for me. I remember listening to this one a lot during the summer evenings and weekends while figuring out what I wanted to do with The Phoenix Effect.
Between then and the end of the month, I did pick up a handful of CDs both from the record store and from Newbury Comics — by then my weekly comic book run had started to include a quick stop there to look for things my own store might not carry (or sell cheaper).
Goldfrapp, Felt Mountain, 11 September 2000. I’d left the record store by this point and was just starting at Yankee Candle — a westerly commute instead of an easterly one, and twenty miles shorter at that — but I really didn’t want to disconnect from my weekly accumulation of music. I could just as easily buy copies of my favorite music magazines, CMJ (College Music Journal) and ICE (an industry magazine featuring news on new releases) at Newbury Comics. I think this was one of the first that I bought there after starting the new job.
VAST, Music for People, 12 September 2000. I know I bought this one the same day as the Goldfrapp album (and the Barenaked Ladies album Maroon as well). I’d been a big fan of Jon Crosby’s first album under the VAST moniker and while this one felt slightly more upbeat and less steeped in Nine Inch Nails-esque gloom, it featured some amazing tracks that got a lot of play in the Belfry.
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I actually wouldn’t start writing A Division of Souls for another year and a half, maybe early 2002 after the frustrations brought about by The Phoenix Effect and its sequel The Mihari, which I was writing at the time. The two books do have a lot of similarities to A Division of Souls, however, and it was simply a decision to stop work on both TPE and TM and completely start over from scratch. [Very similar to what I’d done recently with Theadia, actually.]
The music that inspired the project, however, started around this time when I switched day jobs. It wasn’t a clean switch of course, as I actually worked second shift for my first couple of months (3 – 11pm or thereabouts) and wouldn’t move to first shift until sometime in November. It would be around that time when my writing sessions would truly become more stable and frequent, as would my weekly trips to Newbury to pick up new music.
I said I was going to do it and I’m doing it now: I’m currently going through the albums and singles from 2000 onwards as a soundtrack to the Bridgetown Trilogy Remaster Project. I started the revisit on Monday afternoon on my day off with William Orbit’s remixed take on Barber’s Adagio for Strings, one of my all-time favorite classical pieces.
I know, this is sort of an arbitrary place to start and doesn’t really line up with the writing chronology. I’d started and finished The Phoenix Effect (the early ‘demo’ version, if you want to continue the music analogy) but hadn’t yet started writing its aborted sequel The Mihari (that would take place that summer if I’m not mistaken), but the actual day-one of A Division of Souls wouldn’t take place until late 2001 or early 2002.
So why start the relistening at January 2000? Partly because I knew my days were numbered at the record store by then. I still loved the job and wished I could stay there forever, but a) I could definitely see the downturn of the music industry happening in real time, and b) I wasn’t sure how much longer I could handle the store manager without eventually ragequitting. It was also a bit of a weird time musically; grunge had long given way to adult alternative which had given way to meathead alt-metal, and pop was having a huge resurgence with its sugary overproduced electronica.
A lot of music I listened to at the time felt a bit out of place. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to listen to, because very little of it was resonating with me at a deep level, as it once had just a few years previous. That could very well be due to personal issues and changes, and at the time I was feeling unmoored.
Still, I was willing to see where it all took me. Life changes and all.
Okay, so I have to remind myself that sometimes I don’t need to listen to the entire broadcast day of KEXP when I happen to have the time and access to it. It’s great background music, but by mid-afternoon I start feeling that I’ve lost the plot of what I need to get done. No offense to Larry Mizell Jr — he’s a great afternoon DJ and I pick up a lot of great tunage from him, but sometimes I really should focusing more on, say, my writing session or getting a blog entry done. And I can’t always do that when my favorite station is dropping new things that capture my attention. It’s too easy of a distraction.
This constant connection not only distracts me from my writing work, it also takes away from my ability to occasionally deep-dive into my own library sometimes. I mean, it’s not as if I’m missing out…KEXP stores their show streams for two weeks so I can always listen to that if need be. Point is, I’ve been visiting the old Songs from the Eden Cycle mixtapes and realizing there are some great tracks there from albums I haven’t played in years! I feel it’s far past time to give them another spin.
I know, I know…I’ve been talking about doing this listening habit reset for years and never quite doing so. But considering my decision to make this year about Following Through, perhaps now is that time. Even if it means I have to work out a schedule to create some kind of stability (hey, that’s what my whiteboard schedule is there for). That might not be a bad idea, considering I’ve been feeling the urge to get back to Doing All The Things. Not just the writing projects, but revisiting the 750Words site as well as returning to my drawing. I have the drive and the inclination, I just have to, y’know, do it now.
It’s been quite some time since I’ve actively listened to Radiohead, especially during my writing sessions. During the Belfry days, The Bends and OK Computer would get a lot of play, but the last time I played them a lot while writing was back in 2016 when A Moon Shaped Pool came out. [Has it really been that long since their last album?]
I think part of it is because I was working on different projects at the time. In Rainbows came out when I was writing the trunked Love Like Blood. I’d just started working on the multi-year revision work for the Bridgetown Trilogy when The King of Limbs dropped, but by that time I was obsessing over several other bands and Radiohead kind of fell by the wayside. The ever-increasing gap between albums caused a bit of a distance for me as well.
Now that I’m working on the ADoS remaster, however, I’ve been tempted to do another revisit of those albums. I’ve been a longtime fan literally since “Creep” dropped here in the US in early 1993, and I’ve picked up most of the members’ solo releases as well. Perhaps this is the perfect time!
So I’ve begun the process of revising A Division of Souls for its tenth anniversary edition later this year, and I’ve been listening to my Songs from the Eden Cycle mixtapes during these sessions, and it suddenly occurs to me:
I am sorely tempted to add that ‘Director’s Cut’ ending that I’d come up with soon after I self-published it that takes place immediately after Poe leaves Christine’s building. At the time I felt it was extraneous, but in retrospect it actually provides a stronger tie with the opening scenes of Book 2, The Persistence of Memories. [Am I thinking of ‘remastering’ that one as well as The Balance of Light? Yes I am!] I’d of course need to change it from its screenplay format to prose, but that shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
I wasn’t planning on revisiting the mixtapes and the albums and playlists while working on it all, but now that I’m doing it, why the hell not? It’s an incredibly long list that not only includes music from the 1996-2000 HMV/Phoenix Effect era and the 2000-2005 Yankee Candle/Trilogy years, but the 1993-1995 Boston/True Faith years and the 2010-2015 Spare Oom/self-pub era as well. There’s a lot to revisit. Some of my all-time favorite albums have deep connections with the Mendaihu Universe.
I’m kind of playing this out to ensure that newer music gets a decent amount of play here as well, especially since I’m doing this as a lead-in to working on MU4 and perhaps other stories in that universe. I’ve been wanting to return to it for a few years now, and considering I’m nearly done with Theadia, I feel I’m finally ready for it.
This was definitely an interesting year for music! We had several ‘comeback’ albums from musicians who hadn’t had a studio release in over a decade — not just the Cure, but The The, The Softies and The Wolfgang Press — and we also had several excellent anniversary reissues popping up as well.
While my listening habits pretty much remained the same, I was super excited by the news that my favorite station, KEXP, would start broadcasting here in the Bay Area! We’ve desperately needed a good alternative rock station for years (I’m sorry, Live 105, but you are not cutting it even despite recently rising from the ashes), and they’ve always had a super strong fanbase here. So far they’ve been quite successful!
Musically I found myself leaning towards electronic and shoegaze once again, but that’s not to say I was firmly entrenched; the local label Slumberland has been consistently putting out some brilliant jangle pop and lo-fi gems and I’ve become a loyal fan. Still, a lot of non-KEXP listening was focused primarily on moods and vibes this year, mainly for a need of soundtrack music while working on Theadia, my first space opera.
So! Without further ado, here’s my official end-of-year playlist/mixtape for your listening enjoyment!
This one’s a long playlist/mixtape collection of 129 songs so I’ll spare you the list here. So instead, on with my favorite releases of the year! This time I’m merely listing them in alphabetical order as I tended to enjoy all of these equally, with the bolded title being my top favorite of the year. As I’ve mentioned quite often, these were albums that got a lot of play here in Spare Oom, whether on days off or during writing sessions.
ALBUMS Bastille, “&” (Ampersand) Bibio, Phantom Brickworks (LP II) Coldplay, Moon Music Elbow, AUDIO VERTIGO Four Tet, Three GIFT, Illuminator Hooverphonic, Fake Is the New Dope Kelly Lee Owens, Dreamstate La Luz, News of the Universe Linkin Park, From Zero Ride, Interplay The Cure, Songs of a Lost World The Fauns, How Lost The Reds, Pinks & Purples, Unwishing Well The Softies, The Bed I Made The The, Ensoulment Torres, What an enormous room Underworld, Strawberry Hotel Various Artists, Everyone’s Getting Involved: A Tribute to Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense Various Artists, Red Hot Org Presents TRAИƧA
SINGLES Bad Bad Hats, “My Heart Your Heart” Corridor, “Jump Cut” deary, “Selene” DIIV, “Brown Paper Bag” Elbow, “Things I’ve Been Telling Myself for Years” English Teacher, “The World’s Biggest Paving Slab” GIFT, “Later” Girl and Girl, “Hello” Kamasi Washington, “Prologue” Kelly Lee Owens, “Love You Got” La Luz, “Strange World” Orcas, “Under the Milky Way” Orville Peck & Beck, “Death Valley High” Ride, “I Came to See the Wreck” RÜFÜS DU SOL, “Music Is Better” The Cure, “And Nothing Is Forever” The Fauns, “Doot Doot” The National, “Heaven” Torres, “Collect”
REISSUES American Football, American Football 25th Anniversary Edition Cocteau Twins & Harold Budd, The Moon and the Melodies Cranes, Collected Works Vol 1 Garbage, Bleed Like Me Deluxe Edition George Harrison, Living in the Material World 50th Anniversary His Name Is Alive, How Ghosts Affect Relationships 1990-1993 Hugo Largo, Huge, Large and Electric: Hugo Largo 1984-1991 Ivy, Long Distance 25th Anniversary Edition John Lennon, Mind Games: The Ultimate Collection and Mind Games: Meditation Mixes Kristin Hersh, Hips and Makers 30th Anniversary Edition New Order, Brotherhood (Definitive) REM, We Are Hope Despite the Times Seal, Seal (1994) Deluxe Edition The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Still Barking (1967-1972) The Dream Academy, Religion, Revolution and Railways: The Complete Recordings The Police, Synchronicity Super Deluxe Edition
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So what do we have coming in 2025? Good question. So far I know we have new albums coming from Franz Ferdinand, Ringo Starr, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, Doves (!!), Manic Street Preachers and Mogwai. Stay tuned!
Hope everyone has a great 2025! See you in the next year!
Granted, the last couple of months of the year usually go by in a blur, especially since I work in retail. Between the day job and writing and everything else, I tend to lose track of time and forget minor details and things like that. But thankfully the year did end on a positive note, with a wonderful handful of new records!
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deary, Aurelia EP, released 1 November. One of my favorite newer shoegaze finds with that wonderful guitar wash sound I love so much. I played this one a lot during my writing projects!
Ivy, Long Distance [25th Anniversary Edition], released 1 November. This is probably my favorite Ivy record and one that got a lot of play during the Belfry years. I highly recommend giving this one a listen!
The Cure, Songs of a Lost World, released 1 November. Their first studio album since 2008’s 4:13 Dream, this is well worth the wait, and both critics and fans alike have put this on their list of top albums of the year. The more I listen to this, the more I feel it’s one of their best albums to date.
Linkin Park, From Zero, released 15 November. It’s great to see this band not only returning but essentially picking up where they left off. Emily Armstrong is a great choice to heal the loss of Chester Bennington…while she’s got the same scream-vocal style he had, she gives it her own style and spin.
George Harrison, Living in the Material World 50th Anniversary Edition, released 15 November. This is my second favorite George solo record (after All Things Must Pass of course), and it’s got some of his best work on it. While the album itself leans heavily on the spirituality, it’s not overly cloying. It’s well worth checking out.
New Order, Brotherhood (Definitive), released 22 November. This reissue was also worth the wait as well, as their ‘Definitive’ series provides fresh remasters and intriguing bonus tracks and rarities. This was probably my favorite album of theirs after Substance and got a lot of Walkman play back in the day, so it’s great to hear these songs fresh once more.
U2, How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (Re-Assemble Edition), released 22 November. Another reissue, this one a twentieth anniversary remaster of their 2004 album plus several more tracks recorded during its sessions but mostly unreleased. It’s a fascinating listen as many of the extras feel much looser and more experimental than what showed up on the original.
Kim Deal, Nobody Loves You More, released 22 November. It’s surprising to know that this is actually Deal’s first solo album, after working so many years with Pixies and The Breeders. It kind of reminds me of The Breeders’ Pod actually, with several of its songs played loosely as if it was more of a demo record than a complete project. Yet that’s the kind of work she’s always done best.
Bibio, Phantom Brickworks (LP II), released 22 November. I first found out about this musician through the first Phantom Brickworks back in 2017, and this sequel is just as fascinating. His work leans towards slow and ambient — the perfect score for my writing sessions, of course — and this one in particular reminds me of one of my favorite ambient records, Global Communication’s 76:14.
Various Artists, Red Hot Org Presents TRANSA, released 22 November. Red Hot has always put out fascinating compilations, and this one is a heartfelt celebration of the trans community. It features forty-six tracks of all kinds of styles, including Moses Sumney’s groovy cover of Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”, a surprisingly calm cover of Prince’s “I Would Die 4 U” featuring none other than Wendy & Lisa themselves, a ghostly cover of Sinéad O’Connor’s “Feel So Different” by Sharon Van Etten and Ezra Furman… and the biggest surprise, an absolutely lovely track by Sade herself written for her trans son. It’s a fascinating listen and highly recommended.
Mixtape/Playlist, Re:Defined 2405, created 1 December. This particular mix showcases several songs that stopped me in my tracks in the latter half of this year — songs that literally made me stop writing or surfing the internet to focus on what I was hearing. That’s been sadly very rare these days, but I’m glad there’s still a lot out there that will do that for me.
Garbage, copy/paste, vol 1 (Abridged), released 6 December. A shortened version of a Record Store Day special release, this showcases the band’s penchant for the occasional cover song, many of which usually end up on single b-sides. I was familiar with half of these, but their take on The Psychedelic Furs’ “Love My Way” was a great find.
Saint Etienne, The Night, released 13 December. Glad to see this band returning after a couple of years (songwriter/keyboardist Bob Stanley has been doing a lot of music biography writing as of late, and I highly recommend them). It’s a bit quieter than their usual output, but it’s a great listen.
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….and that’s it for the year! I did leave out quite a few records, mainly due to space, but I’m glad to say that a lot of it stayed with me over the months while I focused on my writing!
Walk In Silence 