Curious how people are actually listening right now. I play music for people in a room, in a box, sometimes in my own home. When you put on new music, are you Walking? Driving? Cooking? Lying on the floor?? At work with one earbud in. There’s no wrong answer. Just interested in the habits.

So, I have songs and albums that are slow burners. I know you know. You almost get mad at yourself for not loving it from the go. I liked OK Computer at first and well, it's near the top of my all timers now. I do this on the show as well. I love it actually as I can hear from listeners who are also "getting it" along with me. Is there a song from this past year that didn’t land at first—but later found you when you were ready? Those are often the ones that last.

I recently got the ability to listen to CDs up and running again at home, something I've not had available for probably more than a decade. Fortunately, I still have all my old CDs, so I have a full cabinet of music I love to listen to. Yay me. However! There are thousands of CDs available in thrift stores and various other places - and they are dirt cheap, which is great. What's not great however, is the absolute scale of "stuff" that has been released on CD vs. what's been released on vinyl. When you go browsing through vinyl collections, it seems like you're often able to find something that looks interesting. With CDs, this feels a lot harder. For context, there are NO music stores where I live - not unless you count music supply stores, which sell instruments. Internet killed the local rural music store. But since there are thrift stores a plenty, and CDs at those stores, I felt the need to go looking. My initial strategy was to search for popular music that I don't personally have a large collection of - the Beatles, Beach Boys, that kinda thing. So far it's been a complete bust. Does anyone have strategies for what to look for in the mess that is the non-curated used CD market? I'm afraid that the relative low-barrier-to-entry cost of CD production in the early 2000s means that it is significantly harder to find "good" stuff compared to when you're looking at vinyl of almost any era. Or maybe all the cool kids have already raided the good stuff.

A bit of an opposite to John's "the song you weren't ready for" is the band / album that hit you exactly where you were at that time of your life. Way back in the before times, my friend stopped by randomly and said, "Hey. Whatever you're doing? Stop. You're listening to this now." He then put on Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots by The Flaming Lips. That album, from start to end - an absolute piece of art. I'm still a bit gobsmacked by it. I'd heard of the flaming lips, and knew the ol' "She don't use jelly" song, but this was something entirely different. For that hour or whatever I was completely transfixed. I'd also add Portishead's "Dummy" to this list - although the time and circumstances were quite different to this one... As an aside, several years later, I was waiting in the OKC airport for a flight to Denver, when a guy with curly longish hair, sunglasses, and a feather boa walks by me and sits down in the same seating area. I whisper to my partner - "Hey! I think that's Wayne Coyne!" Not only was it really Wayne Coyne, but he sat in the row directly in front of us. We ended up on a turbo-prop airplane, flying through a snow storm in the winter. When we landed, there was no jet-bridge, and it was late at night. They let us deplane on the tarmac and had to walk to the terminal in the snow. Halfway to the terminal, Wayne stopped to turn back and take a picture of the plane, with snow blowing all around us in the wind - an iconic image. I didn't stop Wayne to tell him how amazing Yoshimi was, or how important it was to me (I deeply respect the personal space of public people when they are not "on") but I've since made it a point to tell artists I meet at concerts or whatever how much I love their work, or how important it is to me. Every time I've done so, it's been really rewarding. But that's another topic for conversation...

Anybody have the typical older sibling music influence as a teenager? Is it something you’ve stuck pretty close to, some of which you still count as all time favorites or did your musical journey take you on your own somewhat different or completely different path? My older sister definitely had a big influence on what I listened to as a teenager. Typical 70s teen I remember it was bands like Bad Company, Montrose, Foghat. That was it until the first time I watched MTV in the 80s then everything changed.