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Spotify Wrapped and who we really are
Tis the season for Spotify Wrapped. But what exactly does this AI generated assessment tell us? And how should we treat it?
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Training Spotify’s AI on the drive through Michigan
Why Spotify doesn’t play the stuff I want it to; just the stuff it “thinks” I want to hear. The personal fix is quite simple.
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Do we have to listen to Led Zeppelin?
What popular music is essential? What are we required to listen to? And do such ideas about art even have a place?
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Not the Same Old Same Old
The season we often use to anticipate Christmas can be an invitation to both plan and dream, not only what’s possible, but what God will make possible.
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City With No Children
I’ve loved this song from the moment it first came through the car’s speakers. From Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs, it speaks of desperation and the isolation, trapped feel of that location. Beautifully haunting, youthful, aging, wistful and anguished. Pure pop genius. It has lingered lately. That sense expanded beyond the suburbs, to the country, the continent.…
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Music
I was raised on Peter, Paul, and Mary and Pete Seeger. We listened to show tunes and the Beatles. Total Boomer parents. A flower child’s child. And the culture outside our house was the last hurrah of Top-40 radio: the era when everybody really did hear the same songs on the radio. Before the whole…
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Fooling Expectations
Suspense in action By the time the car pulls off the lot and drives down the road, I was more terrified than I had ever been by a movie. The beginning of Psycho had my guts wrestling my fast-beating heart for room in my throat. And yet nothing scary has happened yet at that point…
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Learning How To Sing
I remember a specific moment of great happiness from my childhood. It was the day I learned I no longer had to sing at school. I didn’t dread singing until fourth grade. The year I had my first crush, my first acknowledgement that boys and girls really were different, the first realization that what I did…