Music Journal: Jazz, Spotify, and Patience

Today, while starting to pack for my cross-country move, I listened to three albums back-to-back: Samara Joy's Linger Awhile, Etta James's At Last!, and Billie Holiday's Solitude. I learned about Samara Joy when she won two Grammys last year, and of course the latter two albums are classics. (I'm listening to Solitude again as I write this.)

I typically don't have the patience to listen to albums all the way through, and I think that comes from the algorithm-driven anxiety to approach every sound we hear from a place of evaluation: Do I like this song? Enough to favorite it? Enough to add it to a playlist? Which playlist? Obviously, that's not how music is meant to be consumed, but it's the way I have consumed it since I made my Spotify account in eighth grade. Checking off boxes and accumulating information, but never steeping myself deeply enough in the work as a whole to really understand the context I am interested in, like an artist's stylistic evolution or how they fit into the history of a genre.

I don't think there's a right or wrong way to consume art, but I do think the need to form opinions with such immediacy induces needless anxiety. Sometimes I hear a song and it immediately feels familiar, or comforting, or exhilarating, but those cases are rare. I realize now I've been doing myself a disservice by sifting through albums as if I'm mining for gold, skipping songs after thirty seconds if I don't think they'll provide the immediate gratification I'm looking for.

Not to sound like a Boomer, but I think that modus operandi has made me more generally anxious. It's the constant need to curate and control my environment, to not spend even an extra second listening to something I'm not absolutely sure I will like. How in the world am I ever supposed to expand my taste or learn anything interesting that way?

I'm pretty set in my ways with my music listening habits, so I anticipate my routines (i.e. making extremely chaotic playlists every other week) being pretty hard to shake. At the very least, however, I hope to start practicing a bit more patience by listening to albums in full that I've already determined I like, instead of always opting for my most recent playlist and then skipping half the songs in frustration. I wonder if this will bring me equanimity in other realms of my life. Guess we'll see.

As I've written this, I didn't even notice I listened to Solitude all the way through once and I'm more than halfway through its second loop.

Anyways, rather than continue to wax poetic about essentially nothing, I'll close out this post with some of my recent favorite songs (none of which are from the same album... LOL):

• "Sweet Love" by Anita Baker
• "The Letter" by Al Green
• "I Got The..." by Labi Siffre
• "Use Me" by Bill Withers
• "Plain Gold Ring" by Nina Simone

With teeth, love, and worry about my attention span,

Anika