2020 - The year I learned how to enjoy music again
Bit of a self-indulgent thread but forgive me. I know the world went to shit in 2020, with life as we knew it disrupted beyond repair in so many regards. Having worked on a couple of the responses to COVID-19 over the past year I feel fortunate to be able to say I have come through relatively unscathed, with a healthy and safe family and friends and with some positivity for the future.
One odd outcome of 2020 was spending a lot of time at home (I normally am out on the road 5 days a week) and whilst that has presented its own challenges for work/life balance I have unlocked something important as a result of spending so much time at home.
First off, I have damaged hearing. A combination of stupid behaviour as a youth listening to music through headphones at far too high volume and a particularly bad ear infection one year mean my days of ear/headphone use are long gone. My happiest times with metal were as a teenager living at home. With no fucks to give my life for years was : go to school, come home, listen to my records, cds and tapes in my room with no interruptions. I literally spent hours in front of my hi-fi system stood up absorbing the same albums over and over again to the point where by now - despite my hearing - I can recite whole records through in my head, track by track.
As I grew older and left home, responsibility took over - work, relationships, marriages, finances, etc - and my time (and focus) on music diminished. Although I got back to a regular stream (literally) of music each day over the years, I never quite retained too much of it which sadly seemed to indicate some loss of connection with the music I grew up with.
2020 actually gave me opportunity to reconnect with some habits of old (over 30 years old) and learn how to truly enjoy music again. There's no rocket science here, I simply cleared a corner of my home office/study and made a conscious effort to listen to music without distraction as best I can. No phones, laptops or tablets in my hand. No video games being played, no pc screens being constantly looked at. No attempting to listen to music whilst working and constantly interrupting the flow of an album. Just making the time to step away from life one album length at a time and get as close to my old music loving self as possible (without headphones).
What also helped me was actively not trying to keep up with every new release this year. Having tried that for years, I recognise what an impossible task it now seems (fair play to those who manage it) and I can't vouch for the quality I actually found a lot of the time of spending so much time trying to keep up.
Life lessons session over!
That's a great message. How are you catering for that while listening to music in your home office if you don't mind me asking? I'm asking for.... a friend.... who is still addicted to loud music despite knowing he's done himself irreparable damage & is not doing himself any good for later life. (That's my story & I'm sticking with it.)
Great message! Here's my 2020 metal story:
This year has indeed been a sh*tty one because of COVID, but I'm also fortunate to be in a safe healthy family and to have great friends from the outside world. I'm definitely glad to be in this site where we can share metal to one another, review albums, make suggestions for things like monthly playlists (hint hint) and other cool features to help develop the website for a bigger brighter future. It's nice to have positivity during this dark time. Of course I also had to stay home for a couple few-month-long periods of time. That used to be a big challenge for me because I was not used to not going out for a few days or more, but now I can handle it just fine because of the many things I could do at home. I don't have a job but I'm living with my parents who already have jobs. I guess you can call my massive amount of reviewing, "jobless work". Heh heh...
It is sad when your hearing is damaged and can't fully function anymore, but my hearing is actually still very good. Since my days of youth, not to brag but I'm pretty smart at figuring out the proper volume when listening to metal. My computer volume is at 5% and I'm wearing my big Beats headphones, but it's still a pleasantly loud volume. I still can't stand things that are much louder than my computer at full maximum blast, like thunder which I'm still a bit scared of (don't laugh). Wearing earplugs when there's thunder and cleaning them every couple weeks is what prevents my ears from being deafened or infected. I'm very protective of my hearing and make sure they never get damaged because even though it's possible to listen to metal with damaged hearing, I fear that I might go deaf and never be able to enjoy metal again. Whenever I go out during the virus, not only do I wear a face mask but also big industrial earphones because I think the ears are important to protect from the virus too.* Lol! Anyway, I've also had happy moments when listening to metal as an underage teenager, but those were my earlier epic melodic metal days and they're now long gone, though you guys helped me bring a bit of power metal back to my life. My current routine for my home days is filled with metal and a bit of writing. All of my metal is in my computer and a spare hard drive in case it breaks. My computer time is limited but sometimes I go a little overboard. I can't pay full attention when absorbing albums except in special occasions and when I have to, like when I'm writing reviews, so I just take what I think are the greatest hits from each album and somehow be able to absorb them while playing Minecraft.
*(Hey people, ears are part of your face, they need protection too, if you don't want them to be infected! And while you're at it, please start calling the virus COVID-20, don't let the first year that did nothing take all the blame!!)
Well I do have responsibilities, but as a 21-years-old living with his parents, they're not as big as the later part of adulthood when I move out in the future. My time and focus on music is still around. In fact, while I'm still connected to my music, 2020 is indeed a big metal year for me because thanks to all of you in Metal Academy and the site itself, I've discovered way more bands now than I've ever done in the 5+ years before I joined the site, and I never had to make another drastic change of taste. My metal taste range has even been extended to more than my original 30-year limit with a few bands from the 80s, though I'm still don't feel ready for the 80s thrash giants like Metallica, Slayer, or Sepultura. The new releases that I pick up are either some of the best or just not the same as earlier material, but I'm glad to keep building my collection.
In conclusion, the world may be coming down while struggling to get back up during the virus and some people might recognize good resulting benefits while having some setbacks, but in the end, what matters is, our lives are worth appreciating all the same.
And to wrap up this life lesson, in case you're wondering what I'm writing, it's my own personal commentary for this book I got last month, Andrew O'Neill's History of Heavy Metal! I enjoyed reading it so much that I'm writing my own personal commentary for the book, agreeing and disagreeing with Andrew's heavy metal facts and opinions. After I finish my commentary and get some planned album reviews out of my way, I plan on reviewing that book (my first (and possibly the site's first) book review!). Stay tuned...
That's a great message. How are you catering for that while listening to music in your home office if you don't mind me asking? I'm asking for.... a friend.... who is still addicted to loud music despite knowing he's done himself irreparable damage & is not doing himself any good for later life. (That's my story & I'm sticking with it.)
I am fortunate to live in a house big enough for the music I play to be relatively isolated from other spaces in the house so my fiancée isn't disturbed (plus I don't listen to music loudly all that often) and my office is at the side of the house that is not attached to an adjacent property. I have started to try and open my day with an album to stop me logging straight onto my work laptop each day and then also making effort to play an album at the end of my working day to acknowledge that's done and I am out of work mode.
Hey Vinny, it's great to hear a story with some positivity coming out of what has been a completely f***ed up year and I am genuinely made up to hear it. Personally I have had to put up with tinnitus for years, due as much to working in a foundry/rolling mill back in the Eighties when H&S rules were much slacker as it is to standing in front of the bass bins at Motörhead gigs. The consequence for me is that I tend to listen to too much music as it disguises the constant hissing. But I completely recognise where you are coming from when you say you had trouble retaining the music you were listening to, almost as if some connection was lost. Your comment about not trying to keep up with every new release really resonated with me as I am guilty as charged. My theory for this is that like some emaciated smack-head I keep chasing the high of that first time hearing Paranoid, Creeping Death, I Am the Black Wizards or whatever shit it was that blew my mind back in the day and I attack every new album with the relish of a junkie with his first bag of the day, only to be left disappointed more often than not. So, I have decided that I too will abandon, at least for now, this constant chasing of that musical dragon and try to focus on fewer new releases and maybe try to reconnect with some of that music that inspired me so much back in the day. Thanks Vinny for sharing your story and maybe reigniting something I thought I had lost, I am genuinely grateful.
12 months on from this post and I am pleased to say that my office set-up has continued to grow and this has now become less of a work space and more of a den for me as a couple of swords and an axe now adorn the walls and as I have mostly bought vinyl this year I have built up a selection of posters that proudly adorn the walls like it is some teenagers bedroom. It has become my go to place to disconnect from life and calm my soul.
I have still kept up fairly well with releases this year despite me vowing not to do so. I am still eager to disconnect more from keeping on top of current releases as I still fundamentally believe that there is far too much undiscovered music out there that is gathering dust unnecessarily. However, in all honesty quality releases can land from any decade and planning to stay away from the crop of new releases defeats the point of planning to stay on top of them as it just replaces one lot of planning with another.
Swords and axes - the proper wall adornments for any real workplace! I have now managed to get myself ensconced in a shitty little office on my own at work, although I still spend half my time on the shop floor. This allows me to listen to my own music on headphones rather than have to suffer listening to fucking daytime radio all day as headphones aren't allowed on the shop floor - forklifts and all that, don't you know. Looking back to last year's posts I too vowed to listen to less new music and mostly failed, although I have gone from just over 240 new albums in 2020 to just over 140 in 2021. I wouldn't like to stop listening to new music anyway - there were so many great albums released in 2021 - Kanonenfieber, 1914, Ophis, Les Chants de Nihil, Nekromantheon, Skepticism, Body Void, Steel Bearing Hand, Yith, Flight of Sleipnir and many more that I have really enjoyed. Plus, with most of us now running monthly playlists, we gotta keep ahead of the game haven't we? It's just a matter of balance I suppose as there is quite a lot of older stuff I would like to revisit.
Here's my estimated new album search progress in this year and the last:
2020 - 38 new albums
2021 - 46 new albums (about 44% of that amount from September to December)
I hope to level up my metal palate further, so here's to, say, 54 new albums in 2022 for me to enjoy if the number keeps going up at that rate!
My listening habits have had to be adjusted to suit a post-COVID environment. I used to do the majority of my listening while driving to & from work each day but now that I'm working from home as often as not & my kids are at a more demanding age I find that my time for dedicated & active listening has become increasingly valuable. For that reason the last couple of years have seen me steering away from having much structure around what I'll listen to other than committing to exploring the nine monthly feature releases. There's an absolute crap load of releases that I'm very familiar with but have never rated so I do spend a portion of my music time trying to get through those (like I did today with Immortal's "Pure Holocaust" for example) but the rest of my listening time goes to whatever the hell I feel like at the time. Sometimes that will be indulging in my favourite subgenres & others it'll be experimenting outside of my comfort zone to expand my horizons. I don't have any quota for new releases & don't give them any more attention than I do to releases from any other year. In the days when I used to focus much more heavily on new releases I found that it tended to add additional time pressures to listening to metal because I'm a completist by nature. These days I just want to take the time to appreciate what's in front of me rather than always worrying about what's around the corner. My only rule is that I give everything I listen to at least three full & active listens to allow them to sink in properly.