Terrestrial Radio

There’s a local radio station out here called the SoCal Sound. It’s an independent station, one that I’ve found plays a little of everything. There’ll be 80s standards one moment, contemporary hits the next, and then Mexican indie after that. It’s an eclectic assortment and it’s fun to have someone else pick from a variety of music that’s not just the biggest hits of the moment. Sometimes I’ll hear something I know, sometimes I’ll hear a song and decide I need to buy the band’s album, and sometimes I’ll hear a song I now love and I’ll probably never hear again.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I can check their website to see what song just played (no more hoping for the DJ to say the name of the song) and despite Metallica’s best efforts, I can very easily get ahold of a song on the internet. But I don’t always do that, and sometimes, a song comes and goes, probably never to be heard again.

It feels like an odd thing, in this digital age. I listen to music from an iTunes collection I’ve had for over fifteen years — some of my MP3s are old enough to vote. If I branch out to Pandora I can see what was put on my playlist. Everything’s there, I can listen to whatever I want whenever I want. And if I hear something, I can listen to it again.

So it feels oddly freeing, listening to the radio. There’s a bit of letting go there, letting someone else take the reins and being along for the ride. Which, on the one hand, yeah, plenty of people still listen to the radio, I’m just the terminally online millennial dipping his toe out of the cyber-pool. At the same time, though, deciding to let a song be a song and not feel the need to add it to the library or file it away somewhere for future listening is almost rebellious in this modern age of add-to-playlist. 

Maybe this is risking turning into another one of my luddite-be-in-the-moment rants essays, maybe I’m thinking about being willing to not need to ‘own’ something, to be able to experience it and let that be enough. Or maybe I turned the radio on the other day and thought about how it’s different than shuffling through my iTunes. In any case, the SoCal Sound’s been playing a bunch of 70s soul while I’ve been writing this and it’s been a lot of fun to listen to it. Whether I try and listen to Michael James Kirkland again in the future is anyone’s guess, but right now, I’m enjoying it.