Drum Fill # 2

"Hook in her Head" by Throwing Muses

Among my hobbies freshman year of college was going down rabbit holes on Allmusic.com. I’d read a band biography and then peruse the “similar artists” and “influences” tabs, clicking through dozens of artists a day. Napster and Audio Galaxy were up and running, but I had my reservations about the ol’ bit-torrent thing, and anyway the stuff I was looking for wasn’t always available. So I was pretty much just stuck writing down dozens of band names in a cloth-bound notebook. I sorted them by ill-defined genre categories and hoped to stumble upon the music via libraries or friends or all the other ways we used to find things before the internet dominated all media consumption and information transmission. (Some good friend recs of that era: thanks, David J, for Porcupine Tree’s Lightbulb Sun, and to Katie G for introducing me to Roxy Music.)

One of those scrawled band names was Throwing Muses. But it wouldn’t be until 2008 or 2009 that I would get a chance to hear them, when I noticed a burned CD of their 1991 album The Real Ramona left near the stereo in the basement kitchen of the Portland restaurant where I worked in those days. The name hadn’t stopped rattling in my mind as a curiosity that whole time, so I glanced around and furtively slipped it into a spare CD case and took it home. (I’ve since learned that this burned CD belonged to one Mike Payne. Thanks, Mike! I’ve loved this band ever since I heard the first notes and you leaving that compact disc lying around is the whole reason why).

Also, holy shit, remember CDs? Remember how amazing it felt to be able to skip tracks with the press of a button? That was incredible at the time. Like, the height of listening convenience. I think those of us who live comfortably in the first world probably have way more convenience than is healthy. And data. Way too much fucking data. But that’s a whole other piece.