Discord and Rhyme is a podcast where we discuss the albums we love, song by song.
Around the time that I wrote this post, I reached two life milestones that, while mostly unrelated, can’t help but make me think of them in tandem. The first is that I reached the age of 40, a number that has long filled me with some sense of anxiety and dread. The second is that, on my custom-modded iPod Classic, which has a 512 GB SSD hard drive (472 GB available for use), I finally passed the 50% level (236 GB) in filling it with music to listen to.
Read Moreby Ben Marlin
When I talk about Olive Garden pop music, most people know what I mean. They remember restaurant visits where they felt like family; and they can picture the genre's greatest hits, like this one by Frank Sinatra:
"Hey, ring a ding ding, jocko!" ::sharp horn riff:: ::drum fill:: "Get a load of that broad!" ::more horns:: "Las Vegas, baby!"
Read Moreby Mike DeFabio
Look, I fully accept that music streaming is one of the main ways people listen to music now. It’s not going away anytime soon, and I’d rather the industry focus on that than on suing 12-year-olds and grandmothers for ridiculous amounts for downloading a few songs. But I do have a little problem with it becoming the main way people listen to music, and I’m going to try to explain why.
Read Moreby Rich Bunnell
As part of her studies in environmental behavior, my wife (and invisible Discord & Rhyme co-host) Jen researched interest, which is not to say compound interest, but the concept of being interested in things. And though some of what piques a person’s interest is in their genes, it’s just as much a quantum roll of the die. So while I fully plan to be the dad chucking a copy of Remain in Light in the Onion article “Cool Dad Raising Daughter On Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out of Touch With Her Generation,” I know that it’s fully possible my kids will turn on music, because that’s what I did with my dad and cars.
Read Moreby Phil Maddox
Since hosting an episode of Discord And Rhyme about the Grateful Dead a couple weeks ago, I’ve been thinking a lot about live music. The Grateful Dead are considered by a lot of people to be the greatest live band of all time. Plenty of people, however, find their music interminable (to put it mildly) and far prefer the work of bands like, say, The Who - another band I frequently see cited as the “greatest live band of all time.” Both of these bands are fantastic live acts, but they’re extremely different. That got me thinking - what exactly does it mean when people say that a band is “good live”?
Read Moreby Chris Willie Williams
I may be paraphrasing or misremembering entirely, as I cannot locate any corroborating evidence for this memory, but I recall Tara Key of the fine indie-rock band Antietam discussing what she called “the moment” when recording songs. Essentially, she used that term to describe little details in songs that push them from being good enough to great. Moments where something is added or changed in a song and your lizard brain gets goose bumps, turning you into some sort of hybrid reptile/bird creature. (Again, I do not affirm that this is the exact metaphor Key used when defining “the moment.”)
Read MoreAlthough we are not doing a holiday songs episode this year, we didn’t want to leave our listeners without a Discord & Rhyme holiday playlist with which to annoy their relatives! So we’ve each chosen a couple of our favorites and compiled them into a Spotify playlist. We hope you enjoy it, and that you have a lovely holiday season!
Read Moreby Amanda Rodgers
Way back in the dark ages of the Internet, I used to follow the MySpace page of indie-rock band Hem. Dan Messe, their chief songwriter, kept a blog there where he talked about various music-related topics, and the one post I still remember was about the importance of a memorable first line. According to him, a good first line can make or break a song. He favored lines that set a scene or a mood with a few well-chosen words, and was particularly down on tired clichés like “woke up this morning” and all its variants.
Read Moreby Benjamin Marlin
Discord & Rhyme is a podcast where we discuss our favorite albums, song by song. That said, we don't discuss all of our favorite albums. In our travels, we've discovered that some albums carry an episode better than others do.
Read Moreby Dan Watkins
For a number of years, I’ve found myself strangely fascinated by the world of what I affectionately refer to as audiophile nonsense. It’s an interest that I generally observe from a distance, though, as I frankly do not have the sort of income required to truly indulge in a hobby as expensive as hi-fi audio. Nonetheless, I enjoy flipping through catalogs of pricey audiophile equipment the way some guys do car magazines. I get a kick out of seeing the extravagant lengths some people are willing to go to make sure that Aja sounds just right in their dedicated listening chamber. It’s insane and ridiculous, but what if they’re onto something?
Read Moreby John McFerrin
“What grade should I give this album?” This question has been asked by all of the members of the Discord & Rhyme family at some point in our lives; as mentioned many times in our episodes, we all first became aware of each other through a collection of Web 1.0 music review sites where the writers gave grades to various albums with supporting text to accompany them. Some of these sites graded on a scale of 1-10, some used star ratings (up to *****), and some used letter grades. Since these sites generally accepted reader comments, it became regular practice to include our own proposed rating for a given album in addition to our own written thoughts. Later, at some point or another, most of us went through the process of writing our own reviews and providing our own grades, some within the context of a collective site (i.e. Music Junkies Anonymous), and some within the context of our very own review sites (e.g. CosmicBen’s Record Reviews, The Disclaimer Music Review Archive, John McFerrin’s Reviews of Music). Each of us in turn chose our own scale to use; most followed the typical 1-10 approach; Will used letter grades; and I eventually shifted to using hexadecimal (base-16), a rating system that makes perfect sense to me but is an acquired taste for others.
Read Moreby Mike DeFabio
I like to get really meticulous with how I tag the music on my computer. I use the sort artist field to sort solo artists by last name. I scan the cover art myself if what I get from a quick image search is too low-res. It’s really satisfying when I get everything tagged and sorted just the way I like it. But I never touch the genre tag.
Read Moreby Rich Bunnell
Amanda recently wrote an excellent blog post about her realization that she experiences synesthesia, a perceptual phenomenon where people’s senses overlap with one another. I’m a synesthete as well, and I wanted to write my own post, both to illustrate that different people experience the phenomenon in remarkably different ways, and because I’ve been aware of my own synesthesia for more than a decade, and this awareness has subtly shaped how I experience the world and especially music for quite a while.
Read Moreby Chris Willie Williams
A lot of my colleagues here have written about how their parents' specific musical taste and collections acted as a starting pistol for their lifelong musical geekiness. I can't say the music my own parents liked was necessarily was a catalyst for my music gluttony (though I do admit to an enduring fondness for Hall & Oates). However, they wholly supported my obsession with music. Mom and Dad would drive me to bookstores to purchase album guides, so I'd know where to start my journey. (The Trouser Press Guide to '90s Rock was essential to me, and the SPIN Alternative Record Guide is far more informative than you'd think.) Once I then had a plan of action, they'd happily drive me to record stores so I could look through the CDs with the intense focus of a crime scene investigator. They were also willing to often listen to my albums in the car when we were riding around. They may not have shared my particular taste—they like R.E.M., but They Might Be Giants drove them positively garanimals—but Dad and Mom understood it.
Read Moreby Phil Maddox
I’ve been a huge music nerd for literally as long as I can remember. My parents and family played music constantly and I’ve always ravenously consumed as much music as I could. Ultimately, though, if you want to get into more music, recommendations from friends and family are only going to get you so far. You’ll eventually need to branch out and start finding stuff on your own. These days, this is mostly accomplished via YouTube, Spotify, and various other streaming services - learning about new music that you’re curious about is unbelievably easy. Back in the nineties, however, it was considerably more difficult. You largely had to depend on a combination of taking chances on stuff you heard on the radio, a small handful of blogs, and professional music critics.
Read Moreby Amanda Rodgers
If you’ve been listening to Discord & Rhyme for a while, you’ve probably heard me and Rich talk about synesthesia. That is the difficult-to-explain situation where your five senses get their wires crossed; in other words, sounds have shapes, or days of the week have colors, or any number of other strange combinations.
Read Moreby Benjamin Marlin
"Criticism", by definition, sounds like it should be negative. The word brings to mind bitter keyboard jockeys who couldn't make it in the arts and, consequently, pledged to burn it all down. (If you're David Lee Roth, it also brings to mind a bunch of guys who look like Elvis Costello.)
Read Moreby John McFerrin
As of July 2019, “John McFerrin’s Reviews of Music” (otherwise known as “John McFerrin’s Rock and Prog Reviews”) has existed in some form for 20 years (initial writing began in late July, and the site first went public, with a whopping 4 artist pages, in October, 2019). The site has grown slowly but steadily from humble beginnings into something I am genuinely proud of, and it has served as a gateway for me to many personal connections I would otherwise not have (not least of which are the other members of Discord & Rhyme). In commemoration of this anniversary, I wish to tell the story (a story that I have most definitely not told in public previously) of why I began this site in the first place, and why I continued with it despite every opportunity to discard it.
Read Moreby Dan Watkins
I tend to credit my parents with unintentionally guiding me down my path of music obsession. In the dark, cold days before the internet and Spotify, their record collection was an invaluable resource that fed and educated my musical fixation. Their extensive collection established the basis of my musical palate. For instance, if I’ve ever made your eyes glaze over while talking about Frank Zappa, you can place the blame squarely on my dad. My parents' music library did have one major shortcoming: Aside from a few exceptions, their collection basically ended right around 1980. It turns out this was fairly representative of their taste overall, as they generally have very little to say about music from the 1980s and beyond. By their early 30s, current music had seemingly ceased to be a major concern for them, and most of their everyday listening consisted of music from their youth. In fairness, I can imagine that staying on top of new music trends might become a low priority once you’re busy raising two kids, working full-time jobs, paying a mortgage, and tending to other grown-up responsibilities that are supposedly more important than the new Killdozer album.
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