I'll Never Know If My Taste in Music Is Good. And That's the Point.

I saw a video once — one of those street interview things — where a guy with a microphone asks strangers: "Do you think you have good taste in music?"

Every single person winced. Like he'd asked them to solve differential equations on camera.

"Good" is such a useless word. It's the vanilla pudding of adjectives. There's too much music, too many metrics, too many lists pretending to be objective truth. And anyway — good according to whom? Pitchfork? Your Spotify Wrapped? That guy in college who made you feel small?

I stopped asking "Is my taste good?" about five years ago.

I started asking: "Am I still curious enough to be surprised?"

The answer to that one matters more. Because you can work with curiosity. You can chase it. There's always another artist nobody's heard of. Always a song with seven listens. Always a band with a dumber, more interesting origin story than the last one.

I can't promise my taste in music is "good." I can promise it's strange. I listen to everything. Pastoral British folk that sounds like field recordings from a ghost's bedroom. The obscure solo work of someone's sideman. Ambient instrumental music from a band with a completely fabricated backstory (I don't care which one).

This doesn't win me the aux cable at parties. But it makes me comfortable in the dark. Makes me an explorer instead of a consumer.

If you're looking for music that goes somewhere — I mean really somewhere, not just "more of the same" — I made a playlist called Rest of My Life.

It's full of rich auditory landscapes. Incongruous melodies that shouldn't work but do. Lyricism vague enough that you can pour yourself into it.

Some of these artists have fascinating histories (or so I've heard). Some of them might be entirely made up. Honestly? That's half the fun.

Put this on during your morning coffee. During a long walk when you're tired of your own thoughts. During those 3 a.m. moments when you need to feel less alone in the universe.

It spans decades. Styles shift from classical to ambient to underground alternative to things I don't have words for. Artists like Durutti Column, Personal Effects, Deux Filles, Virginia Astley, Maurice Deebank, Susumu Yokota, Soft Location, System Olympia.

The point isn't that this is "the best music." The point is that it's real. These people made something and put it out into the world. And somehow, it survived.

Durutti Column's "Sketch for Summer" recently appeared on The Bear — suddenly everyone wanted to know about it. But the song that started everything for me was "The Rest of My Life." Just that title. Just that commitment to showing up, again and again, for something that doesn't trend.

That's the kind of taste I want to have.

Not good. Just awake.