(The “enjoying music” part is critical, I think. It means you actively enjoy the act of hearing and responding to music, even when you don’t enjoy the music itself; not that you simply enjoy everything you hear. The opposite of this would be for listening to become a chore. That happens sometimes; it has a lot to do with personal things beyond the state of whatever music worlds you favor. Music writers tend to have or make a lot of listening time, and looking forward to filling it in is key to enjoying the doing of the work. And listening is work; meanings shift, and as we’re learning from the newly remastered versions of Sgt. Pepper and Purple Rain, even the sounds of recordings we know under our skin can change too. Enjoying music is being alive to it, and that can mean anything from new album-new album-new album monitoring to living inside a favorite couple of albums for a month. There’s no right way of doing it except doing it.)
(The “learning” part is something that took a long time to really understand–when I was younger I had a programmatic view of things like I’d see later on from younger writers, e.g. the guy who informed me on FB around 2007 that it was “my job” to have an opinion about a given Wilco album. No, it isn’t–which isn’t to say that someday I won’t go back and, in fact, form opinions on every Wilco album. We all get to change our minds, our habits, our methodologies; not doing so is a little inhuman, at least in the post-digital age. But what was most short-sighted of me was not realizing that the music I already love has more to teach me, more to impart–it has not even begun to do those things, in fact, because our relationship with what we listen to really is so personal, so private in some ways, that even people who talk about what they listen to publicly can only express a certain amount of what they get from it. There are things we’ll never be able to express publicly about the things we love; some of them are beyond us, some are embarrassing, some are holy. Chances are the things that move us most do so for all of those reasons, and their importance shifts with the years and with context. That’s the stuff you keep learning–even beyond the newly encountered or plain new things that teach you what you’d never know otherwise.)
annaxmalina
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