New Music 2017 - Part 35 - Angelina - Vagabond Saint

This follows from my previous post in that I realise sometimes it takes new music time to reveal itself to me. This is a more extreme case in that I first heard it almost a year ago. It has more recently become a a go-to album especially when I find myself in a somewhat ambivalent mood. There is something about it that works for me. That mood is not actually the case just now and probably why I have finally seen my way around to writing about it.

Vagabond Saint - Angelina (WONDERFULSOUND, 2 December 2016). D/l & vinyl.

Vagabond Saint - Angelina:

• Dark Heart 
• Rose Cascade 
• Mandolin Man
• I Don't Cry 
• January Butterfly
• Prayers and Grace
• Vagabond Saint
• Smokes Like A Dream
• Manola
• Wild Cloud
• Sometimes

It's soulful, smoky, southern, pastoral and she wrote the songs too. The artist comes from the nearest that the UK has to an island in the delta, the Isle of Wight, but don't let that put you off.  Had I found it in time last year it would have been on my year-end list. That it was released when it was is a great commitment to the fact that fine new releases no longer stop at the start of November in fawning to the 'don't-offend-anyone' Christmas market fare of decades past.

It is better to buy (or give, or be given) an album you love and an album you detest than end up with two albums that don't evoke much response either way. 

Aside from the music that I write about, what else am I listening to?

Inspired by a number of inquiries over time, this is a start on answering that question and perhaps it will also provide an insight (for I am not entirely sure about this myself) into the means by which this comes about. One thing that I am sure about is that I have no science, and certainly no formula, for this. The vagaries of each individual human mind are at least for now still way beyond that level of analysis - and indeed I hope they long remain so.

Curiosity, serendipity and sometimes (possibly skewed) memories are the watchwords here. Of course a modest physical music collection allied to the vast resources now available via streaming help with this.
Many of the artists below I have mentioned before; what lead me to choose them for this list and in this order is not remotely clear to me except to say that "it seemed to make sense". There is one thing that I do know and it is that the search for music, new or simply new to me, is addictive:



It is likely nothing other than the advantage of the perspective provided by middle-age, as applied to the teenage-pastime of compiling cassette mix-tapes, combined with the advances in technology that have made the creation and sharing such things possible in a way that at the former time we would never have believed would be possible in our own lifetime.

If you don't like my choices then that is just fine by me and I am always open to comment and criticism. If anyone finds something hereby that leads them into pastures new then that is everything that I could hope for. This is quite simply music I like at the moment and, starting point and a couple of others aside, of fairly recent vintage. I'm minded that 'An anthology of songs #3' will be a retrospective affair by comparison.

Playlists are like blogging in many ways in that they are is widely available (if you are in a 'free' country and that is a proviso that I much regret that I need to mention). If "shared" social media that has no trace of of that individual's user-generated content, or even their comments on material by others, riles (or roils) then you should do something about it.

Write, publish, use the Oxford comma, and be damned!

Thoughts on music - is this really true?

This isn't a rant but the premise is something that made me think.
It doesn't annoy me in the slightest but made me consider how I now perceive music the way I do. And why that might be so.
This post on The Line of Best Fit got me started because it doesn't fit my experience at all. I will soon turn turn fifty and yet now I listen to not only more music but a wider variety of music, both new and old, than I ever did  - as a teenager or any time in between - and I estimate by an order of magnitude, so statistically significant. In part that is because I can but that does not mean that that I would do so if I did not wish to do so. Indeed I am rather proactive about finding new music rather than simply waiting for it to be served up to me by the industry and established media. Again this is something I rarely if ever attempted back when I was younger. Is this largely peer group pressure and the fact that as we get older, and in general terms more self-assured, it influences us less?

Let's look more closely at what the primary research implies. I will start with this graph:

On the face of it the indication is that I am just an exception to the rule. Another is that I  and many others are listening to "cool" (contemporary) music but also a whole lot more other "uncool" music as well?  This chart does not tell us that, and conveniently stops at age 48. I assume that means that I am regarded as a "dead" listener now.
Strange then that I am writing this. The rest of the survey is interesting not least because it seems to indicate that females' taste in music ages much less quickly than that of males. Interesting though it is I suggest that it might be influenced by factors that are not the headlines - the data is based on US Spotify streaming. What if females are more inclined to use Spotify more often than males, and possibly at different ages, as just one example?
There could well be very legitimate reasons for that to be true; this study tells us absolutely nothing about them.
The certainty is that a lot of money depends on divining the real trends in music consumption and the demographics of it. Importantly, and this must be true given long-standing trends, that it will vary dramatically from country to country, which is something else that the above survey, quite transparently, makes no attempt to address.