Is there anything as crunchy as discovering something new and special before everybody else finds out about it? Crunchy is a word my daughters use to describe anything that makes you feel amazingly great. It's hard to explain.
As great as it is to be living at a time when information is harder to avoid than it is to find, truly 'discovering' something before it becomes a mainstream staple is almost impossible. Some people are better at discovering great new stuff than others, but you always have to wonder if they really discovered what they said they did, or did they just find it online before you heard about it?
With all respect to Mr. Columbus, I would suggest that being a true Discoverer in the year 2009 is much more difficult than it was back in 1492.
I'm sure you can relate to how crunchy it feels to discover new music before you read about it in People, or see the band on TMZ, or before you read a blog about them.
It happened for me with Coldplay a few years ago when I was driving around, trying to find a nice gift for my youngest daughter who was 14 at the time. The gift wasn't for a birthday or any special occasion. You'd have to be a dad with teenage daughters to understand, but I was simply looking for something to show her how much I loved her at a time when we were growing apart. No drama, just the reality of what happens when little girls turn into young women and dads start feeling insecure about it. I was driving, racking my brain, trying to think of a gift that would make a teenage girl think her dad was ... crunchy.
So while I'm in this highly emotional state, I hear Chris Martin being interviewed on the radio, talking about the single by his band Coldplay from the album Parachutes. I'd never heard of Chris Martin or Coldplay up to that moment. The band was in Toronto to play some small room on their first Canadian tour, and they had stopped by the radio station for an interview. The announcer never mentioned the name of the song, something DJs are famous for ... it just began playing ... and like everybody else who ended up hearing Yellow in the weeks and months that followed, I loved it.
If I tell you that I cried while hearing the song for the first time, it wasn't only because of the heart-wrenching chord progressions ... it was because my daughter's favorite thing in the whole world is the color yellow.
I'll tell you how great that discovery was. The kid at Best Buy didn't even know who Coldplay was.
It happened again two weeks ago. I had run out to the convenience store to pick up my wife's favorite apple fritter, and a song came on the radio that was so fresh sounding, so original and beautiful, that I couldn't get out of the truck until it ended. I'd never heard the song before and surprise, surprise, the DJ didn't mention the name of the song OR the artist. I manage radio stations and have never fired a DJ for this, but I still might someday. Anyway I knew that what I had just heard was very special.
The next day I was in my favorite music store to buy some drum sticks, and my drum guy starts telling me about this kid from a little town about 40 miles away who recorded this song in his basement about his insomnia, and how while he was up at night he would share his originals with anybody and everybody he could reach via MySpace and Facebook, and how Universal Records had signed the kid, and on and on. My drum guy always has a new story about something so I was only half listening.
Then this past week my music director walks into my office, hands me a cd and says, "you gotta hear this." I can't tell you how great it feels to have discovered "Fireflies" by Owl City.
The fact that Adam Young happens to live only 40 miles away makes this one of the best discoveries ever! http://www.owlcitymusic.com/
