The past is a grotesque animal,
And in its eyes you see
How completely wrong,
You can be
- Of Montreal

I’ve decided to sell my old mini disc player. This isn’t really a big deal. I haven’t touched the thing for two years, and that was only to move it into my new house. But, since the weather got warm last weekend, Erin and I decided to do a little feels-like-spring cleaning. We now have an ebay pile.

I took the time today to go through each of the 77 mini discs that I owned to erase them and white out their labels. Lets just say it was an interesting look back at some of the music I was listening to in the late 90’s and early 00’s. I’ve always been the person who is looking for discovering music that people haven’t heard of before, and apparently at this point in my life, that lead me down the punk/hard rock route.

I thought punk was fun, and enjoyed a type of music where chord structures were so simple that you really had to kick it up a notch with lyrics – at least that’s what I think I was thinking. The hard stuff? Well, I was an adolescent, and this was the time when acts like Korn (ugh) and Limp Bizkit (double ugh) were getting solid airplay.

So how did I get from there to here? Honestly, I think a lot of it had to do with bands that friends passed on to me – Sunny Day Real Estate, The Get Up Kids, and Jimmy Eat World combined with this new-fangled thing called high-speed internet, allowed me to branch out and explore.

Eventually, collecting music became a hobby of mine and I wanted to share. That’s why I’m here, writing for a rarely-visited blog that gets most of its traffic from facebook. Actually, I’m not sure where most of my traffic comes from – the daily statistic collector has been broken since mid-December. I should really get that looked at.

Reading back on this post, this sounds like the type of post that I would use for my one-year anniversary of this blog (February 6th for those of you keeping track). Oh well, maybe I’ll just copy and paste it then. Or maybe I’ll be ironic and take the day off. Then you can explain to me that I don’t understand irony (true).

Today’s song comes from my first new album of the new year. It is by a band/guy called Wisely, which is short for Willy Wisely, the Minneapolis native, who has been making music since 1989. Based on the bands that I listen to, that is an old-timer. First impressions? The album starts out strong, has a couple of weak songs in the 3-5 range, but picks it up again towards the end. Check out the opening track, On My Way. I think his voice sounds a lot like the lead singer of Barenaked Ladies in this song.