For me, it means music of the mid- to late-80s has a hold on my soul. It explains the 80s hair band playlist that’s on heavy rotation in my Spotify catalogue. It explains why even though nothing about my personality or appearance suggests that I would like a song like Whitney Houston’s 1987 hit, “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me), it floods my brain with head bob-inducing pleasure chemicals every time I hear it in the grocery store or wherever.

Research also indicates that most people tend to stop seeking new music (for life!) in their early 20s, which explains why my knowledge of pop music between roughly 1980 and 2000 is borderline encyclopedic (and thanks to my older brother and parents, pretty solid between 1950 and 1980), but it falls off a cliff from 2000 forward (with the exception of a few years between 2000 and 2003 when I managed a record store and heard everything whether I wanted to or not).

This all got me thinking about 1) what I may have missed and 2) my lost habit of listening to entire albums from start to finish in a single sitting instead of cherrypicking one song at a time. Loathe as I am to use AI for anything, I decided it could probably handle a request to compile a list of the top 100 albums of this century, based on critic’s reviews from around the internet. And sure enough, all but around 10 of the recommendations were albums I had heard very little of or never heard at all. It was daunting initially that the list was pop, rap, and R&B heavy because my listening (and music making) tastes do lean toward guitar-based rock, but then I remembered that my first concert as an impressionable 12-year-old was Bobby Brown on the Don’t Be Cruel tour, and I settled down. I grew up listening to my mom’s Motown records, my brother’s copy of ABBA’s Greatest Hits, and Prince’s 1999 was one of the first records I owned. This could represent a return to my mainstream roots!

First on the list was Beyonce’s 2016 album Lemonade. Before listening to this record, the entirety of my take on Beyonce was that she had great stage presence during a SuperBowl halftime show and impressive dancing ability. I also thought she seemed like a pretty good actor in the few things I had seen. I didn’t think much of her as a musician, based mostly on ignorance.

I played the record first on a long car trip and came away disappointed. Aside from the super-catchy track Sorry, and a collaboration with The Weeknd called 6 Inch, I just wasn’t into it, but something told me to give it a second chance—a closer listen with headphones—and I am glad I did.

Turns out, it’s a really good album! Maybe not something I’ll go back to all that often, but strong nonetheless. Pray You Catch Me is a perfectly placed opening track. The quiet, almost whispered vocals and the spare orchestration force you to lean in and listen closely, and the abrupt ending of the final solitary string chord creates a cliffhanger-like sense that a story is about to unfold. Generally, it’s the quieter and more sonically spacious moments I appreciate most on the record because they bring you up close and personal with Beyonce’s voice. For whatever reason (simple lack of exposure, I guess), I had underestimated her singing ability. From the intricate phrasing and breathy falsetto of Love Drought to the beautifully-imperfect, soulful balladry of Sandcastles, she proves herself an emotionally impactful and versatile singer.

Among the more uptempo tunes, I like Sorry for its simplicity and sense of humor. It’s all percussive hi-hat and bouncy vocal melody, and it doesn’t need anything more to keep you bobbing your head and hanging on every word. All Night is also a favorite for its groovy bass and old school horns chorus.

Collaborative songs with Jack White (Don’t Hurt Yourself) and Kendrick Lamar (Freedom) leave me with the impression that they tried breathing life into the album’s weaker tracks by featuring famous guest musicians, and aside from the old-timey jazz horn opening of Daddy Lessons, I could do without that song entirely. I just can’t stomach most music that fuses pop and country. It’s a personal preference thing.

Generally, and at the risk of sounding pretty damn creepy, what I enjoyed most about this album, and came away wanting more of, was quiet moments with Beyonce. In other words, the strongest songs were those that put her extraordinary voice up front and left quiet spaces in the arrangements for the music to groove and breathe. Guest appearances and busier, more sonically dense tracks tended to distract from the album’s greatness. Legions of Beyonce fans will not likely be surprised that I came away simply wanting more Beyonce.

What 21st century album should this 20th century man listen to next? For ideas, consult this Rolling Stone list, ask the dumb AI, or in a shocking twist, rely entirely on your own expansive brain. Either way, let me know in the comments!

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How about guitar-driven, synth-tinged, multi-hyphenated indie rock music? Listen to Giants of Diving (a.k.a. Craig Patrick, a.k.a. me) on your favorite streaming service or via the Giants of Diving web page.

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The rock band of the moment is Geese, a five-piece indie rock group from Brooklyn, New York, fronted by critical darling Cameron Winter, a songwriter who, at age 23, has already drawn comparisons to legends like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Lou Reed. Geese’s latest album, Getting Killed, appeared at or near the top of every imaginable 2025 best of list, they have an intensely devoted fan base, and they’ve drawn almost exclusively fawning critical praise, at least until their recent appearance on the dying animal that is NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Their performance prompted a flurry of clickbait-style articles proclaiming them “the worst SNL musical guest of all time” or words to that effect. It’s precisely the kind of histrionic, negative (always negative) statement the internet specializes in, and as far as I can tell, it was based mainly (if not entirely) on anonymous social media comments.

Predictably, a series of response articles in defense of the band followed. Everybody took their turn feeding the algorithm their share of content (feeding the machine being the purpose of the original negative comments anyway), and in the end, an already overpublicized band received even more publicity, prompting me to consider the possibility that Geese, or their representatives, may have planted the initial negative social media comments as a marketing move in the first place.

All predictable internet nonsense aside, my take on Geese is simple: they’re sort of an interesting band. In the context of the current musical landscape, they have a unique sound. There are some goods songs on Getting Killed, and on the songs that aren’t great, there are nonetheless some compelling musical moments. The level of critical praise they’ve received is an overblown function of the internet’s ceaseless need of something—anything—to talk about, and comparisons to rock legends like Dylan or Lou Reed are premature to the point of absurdity.

That said, I get it. There is clearly a huge audience of listeners from Gen Z to Gen X who are starved for live-sounding electric rock and roll music, and Geese is one of the few bands going that fills that void. Their music is loud, shambling, and aggressive, and that’s exactly the dynamic their fans crave. Rock music isn’t supposed to be orderly and free of mistakes, its sound compressed to even out all the rough edges. It’s supposed to be assertive and extreme, to sound like it could fly apart into chaos at any moment, but somehow—by the sheer force of a great band’s will—it does not. Rock and roll should be noisy, kinetic, and rebellious. Geese’s SNL performance captured some of that brash rock and roll spirit, and I loved it. It rekindled my interest in the band.

Above all else, I was turned on by how little they seemed to care what anyone might think of them, which tipped me off to another void in the musical landscape they must be filling. They sounded raw and angry, and given the sociopolitical climate, the destruction of Gaza, the rising violence by federal agents against our citizens in Minnesota and elsewhere, the stranglehold tech giants have on our attention, and the current administration’s attempts to roll back 50+ years of American social progress, why wouldn’t they be? It led me to wonder, where are all the angry musicians anyway? Where are the political stances and the social criticism? Maybe I’m a spoiled product of excessive 90s rock star disaffection, but shouldn’t we be hearing more rage-filled voices in the music world now than at almost any time in recent history? Geese may not be overtly political, but at least they sound vaguely pissed off, and that’s better than nothing.

I’ll leave you with this: I miss seriously pissed off musicians. We need angry voices railing against the system. We need music that stands for something other than itself. We need distortion and feedback. We need rock and roll attitude. We need cantankerous rockers like Lou Reed, giving clipped sarcastic answers to tedious interview questions. Modern music is stagnant and toothless. I don’t know if we need Geese, but at least they’re something.

Pop Overload

I’m not a snob about pop music. I’ve never considered it inferior to music that’s labeled alternative or underground, even as my listening tastes have trended more in the direction of lesser-known artists over time. I grew up on—and still love—pop music of the 1980s. It would be hypocritical of me to write off current pop music entirely without giving it a chance. Besides, I like discovering and being surprised by new music, so I use my three young adult stepchildren as a conduit to what’s happening.

There are flashes of interest in what they play for me. Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish, for example, are both talented songwriters with undeniable gifts for melody and surprisingly sophisticated lyrics (considering their ages). I like some of their songs. Unfortunately though, most of what I hear leaves me cold. Sometimes, it’s because the songs are too obviously derivative or just plain poorly constructed, but just as often, I’ve found it difficult to say exactly what it is I don’t like. All I can come up with sometimes is that it’s just… bad. For a while, I chalked my criticism up to age. I figured I must simply be yet another out-of-touch old guy, grumbling about how much better music used to be. But lately, I’ve been thinking it has a lot to do with the way modern pop music is recorded, which brings me back to my first paragraph.

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There is a major trend in popular music recording of overloading songs with too many ideas. Because technology has made it so quick and easy for artists to add every fleeting idea to a song, as it occurs to them, in the form of unlimited track space, that’s exactly what is happening. The result is music that is packed—and packed tightly (using an audio effect called compression)—with countless mediocre ideas. I’ll spare you a detailed explanation of compression because I barely understand it myself, but in essence, compression evens out the volume of a song, making the loud parts quieter and the quiet parts louder, thereby making it possible to hear all of the parts in a dense song mix with more clarity. Sounds good, right? And it is, until you take it too far and heavily compress a song consisting of over a hundred tracks. The human ear can only take in so many sounds at once. That is the problem I encounter with a lot of modern pop music. There is no breathing space in the recordings. They are too densely packed with sound.

Negative = Positive

In visual art, the term negative space is used to define the parts of an image that surround the primary subject(s). It’s the blue sky that surrounds the cloud, the white background that defines the black silhouette of a face in profile. Without negative space, there are no outlines, no borders, nothing to offer the eye focus and rest, and ultimately, there is no meaning. The same is true for music. In music the negative space is silence. It’s the quiet spaces that give a song structure. Without silence there is no balance. Without a little space between the notes, there is no harmony.

New ideas pop into musician’s heads constantly in the process of recording songs. That’s always been the case. The trick is in the editing, in taking the time to choose the best ideas, the ideas that truly enhance a song. It takes trial and error, repeated listening, and ideally, interaction with other musicians to determine what those best ideas are, and to put aside the ideas that, while they might sound promising at first, actually detract from what makes a song work.

Which brings me to my final point. Producing good music demands taking your time. Dreaming up melodies, writing intelligent, moving lyrics, these things require time spent with your instrument, time spent living a life of observation and introspection, so you have something meaningful to write about when the time comes, something that resonates with other humans. Not to mention the time spent arranging the instrumental parts of a song, and the labor of recording and mixing. But the internet, where most music lives these days, thrives on speed. It demands to be fed content, relentlessly. If you want the algorithm to move you up the list of who gets noticed, you’d better produce more songs, faster. It’s a factory mentality. Quantity over quality. More songs jammed with more and more tracks. More data for the machine.

Despite the trends, it is sort of incredible (if not a little sad), that there is still plenty of good music out there on the internet, waiting to be heard. It won’t come to you; you have to be willing to look for it, and I suppose therein lies the problem. You have to want it enough to look past what the algorithm serves you. I don’t think that’s a step most people are motivated to take right now, but I’m hoping for a change.

My friends were into superheroes growing up. They collected comic books and wore t-shirts with Superman, Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk. My brother’s heroes were baseball players. He collected their cards: George Brett, Eddie Murray, Rickey Henderson. He amassed a complete set in 1980. Every player.

My superhero was Prince.

On Christmas in 1982, I was gifted my first two record albums—American Fool by John Cougar and Prince’s 1999. They were a study in contrasts both musically and visually. John Cougar looked like guys from my rural hometown—young white guys in work boots and denim who worked on farms or in the hunting rifle factory where my dad made his living. Looking like a regular blue-collar guy—that was his thing.

Prince, on the other hand, appeared otherworldly. Like a comic book character, he wore costumes, patent leather boots and floor-length (cape-like) jackets. He was possessed with musical superpowers and shrouded in mystery. In his record sleeve photos, he was surrounded by smoke, as if moments before the photo was taken, he had materialized out of thin air.

Until the end, Prince’s mystical aura never stopped expanding, from his infamous Love Symbol name change to rumors of a secret stockpile of unreleased recordings to reports of his innate ability to pick up any instrument and play it like a virtuoso.

In my favorite television interview with Prince, he claimed he never wore a watch or kept a clock in his house. The interviewer asked how he managed to navigate the practicalities of daily living without keeping track of the time.

Prince’s response: “I keep track by the truth.”

There was only one Prince, and that's as it should be. Most of us don't lead lives that allow us to ignore the time—at least not all the time. But it comforts me to know that someone lived that way—or at least tried to.

When I learned that Prince had died of an accidental opiate overdose in 2016, a little of what remained of my innocence—my childlike capacity to believe in magic—died along with him. But I am grateful.

I didn’t know I had any of that innocence left.

My listening habits lean toward lesser-known artists. Take any super-famous current pop star, (Taylor Swift, for example) and experience tells me that if you’re motivated enough to look around, you can always find a more obscure artist who does more or less what they do, but better. And there are iconic songwriters—Dylan, Springsteen, the Beatles—that I idolize as much as anyone, but I have heard and dissected their work so exhaustively that my ears tend to want something fresh when it comes to casual listening. It’s a habit that has led to the discovery of new songwriting heroes, people you may not be familiar with, like Richard Buckner or Patty Griffin. But every now and then, I find that my quest for the new has caused me to disregard—to take for granted—a particular widely-admired artist’s contributions. Such is the case with Paul Simon.

For as long as I can remember, I have enjoyed analyzing song structure. I like breaking down a song’s parts, observing how they are connected, and determining what is it about a particular turn of phrase or melody that makes a song special. Beyond the obvious importance of writing memorable lyrics and melodies, it turns out that the key element is surprise. The best songs establish melodic patterns, repeat them, and just when you expect to hear them repeated yet again, interrupt the pattern with a surprising element of change. These changes come in many forms: an altered vocal melody, a layer of harmony, a countermelody (second melody line), a rhythmic or key change, etc. Sometimes the changes are dramatic enough to sound like a series of little songs patched together, think the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” or Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” But I’m more interested in the power of smaller, subtle surprises, like the eerie line of guitar feedback added to the last verse of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or the little minor chord shift that starts the third chorus of “There She Goes” by The La’s (arguably the catchiest pop song ever recorded).

Most songwriters have their strengths and weaknesses. Some rely heavily on extraordinary lyrics to get their songs across and are lighter on melody. Others are gifted at writing unforgettable melodies and have to work much harder to stretch beyond cliché in their lyrics. Paul Simon is equally brilliant at both, in addition to being a master of the subtle and surprising change.

I have never heard a musician explain the importance of surprising the listener as eloquently as he does in this clip:

Simon talks in the video about—having repeated a pattern twice in a song—the importance of changing it the third time around. My favorite illustration of this comes in the third verse of “Slip Slidin’ Away.” Instead of simply repeating the middle register, conversational vocal opening established in the first two verses (“I know a man…”, I know a woman…”), he grabs our attention by starting verse three on a new and higher note (i.e., “I know a father who had a son…”). After that first line, the verse resumes repetition of the original melody, but the slightly altered start carries enough weight to keep us hanging on every word that comes next. Here’s the track (verse three starts at around 2:08):

It’s also worth looking closely at those third verse lyrics:

I know a father who had a son

He longed to tell him all the reasons for the things he’d done

He came a long way just to explain

He kissed his boy as he lay sleeping then he turned around and headed home again

It’s direct, relatable, and charged with emotion, like a pivotal scene in a dramatic movie. The song’s other verses possess a similar emotional resonance. Few artists have captured the basics of the human condition: love, loss, aspiration, regret, and even mortality in song as artfully as Paul Simon.

If you find yourself repeating a pattern, consider making a small change. It’s a wise approach to songwriting and to life. There’s a tendency, when life isn’t proceeding according to plan, to look for the panacea, the big answer that will quickly turn everything around, but it’s only when you prioritize making little adjustments, one day (or moment) at a time, that real transformation is possible. If the pattern you’re repeating is useful on the other hand, by all means carry on.

P.S. - It’s fun to note that the changes I referred to in “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “There She Goes” both adhere to Paul Simon’s third time theory. The feedback in the Nirvana song opens the third verse, and the minor chord change in “There She Goes” kicks off the third chorus. If you’re an aspiring songwriter—or if you just enjoy listening as closely as I do—it’s an approach worth paying attention to.

To the uninitiated, for a two album stretch from late 1983 through 1987, they were the biggest rock band in the world. If I were to predict just one song you might know among their many hits, I’d pick “The Power of Love” because it was featured in the popular 1985 movie Back to the Future. 

To those in the know, you might be tempted, perhaps fairly, to guess that what follows will be an ironic appreciation of the band. You would be wrong. That’s not my style. I genuinely like this band, and taking it further, I respect the hell out of them. Let’s also be clear that they are not a guilty pleasure. I reject the concept. Guilty pleasures are reserved for young people who haven’t yet accumulated sufficient life experience to feel legitimately guilty. I’ve been around long enough to carry more than my share of guilt and shame based on actual life decisions. I have no emotional space left to feel guilty about enjoying a pop song.

Admittedly, not all of the band’s hits actually hit the mark in terms of being great songs. Mixed in with the rockin’ pop gems I love, like “Heart & Soul” or “I Want a New Drug,” are some silly tracks I routinely skip. The title of the song “Hip to Be Square” pretty much says it all in that category, for example. And speaking broadly, there is just too much saxophone on their stuff for my liking.

Putting all that aside, the fact of the matter is that Huey Lewis & the News is an extremely tight band. Not 1990s-style tight as in really great or cool—though a case could be made there as well—but musicianship-tight, as in locked in, in the pocket, or in sync.

In musician speak 'tight' refers to playing that is rhythmically-together. If you watch a really good band - doesn't matter what genre it is - who've grown up together and been playing and practicing for years, and who have an almost telepathic ability to move along the music together, you might say they were tight. www.englishforums.com

It begins where it should, with the rhythm section, and this part I find hard to describe because it really needs to be heard: the bassist and drummer establish such a tight groove that it would almost feel robotic, if the bass lines didn’t also contain so much catchy melody. I looked on YouTube for isolated bass and drum tracks of their songs to help illustrate the point, and (perhaps not shockingly) none exist, but listen closely to the bass line in a song like “I Want a New Drug” and then imagine hearing it a second time without it. 80% of the cool gets sucked right out. Similarly, the simple decision to vary the bass rhythm pattern in the verses of “Jacob’s Ladder” is the hook that makes that song work. Remove that little change, and you’re just not left with much. Plus, the bass player always had a cigarette dangling from his mouth like this (which we all know is very rock and roll):

Bounce around the internet for an hour, and you will also find that every member of Huey Lewis & the News is a highly skilled solo instrumentalist, from the bass player on up to Huey himself with his harmonica, but they resist playing with flash and stay in their lanes, playing together simply, in service of the song. No individual player stands out unless the purpose is to make a song better by adding a burst of interest to the melody, rhythm, or harmony.

In the end, I suppose that’s what appeals to me most about Huey Lewis & the News. It’s a funny observation to be making about a bunch of once super-famous rich rock stars, but they are a group of human beings—flawed like all of us—who instead of constantly striving for individual attention, choose to work together toward a worthy common goal. In this case: rocking out.

Isn’t that the spirit of connectedness we should all be aiming for?