Obsessed Much?

Let's talk music!

Every morning I ease gently out of bed, answer nature’s call, pray, and then hit play! A groove begins or a symphony fills my heart with joy. John Coltrane bends music theory to his will or Metallica gets my blood flowing before the gym. Tom Misch riffs into eclectic indie gold or Randy Travis expresses love “Deeper Than the Holler”. Celine Dion powerfully reminds me that a “New Day Has Come” or The Band Camino has me singing “I Think I Like You”. I could go on and on but you get the picture. I’m obsessed with music.

(This is how many of my friends see me now that I’m over 30)

This obsession has been a part of me since before I can remember, and I mean that literally. There is an old home video of my twin brother, Derek, and me shaking our baby butts to Billy Ray Cyrus’ smash hit “Achy Breaky Heart” and apparently, we begged for the song to be on repeat. In many old pictures, you can see us with long hair and if you had asked us if we wanted our hair cut we would have replied, “no, we want to be like Hanson”. Of course, we loved “MMMBop” but we were just as much in love with the Middle of Nowhere album as a whole. I remember my mother commenting on how remarkable it was that at such a young age we had memorized every lyric, beat, and intricacy of every song on that album.

Between the ages of four and 13, we were also obsessed with baseball. But somewhere around 13 or 14 my brother and I decided to pick up instruments in an attempt to explore music (and also girls) and baseball quickly became a thing of the past. He started learning drums, I started on the bass and guitar and we never looked back.

With a couple of our best friends, we formed a band in high school that changed and evolved a couple of times and lasted until our sophomore year in college. In the years that followed my brother and I, together and separately, played for various churches, and ministries. We would get together with other groups of friends regularly just to jam and thanks to Spotify, we were able to continually discover and share new and interesting artists.

Today my brother and I live about an hour apart from each other. We have wives, young babies, babies on the way (Praise Jesus!), and jobs that keep us very busy. We are not currently in bands but one thing has remained consistent and that is our delightfully endless journey of discovering, sharing, and discussing the music we love and are currently listening to. We text almost every day about what we are playing. My wife saw me texting the other day and said “Let me guess, you’re texting your brother about music?” and she was exactly right. We enjoy sharing what we are listening to with our friends and love to find out what they are currently enjoying. The joy we get from sharing good music and learning about great artists from others is something we will never get tired of. And since Derek and I also enjoy writing we decided to start an ongoing substack series where we will share and discuss the music we love while also exploring any spiritual elements we hear within the music. We want this to be free-flowing, fun, and interactive. We’ll highlight artists, songs, albums, genres, and anything we love in an attempt to share all of that joy.

Just to give you a taste, I’ll provide a link here to my ever-growing Catch-All playlist on Spotify. With almost 1,000 songs, this is full of all the songs I’ve been obsessed with on some level since 2018. You’ll find a huge variety. I hope that you discover a new artist, song, or genre that brings you some level of joy that you can share with others.

I hope this serves as a nice introduction to the project and I look forward to sharing more music soon!