"to refresh the mind of man"

Anyone who knows me also knows that I love music. And if you don't know me, let me begin by telling you a little something about myself. I love music.

There is something very curious, however, that I have noted among my friends and, to a point, about myself as well. This is that music tastes change. They especially alter in the short span of, perhaps, about 17 to about 22, give or take a couple years. And I am always wondering why this is. Of course, a lot of things change in a person between those years--their entire lifestyle changes from a teenager with generally no responsibility to a university student or full-time worker, out on their own. Convictions grow or, unfortunately, convictions wither. But I wonder what a changing lifestyle has to do with a changing taste in music.

I write this in the wake of a series of concerts I have attended in the last few weeks. Seeing Shai Hulud play in the same venue I would later see Rocky Votolato play in is what inspired me to sound out this thought. And the atmosphere the two shows had, though they were in the same place, were entirely different. Obviously because of genre differences and obviously because of crowd make-up and atmosphere. The crowd at the hardcore show was primarily eighteen years old. The crowd at the country/folk show was primarily in their mid-twenties.

I have friends who used to listen to bands like Thursday or Poison The Well when they were teenagers and now sneer at them. The music has not changed though, of course. They have. Now they prefer Chet Baker or The Microphones. The teenage years are a nebulous craze. Definition is often found in an album that a teenage era centres around. I listen to old Stretch Arm Strong and Smashing Pumpkins, or Mineral and At The Drive-In, and still love them because nostalgia is timeless and their music stays in me. So I find it hard to calculate what makes others turn themselves around from the music their younger self was so attached to, simply because they are no longer as young.