What is listening around?

10Nov07

First of all, listening around is the ongoing dialogue of two absurdly old friends, Kenny Mostern and David Schweitzer.  We have been listening to music together since around 1980, when we were 13.  Since around 1994, living 3000 miles away from each other (Kenny in California, David in New York) we have exchanged email three or four times a week about what we’re listening to, sometimes one sentence commentaries, sometimes detailed and passionate exchanges.  Though this has nothing at all to do with our actual careers, each of us has written enough, and seriously enough, to consider trying to publish on rock music at some point in the past.  Still, the dreary fact is that Kenny is an election administrator and David is an elementary school teacher and neither has done anything but write to the other for a very long time.

In form and content, this blog will start as a continuation of our dialgoues. The questions we explore break down to — what good (new) music is out there? What does it mean for 40 year olds with no professional connections to music to be passionately looking and listening around for good music? And, of course, what do we mean by good music, and who cares?

The difference of course is that is finding out who else any of this means something to, and what you have to say means to us. And if you think the way we occasionaly jab at each other is forbidding, well, remember, we’ve been doing this since 1981 and we do know how to behave when company comes. 

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