Discoveries: Rid of Me

PJ Harvey: Rid Of Me

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I have a confession...

I don't have a time line of discovery and growth like many of you. Since I was old enough to sing along with music I've liked the same thing...catchy pop or rock songs, preferably with female vocals. I often am frustrated with myself because I can't seem to go the extra length to give the same effort to finding good new music with male vocals as I do to the ladies. I try to quell my frustration over this by remembering that there's a lot of people that are the opposite of me, that discount musicians because they ARE female, and therefore it's good to have a few people like me around to even the score. As it is, when I visit blogs I often will scroll through and pause the longest for those with band photos with women in them. I've even found some male vocal bands simply because there's a female in their band and therefore I gave them a try...sad, I know, but when there's as much new music out there on the internet as there is these days, you find whatever ways you can to narrow down the search for something you'll enjoy. And hey, maybe that's just my thing, and everyone has their thing.

There was a time when I didn't even realize this about myself. It took a male acquaintance in high school to bring it to my attention. It's senior year, the seniors have a lounge area to themselves where they can spend their free periods, otherwise known as study halls, and I have my CD folder out and am paging through. The guy asks to look at it. He pages through at it and says "so you only listen to girls?" and I am surprised, why would he say that? And he continues "every CD in here is by a woman". I seriously hadn't noticed. So he says he only has one female artist in his collection but that she's amazing because no other female artist he's heard has the seething power he likes (his favorite band was The Jesus Lizard) as this lady and asks if I've heard of her, it's someone named PJ Harvey. I hadn't. So he gave me his headphones and played me a song. At the time I wasn't sure what to think, I hadn't heard anything like it before. It took me a few years to finally get one of her CDs, and then another, and another...you get the idea. This was the song he played me.