I probably owe a lot to recommendation algorithms. There are some days when I find a song I like on Spotify, hit the “Song Radio” feature, and enjoy the ride through, and the “Discover Weekly” playlist has generated a few good finds over the years. The thing is, the algorithm is good at finding things that resemble things I already like. That’s useful, but it isn’t really how I discover the things that become interesting to me.
Most of my musical “expansions” seem to arrive sideways. A local amateur who has a two-hour spot on a community radio station in the UK mentions the Vaporwave genre, and I’m engrossed an hour later. A college radio DJ plays tracks from the band he saw in Irvine, CA last weekend, and suddenly I’m ordering their merch to be delivered to Indiana to show a little love for that one track I heard. A friend who is into music has a new favorite album and offers to trade it to me for one of my current favorites, just to spread the love and break up the obsession a bit. Sometimes, years down the road, I remember how I came across certain music; sometimes I don’t.
So, I’m going to start keeping track. This isn’t a “best new music” column. Some of these songs are new. Some are decades old. Some may be extremely famous songs that everyone except me apparently knew. Some I may have known already, but maybe this week they finally “stuck with me” or gained a new meaning. This is more a snapshot of songs I liked this week, along with how I found them, so that maybe five years from now, I can look back and say, “Wow, what a weird place I was in …”
Frankie Rose — “Return to Dust”
The song: Frankie Rose is a Brooklyn-based singer, songwriter, and musician whose work has moved through indie rock, dream pop, synth-pop, and shoegaze territory, both solo and with bands including Vivian Girls and Dum Dum Girls.
How I found it: This one barely qualifies as accidental discovery. I’ve been a Frankie Rose superfan ever since I heard “Sorrow” on KSPC (I kinda wish I could remember which show it was on now). So, I belong to the fan club; I read the new release announcements; I preordered the album and T-shirt months ago; sometimes this behavior is rewarded. So, this one is a pretty basic find: an artist I already care about told her fans she had something new out, and I clicked on it.
Steve Winwood — “Dirty City”
The song: “Dirty City” comes from Steve Winwood’s 2008 album Nine Lives. By this point, Winwood was decades removed from his early work with the Spencer Davis Group, Traffic, and Blind Faith, as well as the enormously successful pop records that defined his 1980s solo career.
How I found it: This came out of a conversation we were having about this weird little genre in the mid/late 80s when a lot of the big artists from the 1960s and ’70s suddenly adapted themselves to the aesthetics of the 1980s and put out an album that sounded like Don Henley’s Building the Perfect Beast. Clapton’s “August,” Winwood’s “Back in the High Life,” Heart’s “Bad Animals,” Robert Plant’s “Shaken n’ Stirred,” I even throw Roger Waters’ “Radio K.A.O.S.” in there for its attempt at imitating a California sound. Someone asked what Winwood was doing these days. I’ll admit, I lost track of him after the Madison Square Garden album with Clapton, so I looked him up and found this banger of a track.
XBYRDX — “Prizefighter”
The song: XBYRDX is the current project of my old friend Jeff, a musician who famously started playing in the local scene around the same time I started Indy In-Tune. I even played keyboards in a couple of different versions of his band. There is something particularly strange about discovering new music made by someone you once made old music with. You aren’t encountering a stranger, and you aren’t simply revisiting nostalgia. You’re hearing where somebody went after your paths diverged.
How I found it: Jeff and I met up for dinner a couple of weeks ago, and he was kind enough to give me a vinyl copy of this new album. I’d already played it a couple of times in my daily mix, but last weekend I made it my “clean the bathroom” music, giving it my mostly undivided attention instead of just having it on in the background. I decided “Prizefighter” was the strongest track on the album and wondered whether he had made a video for it yet. Turns out he had, and I’d missed it.
DragonForce — “Through the Fire and Flames”
The song: “Through the Fire and Flames” is DragonForce’s spectacularly excessive 2006 power-metal anthem, built around extreme speed, twin-guitar virtuosity, and the general proposition that perhaps guitars should contain more notes. It is not obscure. I had nevertheless never heard it.
How I found it: This comes as part of a two-for. A friend of mine who knew I liked jazz asked if I’d heard of DragonForce. I had to admit I hadn’t, so he went on to describe this crazy Latin fusion band that plays 11/8 double-time with furious piano runs. He had been trying to find the track after watching a drummer trying to learn it in a Drumeo challenge but had only found the speed metal version.
Well, if there’s an 11/8 jazz fusion version of that, then I really want to hear it. Let’s look at the Drumeo video in question … yeah, okay, der’s yer prahblem: You misunderstood the banter. The drummer in the hot seat was being punished for making the guy who issued the challenge learn Dragonforce weeks earlier. The jazz song he’s actually learning in this video as his punishment is …
“A Night in Tunisia” — Jesús Molina arrangement
The song: “A Night in Tunisia” is a Dizzy Gillespie jazz standard dating back to the 1940s. This version is worth mentioning because it is a considerably more modern arrangement associated with pianist Jesús Molina, full of Latin-fusion vocabulary, virtuoso playing, and rhythmic choices apparently designed to make musicians reconsider their career choices.
And of course, if you want to watch the Drumeo challenge version…
Bonus: This Entire Weird YouTube Civilization of 8-Hour Ambiance Videos
So, we’ve taken in this rather skittish cat who spends most of his time under the couch (so please be careful where you sit if you come to visit). This week he finally came out and lay on the bed with me to watch a bit of TV. The problem was that my usual fare, Star Trek and Mythbusters, have quite a few irritating high-pitched noises and explosions, which are counterproductive to convincing a skittish cat that the house is perfectly safe to wander around in. This is how I discovered this entire genre of ambient videos on YouTube. You can get anything you want from a Bladerunner/Cyberpunk city, to a 1940s jazz noir club, to a library playing lo-fi jazzhop, to a hobbit hole with lute and flute, to a luxury apartment with a piano trio in the corner. Most of the stuff is AI-generated, which is fine by me; it still works because this isn’t music you actively listen to anyway. It’s just there for atmosphere. Some of the videos even have Pomodoro timers.
This is where AI has taken us in 2026: Millions of people have independently concluded, “I don’t actually want to watch television. I want to watch a room I wish I were sitting in.”
The point is, if you put all this together, no sensible recommendation algorithm will know what to do with them. One came from a fan-club email. One came from a conversation about the career trajectory of aging rock musicians. One came from someone I knew personally decades ago. One came from a case of mistaken identity in a video; the other because, well, that’s just a damned cool arrangement.
They aren’t a playlist. They’re a very organic trail. That’s what I’ve really been into lately. Recommendation algorithms try to determine what I like and give me more of it. But some of my favorite discoveries happen when one interesting thing points to another that isn’t necessarily similar. Sometimes the connection is musical. Sometimes historical. Sometimes personal. Sometimes it’s an offhand comment. Sometimes I misunderstand what someone says and end up looking for something that doesn’t exist. That last one may actually be my preferred method.
So that’s the experiment. Every week, or at least every week in which I remember I’m doing this (you can see I’ve already forgotten about Friday Night Rabbit Hole recaps), I’ll collect a few songs that entered my world somehow. New releases, old records, famous songs I somehow missed, obscure things somebody mentioned, people I know, things YouTube coughed up, or whatever else I stumble across. Not the best songs I heard this week. Not recommendations selected for you. Just songs I found this week. And, more importantly, the story of how I got there.
