like, all the people who really do love music, but at some point stop seeking more. what are they all about?

yeah my wife has very low jazz tolerance too, with a couple exceptions (Miles, some Sun Ra stuff, Alice Coltrane)

sorry to turn this thread into "things my wife likes" carry on

Anything overly guitar-wanky / prog, bar Hendrix, gets snorted at, and probably rightly so, by my wife. No Zep, no Floyd, definitely no Steely Dan.

I've read this thread with great interest and, unsurprisingly, with an awful lot of identification, especially with jaymc's posts.

Ooh, David Villa.

We bought a house and moved in together nearly three years ago, at exactly the same time as Stylus ceased publication, near enough. This was then followed by about 18 months of career he'll for me, which I only emerged from about 4 months ago properly. I now have a "serious" job that requires me to not piss about on the Internet all day or sit in a giant library basement in my own listening to whateverthefuck I want during the day. For about a year after house/Stylus I gave up on new music and was very down about that; now I've reached a kind of equilibrium, which I'm very, very happy with. I don't listen to as much music as I did five years ago, but I watch more films, more TV, I cook, I go on more bike rides, I did a charity run the other week - all stuff that, while I was being a music monster, i couldn't and wouldn't have ever done. And, bar a couple of small things, I'm the happiest I've probably ever been. Between us my wife and I have bought 20+ albums released this year. I think that's a good amount. Even when I was monstering my most, end of 2004" I was always concerned about getting value out of music, listening to it enough to not feel that it was... trivialized.

I remember a few years ago being really upset and disillusioned when Freaky Trigger started the parallel food and travel and art and sport blogs, as if Tom et al had somehow betrayed music... Or not music so much as... The purity of being a music fan. But, as has been mentioned, a lot of music fandom is about identity and my identity then was as a music journalist, pretty much. My day job was untaxing and low paid and I defined my achievements by what we were doing at Stylus, I guess. These days, well, I just gave up writing about music after Stylus, for various reasons.

One of them being that, right now, I'm watching the football with the sound down and listening to the Owen Pallett album and posting to ILM via an iPad on my lap. I haven't got the time now that I used to. I don't know how. My job still starts at 9 and finishes just after 5. I guess I make twompeople sandwiches each day, and cook dinner each day, and feed cats, and water tomato plants, and cycle to Sainsburys for breakfast cereal (with headphones on) (on the cycle path at least, not on the road!). I like to talk to my wife. I pretty much watched no television from 1998 when I went to university until 2007. Now i watch... Not a lot, but a lot more than none.

I don't feel any pressure to keep up anymore, but there is still a desire there. I've never been quite the voracious seeker of new sounds that other compatriots were - for me writing about music was always more about fathoming my own existing tastes or enthusing things than about discovery - and i guess that's an influence.

My new boss is an ex music writer too. We have very similar taste, and occasionally geek out about Four Tet or Can or whatever after meetings. We did a music quiz together the other week and took it super seriously (and won by some distance, thankfully!). We vaguely talked about getting a show together on the very local community radio station. I'd never have considered doing anything quite so fun when I was still a monster. I wonder why.

My ex complained that my music was all "boppy". My wife complains about "whiny guitars". (she's probably very much in line with a certain strain of ILM thought on that one).

xpost -- Hahah I like your random World Cup interruption there.

Em's got money on Villa being top scorer, on my advice. I'm invested here!

Another batchelor here. The hours I am able to indulge in listening to music are probably incredible to most people in a relationship - basically music is playing any moment I am awake and not at work.

Might be related to this: one of the best sensations I know is when you're just getting to know your next favourite new album, you can't quite consciously remember the songs yet but you wake up in the morning with snatches of them running through your mind.

Also I love to burn out a new favourite album, completely overplay it - because I know another one will be along soon. There's no shortage of music to fall in love with.

xxpost my wife and I have the same taste but she can't stand the Dan either. i think its a gal thang

oh there's definitely things my wife will complain about having to listen to. Steely Dan, for example.

― insert your favorite discriminatory practice here (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, June 29, 2010 1:24 PM

Aren't you the guy who said his wife tended to listen to her box set of The Police only when he wasn't around, or was that someone else?

How music has changed since I am in a long-term relationship: I still listen to it, seek out new stuff, with a proportionate amount of passion & energy. I just don't do as many obsessive things surrounding that hobby. So I used to make a mix CD every month of every song I liked from that month (it seemed nice to have some empirical token of I'm Really Listening), and whenever I had a spare moment I'd sit around writing lists in a notebook of songs I liked, or songs of X kind of theme, etc. Lists. Or I'd draw charts or graphs about songs. I realized the other day that I haven't done any of that stuff in a couple years. I don't think that makes me less into music, though.

Aren't you the guy who said his wife tended to listen to her box set of The Police only when he wasn't around, or was that someone else?

oh yeah AC/DC and the Police are perennial bones of contention between us tis true

I've been following this thread and meaning to post since yesterday...all the comments about relationships and musical first loves and only having so much time for everything also speak to my situation.

At the moment I'm not really seeking out any new music, but at the beginning of the year I went through a voracious phase of loading 20 albums at a time on Spotify and making financially irresponsible batch album purchases. I'm sure the desire will drift back but right now my spare thoughts are focused on planning my next camping trip or working out a better way of stopping the earwigs from eating my bean plants rather than hearing every album on Olde English Spelling Bee. I've been passionate about music for about 15 years now, it seems strange to think that there's a virtue in never shifting my focus to things I know less about. I have accumulated more musical knowledge over the years than is socially acceptable, but pretty much everyone on my street knows more about gardening than I do - suggesting I should put more energy into the latter than the former.

Another reason people tend to get less interested in new music---when you start discovering all these bands, everybody in them is much older and presumably much cooler than you are. Some of them are from another generation entirely like John Lennon/Bob Dylan.

But then as you get older, the bands become closer to your age. Then younger. It gets really depressing when the bands that are considered "old" are all made up of people fucking ten years younger than you are.

Ten years? Try twenty...or more.

i was pleasantly surprised to note that the bands who made my three favourite records of last year are all older than me (and i'm no spring chicken). i'm pretty sure that's coincidental..

Paul Weller is older than me, so everything's ok in 2010...