And more fun with new music…

The point of Reselect.com since it started last year has always been to shine a spotlight on great songs from the past few decades, with the hope of either reigniting a passion in you, the Reselect reader, for a given song or artist, or introducing you to a song that you might have missed along the way or maybe are too young to have been around for and haven’t heard played anywhere else yet. In the process of doing so, though, as I’ve pointed out in a past post or two, I have found myself skipping over a lot of new songs that it has seemed too early to post here, regardless of the fact that they sound promisingly good.

But I’ve continued to be nagged by the feeling that I’m leaving out too much newer music and am possibly even missing out on discovering a lot of great music for myself (a state of affairs that I would have been horrified by a few years ago, when I always felt like I had a pretty solid grasp on new albums coming out). So to rectify that to some extent, I’m making a change here at Reselect, rechristening Mondays as “New Music Mondays.” Seems like a good day to do it, after having a weekend’s worth of listening time to peruse some possibilities. And by “New Music,” I’m not necessarily going to be breaking songs that haven’t even been officially released — I’m thinking more like a 12-months-since-release cutoff. Nothing over a year old.

I won’t be drawing much from what passes for “Top 40” music either — there’s an awful lot of crap to be found there (just as there always has been, of course). I’m going to be looking for songs with substance, those that show great promise for standing the test of time; much like a bad hairstyle, I don’t want to look back in a few years and be embarrassed that I would have considered such-and-such trendy song as being worthy of inclusion, when really that’s all it was: trendy.

And that brings me to today’s featured music, which isn’t new by any stretch. It’s a nearly 30-year-old song by X: “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts,” from their 1983 album, More Fun in the New World. It’s a great song in any case, but it came to mind because it includes a section in which John Doe and Exene Cervenka bemoan the then-current state of music on the radio, where great bands were being ignored simply because radio programmers couldn’t see fit to find a place for them on the radio (and in those days, of course, there was no such thing as the World Wide Web, so there was much less chance of a band being heard if they weren’t getting played on the radio). So I’m using an old song that references discovering new music as a way to ring in the start of New Music Monday — no sense actually trying to highlight a new song today amidst all this mumbo-jumbo about why I’m doing it.

And please, more than for any other music I write about, I’m always open to suggestions for New Music Mondays! Anything recent that’s been floating your boat and you think I might like, please send in your suggestions — it’ll certainly help me to stay on top of things, whether I use it or not. And of course if I feature a song that I found out about through a reader suggestion, I’ll be sure to give credit where it’s due.

One of the easiest ways to suggest a song is by “sending” it to me through Spotify — my Spotify user name is “reselect.” You can just enter

in the Search bar in Spotify, and it’ll bring up a space to enter a song or album to send me, along with any comments you might want to add.