Let Me Introduce Myself

So, let me take you back to a long time ago, when Windows XP just came out. I was 9 years old, and my mum gave me a computer for Christmas. What did I do with it? I figured out how to use Windows Media Player to make mixtapes. Little burnt discs I could annoy mum with in the car, ripping different things off CDs I had routed around the house for. I would update the ‘car playlist’ every couple of weeks, filling the glove box with over twenty instalments of ‘Now that’s What I Call Ciaran’.
Mum humoured me, not really seeming to appreciate my eclectic music taste (as a 9 year old I would have the Beatles as one track, and the Lion King the next), but it did give me a wide view of how my music tastes evolved over time. I could play a disc marked ‘Now that’s What I Call Ciaran 2005’ to find it filled with bands like The Killers, Kaiser Chiefs and Keane (the year of the K’s, obviously) but then could skip to the 2007 volume to find Linkin Park blaring through, reminiscent of my days as a moody, pubescent teenager.

The point is, I’ve always loved recommending music to people. I loved skipping through the track lists hoping the other person felt the same as me, hoping it could become one of their favourite songs too. I wanted to share its effects on me with people, people who also loved music as much as I did.

Now, I can’t profess to be any kind of musician. I’m in my formative stages of learning guitar (and have been for quite some time) and am doing a literature and film degree at university. But, I still can call myself a music lover and can still express the way music makes me feel.

Today, I felt something great. I went to a little record store in Brisbane’s West End and watched a local artist perform live. Jack Carty himself was very good, that’s not in question, but I found the atmosphere made my time at Jet Black Cat Music special. About twenty people all gathered together in a little record store to share experiences. All of which were smiling, tapping their feet in rhythm and seeming to feel the same way about the music. Now, I have been to a large-scale concert or two before but this gig was something else. It was beyond intimate, it was a tiny community all bound together by this one little interest and this one little music store.

That inspired me to widen the community. Jet Black Cat probably couldn’t fit many more audience members in there, but I wanted to bring my own experiences forward to see who’s out there and who generally just wants to chat about music. I’m hoping to bring you playlists that aren’t organised by genre, but by their purpose to the listener. Songs that make you sleepy, songs that make you happy, songs that make you sad, songs that make you want to get a political agenda (even if you didn’t care in the first place).

So, to start us off, I’m Ciaran. I like music. And here’s a little taster of Jack Carty to get us going: