However, I’m finding that these days, I’m also getting to new and undiscovered older music without the help of traditional critical gatekeepers. I occasionally stop by music blog aggregator sites like elbo.ws that tend to be on the leading edge of what’s buzzy, and provide easy links to free (and increasingly legally released by the bands and labels) mp3s & videos. During the couple of months that I was enamored with Turntable.fm, fellow fans played me a bunch of great stuff I hadn’t heard.

But the source that has exposed me to the most and widest variety of music lately is the Related Artists linking function in Spotify. From any selected artist, you can almost instantly listen to what seems like an infinitely branching tree of connected musicians. It’s an incredible tool–I’ll expand on my thoughts about Spotify in a future post.

“My” REM album was Murmur, which I came to late, in the fall of ’89–it was the only decent record owned by my freshman year Middlebury roommate. (He was shocked to discover that REM was widely popular–he had assumed they were a minor band that only he and his high school friends from Kansas City knew about. His other favorite band was The Rainmakers. “Government Cheese”!) Until college, I had mostly known REM through MTV and TV appearances. Murmur was so much more mysterious and melancholy than their singles. Even beyond the fuzzy lyrics, Murmur sounded like a riddle that only repeated listens could hope to unlock. Funny that within a couple of years the world has shifted so that my mom was singing “Losing My Religion” when I came home for break in ’91.

Have you read the new Salon interview with Stipe? It’s a pretty good glimpse into where his head is at, reflecting on the breakup: http://www.salon.com/2011/11/14/michael_stipe_why_r_e_m_called_it_a_day/