Bored-Again Christian

This is, by far, my favorite podcast. If you're tired of market-driven Christian music, give this guy a listen. He's definitely kind of narrow in the style of music that he plays, but if you like indie/alt/emo type music, then this guy is your man. He plays a lot of cuts from Denison Witmer, a local Philly boy who I discovered simply because he has one of the coolest CD packages of all time.

I was at a Best Buy flipping through the CD racks when I found this album with a great Philly skyscape photo. If you've been reading this blog, you should have noticed that I like that kind of thing. So I buy the album and inside I find the best CD packaging I've ever seen - high gloss photos on sturdy cardstock with words printed in matte finish. It must have cost a fortune to print. Every song has another great photo of Philly. I fell in love with the book. Turns out the music is pretty good too. Did anyone else ever notice the direct correlation between album art and great music?

When I was in high school I used to shop at the Discount Den at Ball State University. Back then, they still sold used CD's for about $5 a pop. It was funny because there were always a ton of Michael W. Smith type CD's there. I guess kids get to college and pawn off those gems from their collection to fund their binge drinking. Well, they also got rid of a lot of other gems that found their way home to my collection. Since all we had in Indiana was crappy top 40-type radio, I picked most of the albums I bought based on cover art. It was at the Den that I discovered Teenage Fanclub, Dinosaur Jr., Luscious Jackson, Tribe Called Quest, Publiminal Sigs, Smashing Pumpkins imports, Jackson Browne, Rich Hardesty, De La Soul, Mother Love Bone, Radiohead, and pretty much most of the soundtrack to my very strange high school years. Every week, I would trek 30 minutes or so to the Den and spend a good two hours looking for that album that would take me away to some far away place. I always loved the excitement of buying a CD that I had never heard of simply on the merit of it's cover art. As soon as I bought some CD's I would pop them into my Sony Discman that was hooked up to my 1979 Volvo station wagon's tape deck and I would just sit there in the parking lot and listen to the whole thing and read the liner notes. More often than not, good cover art equaled good music. I kind of miss that with the whole MP3/iTunes experience. Someday my kids will be like, "What's a CD?" and I'll explain how there used to be a day when you could touch and smell your new music and that those sensations added to the whole experience. They'll be like, "Whatever dad, I just buy whatever is popular on MySpace and put it on my iPod. CD's are so inconvenient." I'm sure those things will be old school by the time I have music-buying kids, but you get my drift. I remember thinking that CD's were inferior to records for these same reasons, but now there is no physical connection to the music we buy whatsoever. Technology is cool and all, but I'm glad I grew up with CD's. Ah, nostalgia.

Check out Denison Witmer if you're looking for some thoughtful Christian folk-rock type stuff.

For those who think I'm soft, I still like hip hop. Word.