Category: Longform
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Crucial Track for April 19, 2025
"Check the Rhime" by A Tribe Called Quest
What was your favorite song in high school? Why did it resonate?
"Check the Rhime" is a song that definitely lasted the entirety of high school (and even to present day!) Hip Hop was the first music genre I fell in love with as a kid in the 80s and A Tribe Called Quest is near the top of my all-time favorite artists list.
The song (and ATCQ in general) resonated with me through the melding of jazz and hip hop. The boom bap drums with jazz bass and horn loops are like peanut butter and chocolate for me. It just sounds so good to my ears.
Lyrically, ATCQ contrasted with gangsta rap's rise to popularity through positive and socially conscious lyrics. As someone who was also getting exposed to punk and hardcore at the time, the similarity in message was hard to overlook and made it easy to love both genres.
Crucial Track for April 18, 2025
"CORSO" by Tyler, The Creator
_What is a song that instantly energizes you?_
It's Tyler, so you know it's high energy... and this song has some great beat drops.
He's one of the few current artists that my kids and I both like. I absolutely love the bonding moments when songs like this come on, especially since all three will be graduating high school in the next 15 months.
Crucial Track for April 17, 2025
"Endless Tree" by Valerie June
A song for the current moment and a reminder that even the smallest joy you can add to the world is *something*.
Are you ready to see
A world where we could all be free
As branches of an endless tree
May we seek and find it
Although we might not all agree
Still live together peacefully
Watching the news almost every night
Telling the stories of all that ain’t right
But what could be done from a house and a home
Sink in the sofa and feel so alone
Getting the courage to do something small
Lifting the spirits of all that you saw
Feeling the tiniest spark in your heart
‘Cause only an ember can light up the dark
Crucial Tracks the app, the intro post
For the last four years I have been doing something I call a “music journal” or song-a-day playlist on Apple Music. The basic premise of the idea is to add one meaningful song to my playlist each day.
It could be a song I listened to during the day, a new band I “discovered” that day, a song to represent something that i did (like going to a concert), or a song that was meaningful for other reasons (like my mom’s favorite song; she passed away in 2022.) There are no limits, really…
The best part of this is listening to the playlists later. It could be on long car trips or just throwing one on while you make dinner or clean the house… the memories come flooding back when each song plays. It’s pretty awesome.
This process, along with a blog series I did during the early days of COVID, helped build the idea for my Crucial Tracks blog and interview series. These interviews take a deeper look into the impact of music on some really amazing people. The whole process of thinking about music – how it helped create who you are today, how it influences memories and feelings, is fascinating. I love it… and everyone I’ve done interviews with so far really enjoyed participating.
There are points in your life that are defined by music. Whether it’s a song that introduced you to a genre of music that changed the direction of your tastes and style, or a lyric that made you think about the world in a different way. Songs represent relationships. Songs trigger memories. These are all crucial tracks.
So that got me thinking — what if I combined these ideas with my love of blogging and created an app where anyone can share their Crucial Tracks with the world? And the Crucial Tracks app was born.
After some fits and starts with attempting to make an iOS app, I took a step back and decided to focus on building a web app instead. Some pros to that approach: no operating system lock in, I’m more familiar with developing for the web, and ultimately I could get something done quicker.
Quicker ended up being an understatement, as I stumbled upon an article (around the same time) on using AI to quickly build out app ideas. I figured I had nothing to lose, so I put on my business analyst hat and worked through a set of requirements I could use to build the prompts for the Github Copilot agent mode.
It wasn’t perfect and took some debugging (and multiple attempts) for some features, but it was ridiculously fast and helped me get a fairly stable initial version out in only 7 days. I’ve built a couple of Ruby on Rails apps and a couple PHP apps over the years and none have taken less than a month or two to get right… and none even close to as polished as this first version. It’s astonishing, really.
Design choices
Even with AI assistance there are a lot of design choices to be made and influence you can have on the actual application. I had a few goals:
- I didn’t want to create another social network or place where you have to follow someone, comment, like, or whatever. That shit can be tiring and there are enough services already.
- I also didn’t want to create another high speed firehose type site where there’s constantly something new for you to view. Crucial Tracks will be SLOW and that will take some getting used to (me included!)
- I wanted to support RSS from day one. I truly believe that RSS is one of the best web inventions, because it allows you to do so much with just a simple feed… you can follow other users (and news sites, blogs, etc), you can send your posts anywhere using services like IFTTT or services like micro.blog that support inbound RSS. (For example, my entries get posted to my blog on micro.blog automatically and then get sent to Mastodon and Bluesky with no action on my part.)
- I wanted to integrate with Apple Music. (No Spotify, ever, sorry. Apple Music isn’t perfect, but Spotify are just bad faith actors in the music and entertainment industry. Actually, I’m not sorry.)
- Same goes for integration with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Threads, etc. No algorithmic, centralized, corporate-owned social media, ever. It’s time to get off those sites for good. You can do whatever you want with the RSS feed, but that’s as much as you will get from me. Again, not sorry.
That’s a lot of NO, so I will finish up with what I DID want to create. I wanted to create a simple, focused blogging service that helps you think about the role music plays in your life… and share those thoughts with the world in whatever way you want. Version one does that already and I’ve got some other ideas to help build off that going forward.
Ultimately, the internet needs more weird, focused small communities. That’s what made the web so exciting when I first got access in the early/mid 90s and I hope my little project helps bring that feeling back in some way. (And maybe, just maybe, it will be a gateway for more folks to get their own site and blog.)
TL;DR
To sum it up, Crucial Tracks is a music journal that allows you to easily share meaningful songs with the world. The songs that make you, you.
PS - See my public profile page for an example of what you’ll get. And feel free to hit that RSS Feed button to add me to your reader. 😄
Crucial Track for April 16, 2025
"Splash" by Nell Smith
This track took a turn. I was listening to Nell Smith's full album for Crucial Tracks (the blog) and loved the idiosyncratic nature of her songs. She can certainly write catchy indie pop songs, but mid album things get kind of weird: noisy, chaotic, weird instrumentation... but still catchy as hell. One of these songs had to be my track for the day!
So I started researching to learn her story. Apple Music usually has a decent bio so I started there... and saw she did a Nick Cave cover album with The Flaming Lips at 14! I vaguely remember hearing about that, but when I expanded the More link to show the rest of the bio, I read that *Anxious* is a posthumous album and she died at 17 in a car accident. Wow, what a talent we lost way too early.
Crucial Track for April 15, 2025
"Rodeo" by Momma
The modern day Veruca Salt and I love it. They know how to write ear worms too.
April 11, 2025
"catalogue" by julie
I just happened to tune in to the Coachella livestream at the right time to catch Julie play some tracks off one of my favorite albums from last year, *my anti-aircraft friend*. So good live too – they need to be bigger.
April 13, 2025
"Passion Play" by Speedway
Can't remember what site I saw this band on this weekend, but I totally missed it for my initial pass of albums to check out for Crucial Tracks, the blog. Anyway, it's exactly the kind of hardcore I like: a little youth crew, a little metal, a little melody. Very similar to *Looking Back*- era BOLD (1993)... who just happened to be on Revelation Records too.
April 14, 2025
"Quiet" by The Smashing Pumpkins
I got the repressing of the remastered *Siamese Dream* in the mail today. Blasted at full volume! I got the cassette version of this album in Bozeman, MT while on vacation with the family in the summer of 1993. Listened to it on repeat for the entire trip.
April 12, 2025
"Honey Water" by Japanese Breakfast
This song is great. Watched Japanese Breakfast on the Coachella livestream with the family. They opened the show with this one -- one of my favorites on the new album.