At 13, my musical priorities were fairly straightforward.
Metallica. Death metal. Anything heavy enough to make the bedroom walls nervous.
Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets were sacred territory. I wanted riffs, aggression, darkness and music that felt enormous through headphones. Subtlety was welcome, provided something eventually exploded.
The Cure?
I didn’t get them.
That seems slightly ridiculous now, because I love The Cure. But that is one of the interesting things about musical taste.
Sometimes the music doesn’t change at all.
The listener does.
Sometimes You’re Just Not Ready for It
There is a tendency to treat musical taste as though we gradually discover objectively better music.
I don’t think that’s how it works.
When I first encountered The Cure, they simply weren’t giving me what I wanted from music at that age.
My ears were tuned to metal.
I understood the drama of Metallica. I understood the brutality of death metal. Distorted guitars and aggressive drums spoke a language I already knew.
The Cure operated differently.
The darkness was there, but it didn’t need to punch you in the face.
Atmosphere could do the work.
Repetition could do the work.
A guitar part didn’t need to be enormous to completely change the emotional temperature of a song.
Years later, those were exactly the things I started appreciating.
The Cure hadn’t improved while I wasn’t listening.
I had finally caught up with them.
Then There Is Duran Duran
Duran Duran are another interesting example.
It is easy to reduce them to the surface-level image of 1980s pop: expensive videos, immaculate hair, screaming fans and enormous choruses.
Come back to those records with older ears and there is a hell of a lot going on underneath all that hairspray.
The bass playing alone deserves attention.
Then there are the synth arrangements, guitars, grooves, production choices and the sheer craftsmanship involved in making sophisticated songs sound effortless.
Something like Rio doesn’t need an archaeological excavation to work. It is immediate pop music.
But listen underneath the chorus and there is a remarkably sophisticated machine ticking away.
I appreciate that much more now than I would have at 13.
Thirteen-year-old me probably would have asked when the distorted guitars were arriving.
Sometimes the Artists Change Before You Do
Paradise Lost taught me another version of the same lesson.
I was completely devoted to Icon and Draconian Times. Those records were enormous to me.
Then One Second arrived.
I remember listening to it in a record store and basically thinking, “What the hell is this?”
The guitars were still there, but the band I thought I understood was changing in front of me. Electronics were becoming more prominent, the atmosphere was shifting and Paradise Lost clearly weren’t interested in making Draconian Times Part II just because people like me probably wanted them to.
It was a little like hearing Metallica’s Load for the first time.
For the record, unlike One Second, I still dislike Load.
Apparently not every record is waiting patiently for you to become enlightened.
Paradise Lost then pushed things even further with Host. At the time, that electronic direction seemed a long way from the band I’d fallen in love with through Icon and Draconian Times.
Today, I genuinely enjoy both One Second and Host.
And there is a fairly obvious reason why.
My ears went somewhere else too.
Finding Depeche Mode Backwards
I didn’t really get into Depeche Mode until Ultra.
That opened the door, and then I started working backwards.
What I found became hugely important to me.
That period from Black Celebration through Music for the Masses, Violator, Songs of Faith and Devotion and Ultrabecame one of the backbone influences on the music I would eventually make.
Dark electronic textures.
Melody.
Space.
Industrial sounds that could coexist with pop songwriting.
Synthesizers that weren’t there simply to sound futuristic.
Production that could be cold and mechanical while the song underneath remained deeply human.
Once that became part of my musical vocabulary, something interesting happened.
Records like One Second and Host made considerably more sense.
I could hear what Paradise Lost were exploring rather than concentrating on what they had stopped doing.
The records hadn’t changed.
My musical vocabulary had.
Appreciating Pop Without Surrendering Your Metal Card
One of the benefits of getting older is that you stop worrying quite so much about which musical tribe something belongs to.
Metal culture could be particularly tribal.
There were bands you were supposed to like, bands you weren’t supposed to like, arguments about whether something was really metal and increasingly absurd subdivisions of increasingly specific genres.
Eventually you realise none of this matters very much.
A great bassline is a great bassline.
A brilliant melody doesn’t become less brilliant because somebody programmed a synthesizer underneath it.
A three-minute pop song can contain as much craft as an eight-minute metal song.
And something doesn’t have to be aggressive to be dark.
That last one probably had the biggest impact on me.
Some Records Never Leave
Evolving taste doesn’t mean replacing what you loved when you were younger.
I can discover The Cure later, develop an enormous appreciation for Depeche Mode and Duran Duran, and still think Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets are god-tier records.
One doesn’t cancel out the other.
If anything, having a wider musical vocabulary gives me more reasons to appreciate those Metallica records.
I hear more now.
I hear the arrangements.
I hear Cliff Burton’s harmonic thinking.
I hear the dynamics and the space between the heavy sections.
I hear how strange some of those records actually were.
At 13, I knew they sounded incredible.
Now I have a better understanding of why.
The 1980s Look Different From Here
There is also something interesting about revisiting an era once you are removed from the cultural baggage surrounding it.
The 1980s produced plenty of questionable decisions. Some of them involved gated reverb. Many involved trousers.
But it was also an extraordinary period for records that combined technology with traditional musicianship.
Synthesizers and drum machines weren’t necessarily replacing musicians. They were becoming additional colours.
Bands were figuring out what these machines could do while recording technology itself was changing rapidly.
That experimentation produced records that still sound distinctive because nobody had completely settled on the rules yet.
Listening back now, I find myself appreciating plenty of music I might once have dismissed simply because it sat outside whatever musical territory I occupied at the time.
Your Influences Don’t Arrive in Order
That has become particularly relevant to Most Epic Dream.
My influences aren’t arranged neatly by decade or genre.
Metallica can sit beside The Cure.
Duran Duran can coexist with Portishead.
Paradise Lost can lead somewhere towards Depeche Mode.
Nine Inch Nails can provide brutality without needing a conventional metal arrangement.
Split Enz and Neil Finn can influence the songwriting while electronic music completely changes the production surrounding it.
None of that feels contradictory anymore.
It is just accumulated listening.
And sometimes an influence arrives decades after the music that created it.
Keep Going Back
That is probably the part I find most interesting.
There are records I didn’t understand when I first heard them.
There are artists I dismissed.
There are songs I probably heard hundreds of times without really listening to what was happening inside them.
Going back can be surprisingly rewarding.
Not because everything old was secretly brilliant, and certainly not because getting older automatically makes your taste more sophisticated.
Sometimes you revisit something you disliked 30 years ago and discover you were missing something.
Sometimes you realise the artist had moved somewhere you weren’t ready to follow.
And sometimes you put Load on again and think, “Nope. Still not for me.”
That’s fine too.
Musical taste isn’t supposed to arrive at some final destination.
It keeps accumulating.
The records you loved at 13 don’t have to disappear to make room for the records you discover decades later.
They can all end up in the same record collection.
And eventually, in my case, bits of all of them end up somewhere inside Most Epic Dream.
If you want to hear what that rather unlikely collection of influences sounds like when they collide, have a listen to Most Epic Dream. There is probably some Metallica, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, Paradise Lost and a dozen other things buried in there somewhere.