When It's Not Metal...

Everyone has a favorite ice cream flavor. Mine is probably orange. If a store has orange ice cream, or especially blood orange, I will buy it, hands down. But if stores ALWAYS had that flavor, I bet I’d still eat it a lot, but there would be times where I’d want something different. For me, music is the same. My favorite type of music, hands down, is hard rock and metal. It’s the music of my youth, it’s the music that moves me most and it’s the music where I like the genre enough, that I’ll enjoy a mediocre metal band more often than not. But, sometimes I need to listen to something different. I’m guessing most people are the same.

What do I like that’s not metal? Right now I am listening to Playing for Change, a project that works to record street musicians around the world. I have several Motown and Stax box sets and I love 60s soul. I have some CDs from the swing revival of the 90s. Classic rock like Hendrix, the Who, Led Zep and even Bob Dylan is a given. I also love a lot of blues, especially Buddy Guy, BB King, Joe Bonamassa, and on the acoustic side, Son House, Lightnin Hopkins and (again) Buddy Guy. I go to a fair number of blues shows. I’ve also recently got in to a lot of southern rock, especially Lynyrd Skynyrd, but I’ve also got in to a bit of Blackfoot and Charlie Daniels...I love Sly and the Family Stone.

In the 80s, I was confused that people assumed you couldn’t like Bon Jovi and Metallica. (I saw Bon Jovi on the weekend, and wore my Metallica shirt from last month’s tour to one show and overheard someone say “He’s at the wrong show”). Nowadays, I worry even less about what people think and find I like more and more different types of music, although, out of my 2,600 CDs, I bet that 2,300 are rock and metal.

What about you? What do you listen to when you’re not listening to the bands covered here?