“I’ve had many of these “projects” in my life, albums that I didn’t enjoy at all the first few times through but kept anyway, hoping that someday they’d eventually click. It’s a tough notion to hold on to, especially now. There are so many records competing for attention, and so many are potentially appealing on first listen. But it’s important, I think, to not give up on difficult albums. Difficult records serve as barometers, showing the limits of your current taste and understanding: here’s where music gets too noisy; here is where it gets too atonal; this is that place where I don’t know what the hell is going on. And while difficult records define a boundary, they also measure how your understanding changes between spins. The way you hear music is continually shifting, and many of these changes are unconscious. When that difficult record finally makes sense, you understand how you yourself have expanded.”
