Struggling to Find New Music (& Exercise Tips)

Music has been an integral part of my life since I was a pre-tween, but it's always a struggle to find exciting new music to listen to. I'm someone who needs new things to discover. That new blood is an utterly essential part of my fragile musical ecosystem. The new things filter in and keep the old classics interesting as well, through the process of rotation. If I'm running just on the old stock then the system clouds up and collapses pretty quickly.

This fragile ecosystem has been thrown completely out of wack since I've started bodybuilding. With working out, I'm listening to three times as much music as I normally would per week. Which means I need three times as much music to listen to.

The confounding thing is, music is so essential to my workout. The difference between an hour workout and a three hour workout often hinges on whether I have great music to keep me motivated. I mean, when you get really into a song, when you're emotionally invested in it, you don't even feel the workout at all. Months ago when I had my heart broken I actually would intentionally work myself up into an emotional wreck because if I was stressing about the heartbreak and running it through in my mind, I could beat the shit out of my body and not even notice because I was emotionally preoccupied. Probably wasn't healthy (psychologically) but it was very effective, and for a while I had a flat stomach!

But those days are gone and I need music to motivate me. After 9 months, my catalog is really running thin. It was great for a while and I brought out all kinds of old metal, blues, deep cuts from bands I hadn't listened to since I was 14. But 9 months of this high volume play, I'm about out of ideas.

If you don't know me, I have a pretty unique music taste. Every few years when I'm just about ready to give up, I'll break into a new genre and get my excitement up again. Age 16 it was grunge, 19 it was metal, you get the idea. My last big revelation was dance pop, that was just about five years ago in 2015. So I'm hurtin' for a new phase.

Country music should be my salvation. So many of my favorite all-time albums are the ones that err very heavily on the country side, whether we're talking Harvest, American Stars N Bars, & Old Ways from Neil Young, Mudcrutch from Tom Petty, GG Allin's old school country jamboree EP called Carnival of Excess. Somewhere out there in the ether there's a country band with my name on it, a soulmate who could rival my favorites. But where the hell they are... I have no idea. For many years I've searched to no avail. I just don't know how to find the act that does things the way I like. Garth Brooks was pretty good, I got his whole discography for $30. I enjoy him but in the end he's just a couple playlists of good songs, he's no soulmate. I need somebody with the rawness of Neil, the rancor of Petty & his jammy tendencies, and the sad bastard mentality of GG.

Beyond that I'm pretty much out of luck. Anybody got any ideas on how to discover new music? Yeah I've tried Pandora and the like. Not very effective since all they can do is show you material that's similar to what you already have. And they don't do specifics, they do broad strokes. They can't make me a station based on GG's country material, they just play punk rock. And the Mudcrutch station plays classic rock. It's not about what the material sounds like, it's about what most people who listen to that band also listen to.