I am squarely “Gen X” which I think has been the best generation for a person to be classified as. We’re obscure, grew up both without and with the Internet, and are generally angsty but without any kind of attention that drives the Culture Wars. If generations were classified as anything, we’d be the “observer” generation: watching, but rarely participating. The value of that is overstated, because we’re considered to be apathetic and we’re generally OK with that.

When I started subscribing to satellite radio in the early 2000’s I spent a lot of time on the 80’s station because it had been [counts on fingers] 20 years since I had heard many of the songs the station was playing. It was kind of magical because until that time I had assumed that a lot of the songs I had grown up with in the 80’s were lost to history. P2P downloading was a thing, of course, and eventually MP3 downloads through iTunes and other services would become available, but that was a lot of work. Satellite radio allowed me to tune in during my daily 1.5 hour commute to/from home to work each weekday which was a godsend because for a while there I had been listening to “Kids Radio” as I was on drop off/pick up duty re: my daughter who was in daycare at the time. Therefor the hits of the 80’s took on a new place in my heart because as it was the music I had grown up with, it was also becoming the music my daughter was growing up with. To this day, her command of 80’s hits rival my own and not that I’m a myself an authority on the subject, I have a stupidly vast recall of 80’s music.

Since that time, I have moved decades in step with the passage of time. I am now ensconced in the 90’s. As I write this, I am listening to Lithium on SiriusXM which plays “alternative and grunge”. This is the sound of the early 90’s, which was when I had graduated high school and was attending college. By this age, people have generally solidified their musical tastes; mine tended towards metal, but after arriving at the University of New Hampshire and meeting a whole lot of new people (including someone from Sweden who introduced the lot of us to what was going on musically in Europe, an eye-opener in the pre-Internet era), I started branching out into the music of the era. This removed me from my cloistered world of word-of-mouth CD purchases, pushing me more into the realm of underground grunge and cutting-edge music of the type that college kids would gravitate to. One of my friends, Rachel, was a fan of a band called Live, and we all learned about them well before they became a massive part of the early-to-mid 90’s alternative radio scene.

Thing is, then and now I relied on what I could get from people or radio for my recommendations. As a college student who — shamefully — discounted MP3’s (“why would anyone want this?” I remember thinking as I watched a friend working Limewire and Napster), all I knew was what was popular domestically as well as contemporary; if it wasn’t on the local radio or recommended by people I knew, I probably didn’t hear it.

Now, of course, when I listen to Lithium the songs that they play evoke a massive wave of nostalgia that I really need at this point in my life. Not to say that my life is bad, but I consider my time in college to be one of the best in my life. Every song I hear recommends a memory that brings me joy…even if it’s associated with a painful period during that time. We are all a sum of our parts, and I recognize the years between 1992 and 1996 to be the most formative of my life.

Thing is that this time is populated almost entirely by singles. By the time I was getting recommendations from other people, from the college radio circuit, or from the growing “scourge” of digital downloads, singles were where people were at. No one had to buy entire albums to get the one or two songs they were interested in which made sense for poor college students, but now in 2025 when I have the means to reconsider, I’m seriously thinking of going back and discovering what I might have missed.

So I’m thinking about taking a whole host of singles that I enjoy from my formative 90’s and listening to the albums that spawned them. A few of them I actually did seek out but most of them are only known to me as “individual songs”. I’m thinking that each week, I’ll pick a band I hear on Lithium — since its current in 2025 and doesn’t make me have to rely on my ever-failing memory — and listen to the album from which a popular song originates. I don’t know if this is a good idea or not; listening to an album en toto is always hit or miss; it won’t wreck my feels for the originating song but might make me care less for the band’s opus than I might have otherwise.

That being the case and if I can both remember and stick with it, on maybe Wednesday and Friday I’ll recount my thoughts on particular albums as a purely hack effort stemming from a place of nostalgia. I’ll try to remember to explain why a particular album and/or band was chosen and then track-by-track thoughts on the songs from that album.

Do you care? Fuck no. Does it give me a reason to write posts? Absolutely! Does it ground me more in the nostalgia of the most favored point in my life? Hell yes and when my memory loss accelerates, I hope I will have these posts to review for the highlights of my own past.