music & me: because you miss those christmas album blogs

 Back when I was talking about Christmas music, I mentioned the story of how I lived without a car radio for six months.  I didn't live without music, but my listening joy was confined to songs I owned in a digital format, so I spent half a year not being exposed to new music.  Though if I'm being honest, I wasn't hearing new music on the classic rock station that I mostly favored before the death of my car radio.  I like music by dead people.  I did sometimes listen to country radio, but there's a lot of junk out there in country music these days.  Just sayin'.

When the death of the Focus (sigh) brought a working radio and a car payment to my life a year ago, I was excited about the prospect of radio.  That lasted for a minute.  I'd been out of the loop too long, and I was too used to a life of hearing only the music I liked.  I don't remember the specific incident that compelled me to give up mainstream radio entirely, but one day in a fit of dissatisfied station-flipping, I stumbled upon Christian radio, specifically K-LOVE.

I had always been that person that judged Christian music, mostly without listening to any of it.  I figured if those folks had any real talent, they'd be doing real music.  I also thought that people that listened to Christian music were probably homeschooling their kids and not watching anything that wasn't G-rated.  I was a jerk.  I get that.  But I'm not really the self-censoring type.  I typically suppose that if my faith or value system can't withstand a few cuss words or drinking or, for lack of a better descriptor, wrong living, then it's not much of a faith.  So there was no reason for me not to listen or watch or read whatever I wanted, and I guess my logic was that I didn't need Christian music or movies or fiction.

What I discovered is that I like Christian music. And apparently any new song I've learned at church and liked in the past seven years came straight from the K-LOVE playlist.  Well, not straight I guess.  Someone had to come along and arrange an acappella version, but close enough.  Another amazing discovery:  listening to "positive, encouraging" Christian radio sometimes actually makes me a better person with a better attitude.  Seriously.  It's not constant and foolproof, but I did notice a difference, especially at first.

I'm not all Christian radio all the time.  The deejays are sometimes enough to send me away.  I can barely tolerate talking on the radio at all, and there's a lot of talk on K-LOVE and sometimes they're just too positive and encouraging [Can I admit that without getting on the fast track to hell?], so I occasionally flip back to a few other stations, but since working radio also means working cd player and since Al has a six-disk changer (a big step up in the world for me, automotively speaking), when I get tired of talking, I typically switch to cds, which these days means Glee soundtracks in a continuous loop.

Wanna hear more about music I love?  Maybe I'll blog about my Glee-love one day soon.