10 years of Stuck

Today, more than 10 years ago, I was sitting at my desk working at BillFloat and it was past 6pm, almost everyone was gone from the office. I was sitting there and I heard a song coming from a coworker’s computer. I half got up and looked over and he saw me and apologized for playing music off his speakers, he thought nobody was in the office. I said it’s no big deal, I like the song. He told me what song it was. It was “Stuck” by Contriva (the superpitcher remix).

The next 10 years have been marked with me listening to this song in times of stress, joy, sorrow, and almost anything else that came to me.

From 2008 up until about 2014, I discovered almost 80-90% of the music I listen to. Whether it was older music I had never heard before my time or new music coming out. I will occasionally discover a new song or album today but back then, I was consuming music like air. I was listening to 5-10 new albums a week and listening to at least a thousand new songs a month.

This song stuck with me because it reminded me of that feeling of being in flow and being so immersed in work that I was caught completely off guard when I first heard it coming from my coworker’s speakers. I was sitting there, writing most likely some JS or CSS at the time. And it just gave me a sense of warmth and comfort I couldn’t describe at the time. Now I hear it and I’m reminded of the naïveté and hope I was filled with at the time, I didn’t really know what the future held and I didn’t care. I was happy where I was sitting and working.

I met some amazing friends there and I learned some important things that stuck with me throughout my career.

There’s not many other songs I know by Contriva or Superpitcher. I decided that finding a piece of art that will stick with me is enough. I don’t want anything else from the artists. Musicians are evolving people and realizing that one song or album can’t be all that they are and they will keep producing new music we might like or hate but it doesn’t change what they’ve given us already.

This feeling has become even more prevalent with some other indie folk rock artists I listen to especially Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, and Sufjan Stevens.

I have been journaling in private about my dad’s passing recently. I have a hard time properly writing and honoring my dad’s life and I think it will be very hard and take a long time for me to write about him. I wanted to write this post because it sort of gives me a sense of hope, sense of semblance, something I have been missing the past month or so. I haven’t been able to cope fully yet and I’m struggling with that at the moment. I will hopefully find enough strength to write more in the near future.