I exited the '90s feeling like music was slipping away from me. I wasn't keeping up with new bands, genres like trip-hop and electronica were uninspiring to me, and I was endlessly back-cataloguing and replaying albums from the past.
In college, music was everywhere. Friends would share mixtapes, recommendations flowed naturally, and new discoveries would just land in my lap. But after college, life got busier. The music didn't find me anymore, and I wasn't going out of my way to find it.
This changed in mid 2000 when I got a new job and met Chris Good, a fellow music lover. Chris had a process — a methodical approach to exploring the music scene every year and restocking his library. Watching this, I realized I had been waiting for music to come to me like it did in my early 20s. But now, if I wanted to keep music alive in my life, I needed to be deliberate about it. The specific process was unimportant, what mattered was the discipline. With this realization, 2000 marked a turning point and a renewed connection with music.