REO Speedwagon, Abu Ghraib and Desert Islands

My Desert Island 5 (the five records I would want if I were ever stranded on a desert Island) are: Unforgettable Fire (U2), Shake Your Money Maker (The Black Crowes), Flaming Red (Patty Griffin), Heartbreaker (Ryan Adams) and So Far (Crosby, Stills and Nash). However, truth be told, if those were the only five records I had on a desert island, I’m pretty sure I’d eventually want to suck my eardrums out with a plunger.

Who in the world wants to listen to the same 5 albums over and over again? I don’t know a human being that could handle that. That kind of repetition is something you would have found at Abu Ghraib alongside waterboarding.

There is nothing more depressing than going through life unmoved. Static. Blasé. We all clutch to the inherent sense that we deserved to be wowed; to live in some sense of amazement or awe. But all the things we love...movies, music, cars, food…cannot escape the law of diminishing returns: no matter how great something is the first time, the more you listen to, experience, taste or encounter it, its impact becomes weaker.

It’s true. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t constantly be making and/or looking for new records. We’d be listening to the first thing that blew our skirts up. I’d still be clutching a Realistic tape recorder jamming REO Speedwagon’s High Infidelity.

But that’s a good thing…

It is because of music’s inability to ultimately satisfy our artistic/emotional itch that we push forward to find something new. We want to find something that builds off the brilliance of the old and connects with where we are and might be going.

I think that is what we are trying to do at Brite Revolution.

We are a new music destination. We built Brite to constantly bring people music from the artists they love and new artists they need to love. We cut through the background noise, find those things that promise to inspire, connect, move and resonate with people. We know the value of an artist’s back catalog, but we want to be about new experiences, new renderings of great ideas…new music.

I’m not going to lie. I still dig me some Speedwagon on occasion. Riding The Storm Out is a wondrous guilty pleasure when speeding through the back streets on the way home at 2 AM. However, nothing will replace that moment when you hear a new song that’s the perfect storm of guitar parts, lyrics and performance. When we quit having those discoveries, we might as well be living on a desert island.