Hey there. I made you a mixtape. But first, I want to talk about the importance of curiosity and expanding our taste.

Reaching Into the Blind Bag

I attended a listening party a few weeks ago for the new Phoebe Bridgers album. This was my first listening party, so I wasn’t aware that they happen in a dimmed record store and I didn’t realize they began with a recorded message from the artist and I certainly didn’t know they included an album intro steeped heavily in vocoder, though that last point wasn’t really part of the listening party and is just a weird thing that Phoebe Bridgers did to open her new album.

I was there with my 19YO daughter, just a week before she relaunched back to college, and a few dozen other young humans. The out-of-character vocoder, twisting Phoebe’s voice into some kind of weird background actor in a Kraftwerk video, was weird and electric and then it wasn’t — it slowly locked back into place, breathy and murky and spacey, the Phoebe Bridgers voice we know and recognize. It could have been off-putting or surprising, but I thought it was kind of cool. I still think it’s kind of cool.

I’ve been thinking through the past year of music — and, more specifically, about the leaders of my personal 2026 Album of the Year race. The contenders have fallen into opposite sides of the musical spectrum, split up into two groups: buzz-worthy/national-attention-garnering sad girl indie pop and folk — Olivia Rodrigo’s you look pretty sad for a girl so in love and this new Phoebe Bridgers album, Lost Weekend — and complex, dark, anguished post-hardcore and metal — Chalk Hands’ The Line That Shapes the Coast of Us and Neurosis’ An Undying Love for a Burning World.

This is an exhausting and eye-rolling combination of albums, because by listing them I risk sounding like one of those people who rattles off contrary and varied musical taste to somehow prove I’ve “solved” the idea of music. I roll my eyes at myself, dear reader, because there is nothing novel about liking metal and pop, just as there’s nothing novel about liking Indian food and Taco Bell.

But I do think having a varied taste in music — or varied skills, or varied experiences — is one of life’s most important goals. We all grew up with and still know people who only like one kind of thing — who only eat one kind of food, or watch one kind of television, or read one kind of book — and I TOTALLY understand how that kind of self-imposed lane locking can be safe and comfortable. I understand mostly because I’ve done it myself a few times — my senior year of high school, for example. I dove headfirst into punk and hardcore and figured it was embarrassing to still own Pink Floyd albums, so I sold all of my Pink Floyd albums and, years later, when I repurchased all of my Pink Floyd albums, I realized I was more embarrassed that I sold them in the first place.

There is so much out there, so many things that contribute to our understanding of the world: music, culture, opinion, even the skills we pick up from day to day. The world is made of billions of things, and to think that we don’t have the curiosity — not even desire or longing, but just curiosity on its own — to think outside what we know, to try things and taste things, to reach into a blind bag every once in a while and consider what comes out, well, it bums me out. It ACTUALLY makes me sad!

More than that, there’s a risk in keeping taste and skill narrow. When I sold those records, I didn’t lose access to Pink Floyd — instead, I was trying to lose a version of myself. I was trying to remove the portion that would have heard something in them. Rather than allowing for that music to be included within the rich tapestry of my own taste, I decided that I needed it to be clean and pure and unsullied by the real world. I was outsourcing my own discovery to the genre and scene.

I don’t regret those punk years, ever — they helped create who I was and who I continue to be. But I regret the certainty. The weird stuff and the stuff we don’t think we like and everything that goes beyond what makes us comfortable — that’s what we’re here for. When we allow ourselves to experience things, we give ourselves freedom.

There’s nothing wrong with hyper-focusing and diving deep into a single genre or a single thing. It’s what we do; we can all obsess in the way we see fit. My 19YO is locking back in with a new semester and a new obsession with Jerry Jeff Walker and this very specific idea of what she’s all about. On the other hand, my 17YO (who could easily be pigeonholed as “a skateboarding kid”) has opened up into fishing and a new job on a restaurant line and a new idea of what he’s all about. I have no idea how or where they’re finding their new passions, and I’m sure neither do they.

I think of this because I keep thinking about that listening party experience. I think about how my 19YO and I listened together, but separately, not sharing anything until we had left. I think about that group of kids, scattered across the stacks, some browsing and some just getting super super excited to hear new music from one of their favorite voices. I think about how safe they felt, about how Dan and Liz at Total Drag, once again, opened up their space and exposed these kids to more than just a new album — to the concept of choice, and to the idea that there’s so much out there. I think about how some kid, for the first time, realized there are entire genres of recorded music they’d never seen or experienced. They saw a new name, and maybe it sparked something.

I also keep thinking about how there weren’t that many adults in there. It was 11PM on a Thursday night — I had to work the next day, admittedly — but during this single moment of shared experience it was the kids who took the chance, who wanted to hear the weirdness firsthand. Us jaded adults thought we’d catch it the next day, or didn’t even think about it at all. We didn’t care because we were more focused on something else. An experience was happening, and we can’t all be at every experience, but surely someone said to themselves that they’d be fine at home. They’d be fine missing out.

That’s okay. It’s okay to miss out. It’s okay to pick and choose your battles. Maybe they already stayed up until midnight waiting for the new Neurosis album earlier this summer. Maybe they were at a concert listening to a new band. Maybe they were turning on something weird from Youtube. Maybe they were uncomfortably full from trying their new favorite recipe.

I want to make these assumptions, because I want to believe that we all know the power of new things — of expanding our taste, or experiencing things we’re not used to. I want to believe we’re all still fighting to be curious, to expand, to try new things. I want to believe.

This Month’s Mixtape

August 2026: Reaching Into the Blind Bag

Listen on Spotify. Listen on Apple Music.

• “Still Standing” — Phoebe Bridgers
• “my way” — Olivia Rodrigo
• “Last Train” — Allen Toussaint
• ”Don’t Feel Right” — The Roots (w/ Maimouna Youssef)
• “Been Use Ta” — DJ Shadow (w/ Pusha T)
• “Doctrine of Love” — Jalen Ngonda
• “Mis-Shapes” — Pulp
• “Let Me Down” — Jen Wood
• “Navajo Rug” — Jerry Jeff Walker
• ”Blind Man’s Arrow” — The Appleseed Cast
• “Rewired Eyes” — Chalk Hands
• “Caught Out There” — Kelis
• “Buttas On” — Liim
• “MANE” — GloRilla & Pooh Shiesty
• “Harnessed In Slums” — Archers of Loaf
• “First Red Rays” — Neurosis

This post is saved for posterity at Corey Vilhauer Dot Com. Every typo was because I was too busy looking for new genres to explore.