It’s August, the boss is away, and I’m mowing my lawn listening to The Cure. Reason? See August. But also because I came across an old Apple Music Radio (formerly Beats 1 Radio) show called Gratitude. I found it in the Podcasts app of all places, only to learn that the series ended seven years ago. I have a thing for artist-hosted music shows on Apple’s radio station. This show format is so good and likely only stopped because of lack of discovery.
“Artists sharing albums” is the tagline for the series. When it popped up in my Podcasts app, the premise caught my attention. The series has a host and a guest artist who talks about their chosen album of influence. Interlaced between each track of the album is commentary from the artist about what the album and song mean to them.
There’s something contagious about listening to people talk about things that they’re passionate about, even if it’s not something that you’ve ever thought about. If you happen to already like the speaker and appreciate their subject, it’s like vibing with a friend over something you both enjoy.
Disintegration
For my first listening session, I chose an episode guest hosted by DJ and producer Kaskade, with whom I am vaguely familiar, because their album of choice was by The Cure. I’ve been a huge The Cure fan since I was 13 when Robert Smith was featured on a blink-182 track. I’m sure youth of the 80s will find that discovery process blasphemous. These days it’s the band CHVRCHES that is giving a new generation an invitation to the melodic, dreary world of Robert Smith.
My dive into the deep end of dark pool that is The Cure came around the ripe age of 14 or 15. I was visiting my aunt from out of state and spending the night with her then-boyfriend who had Disintegration on CD. Like I said, the deep end of the dark pool. I remember somehow returning home with the disc, making it my most-played album for the rest of high school. Sixteen years later, I gifted my uncle with the unreturned album on vinyl — larger album art is great for displaying in the age of streaming!
Head on the Door
Now back to the Apple Music Radio episode. For Gratitude, Nicolas R Barili hosted Kaskade who chose The Cure’s 1985 album Head on the Door. I’ve listened to the album before, especially standout hits “In Between Days” and “Close to Me,” but hearing the album from the perspective of someone who grew up on it makes it even richer. This format is just brilliant.
Organic music discovery sometimes happens in a vacuum. We hear a song from an artist we don’t yet know on a playlist before we discover the complete album and their previous work. But then you might recommend that artist to a friend with similar music taste, and now that artist or album is more sentimental because of the memory attached to the first listen.
Gratitude as a feature
So what’s my point? Gratitude is the perfect title for this format, and it deserves more than the 36 radio episodes between 2015 and 2017. Discovering and following a radio show on Apple Music Radio has always been challenging without a central directory or a way to follow shows in Apple Music. You may even find that the Gratitude format is the foundation of many artist-hosted shows.
Next, as an Apple Music member-only show, each song from a record can be played in full. If you listen in Apple Music, you can easily add the songs to your music library. If you listen in Apple Podcasts, your listening progress syncs between devices. Adding these shows to the Podcasts app helps discovery and returning each week, but the feature difference is a gap that should be bridged.
Lastly, Gratitude shouldn’t just be a short-lived internet radio show behind a paywall. It should also be an Apple Music feature for subscribers. Members can already make and share playlists with custom names and album art. Including the ability to include voiceover commentary between tracks, recreating the magic of the Gratitude show format, would be fun and rewarding. I’m sure the feature would be tried once by many and used often by few, but it would be a rich creative tool for music nerds, like me.
For now, I’m going to re-listen to Kaskade share his gratitude for Head on the Door by The Cure before I dive into the rest of Gratitude’s catalog. It turns out mowing the lawn to this mix is very fitting.
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