That there is an ol’ Power Mac 7200 from 1996. She got 90 mhz and can play a whole buncha CDs and Lucasfilm games without breakin’ a sweat. And if you attach a monitor then you’ll have yerself a real doozy!

Music and the Journey Home

Lately, I’ve been working on improving this site and getting my first book, The Reverse Coloring Book of the Solar System, live (edit: It’s live!) and have been listening to a lot of music.

Particularly, I’ve been gravitating towards the music and bands I listened to in college and at my first design job.

I went to a major technical college in the mid-90s for graphic design. I worked furiously through various school projects and would listen to contemporary music and 80s bands who broke their “sound” for the sake of progress and keeping up with the alternative, grunge, and EDM scenes that became popular with the changing of the decades.

I loved alternative 90s artists like Garbage, Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails, and so on. However, the most interesting bands to me during that time were the older ones that took a shot at evolving in the changing decade.

Acts like U2, Depeche Mode, Madonna, INXS, and Duran Duran were staples of the 80s, but could they survive in the 90s? I felt they did and the way they broke their molds was inspiring. They helped me break mine.

Dad introduced me to U2’s 1991 album Achtung Baby which was the “sound of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree” (their best-selling album). Their video for “Even Better Than The Real Thing” blew my mind that year. It’s still pretty cool; I saw the same wraparound camera treatment in an H&M ad the other day.

Their embrace of technology and trying new things pushed me to try more creative things in terms of design, illustration, and photo manipulation. What they embrace in a drum machine I learned in design for something called the “internet”.

There were CDs. Lots of CDs. Thankfully, my Power Mac 7200 had a CD player, so I listened to a lot of music as I worked on projects. That, and taking breaks to play a plethora of Lucasfilm games and Doom.

There were so many different styles that became popular: ska, techno, electronica, house, post-grunge, Brit-pop… It was a great time to explore music because there was something for everyone.

My favorite artists at the time were U2, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, Stone Temple Pilots, INXS, Nine Inch Nails, Oasis, Jamiroquai, Garbage, Moby, KMFDM, Chemical Brothers, Basement Jaxx, and Smashing Pumpkins just to name a few off the top of my head. There were a lot of other names I can’t remember because they were all mashed together on a variety of my techno and EDM compilation cassettes and CDs.

The Smashing Pumpkins did an amazing job merging music and visuals in their video for “Tonight, Tonight” from 1995’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.

There was a local radio station that played alternative music, so I listened to it when I wanted to discover something new. It was great because the station wouldn’t play the standard top 40 songs and would air full albums on their release day. Gotta love radio in a college town before IHeartRadio.

In retrospect, it seems that I connected with artists who utilized technology to add to traditional band instruments and sound. I felt that I had a special connection with the artists I listened to because I was in a field that embraced technology to discover new things.

“The Trick is to Keep Breathing” was Garbage’s third single off 1998’s Version 2.0. The band is still going strong with their 2021 album No Gods No Masters.

I may wax nostalgic, but it was a time of growth for me in my younger days. Just as the music fueled my desire to create in the 90s, that music is doing the same for me today.

It’s a reminder of why I got into this industry as it encourages me to explore a place of creativity and inspiration.

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