There are two versions of this blog post. Please pick the one that best suits your needs.
The short version:
I’m a big fan of a Chicago-area musician named Jeremy Keen. He pops up on this blog from time to time but there was a time when I didn’t listen to his music as much as I should have. However, ever since I’ve been following @JeremyKeenMusic on Twitter, his albums have once again found their way into my regular rotation.
Follow him on Twitter, buy his albums, go see him live (if you’re in Chicago), and live happily ever after. The end.
The long version:
Several years ago, I lived with a roommate who worked for the college radio station, and he was in charge of arranging the weekly band night, where local artists would come to the campus coffee shop every Thursday and play in the small basement performance area. This roommate had been bugging me to come to band night every week for most of the year, and finally one Thursday evening I relented. I sat through several performances, some of which were pretty decent, but at around 8:30 I got up to leave.
“Wait,” my roommate whispered to me. “There’s one guy left, and I’ve heard good things about him.” Reluctantly I sat back down and Jeremy Keen took the stage. Needless to say, it was a wonderful performance, full of emotion and catchy acoustic guitar. His music is largely folk with some country and rock elements – not the kind of stuff I usually listen to, but for some reason it just worked for me. I bought his album after the show and uploaded it onto my iPod. For months after I listened to Jeremy Keen almost every day and it was good.
The era of good times with Jeremy Keen was suddenly halted when I started dating a girl and introduced her to his music. She grew to love Jeremy Keen as well (as we all should). Now you’re probably saying to yourself, “Girls who like the same music as I do are awesome. What’s the problem?”
Well, it wasn’t a problem until we started having problems. The last time we saw each other she was sitting on my couch, arguing with me about grad school, how I was going to pay for it, and what I was going to do with my life. I didn’t know what to say back, but it didn’t matter anyway. She just got up and left.
As lousy as that experience was, it should have ended right there. But it didn’t, because the next day when I went to listen to Jeremy Keen I got angry about what she had said all over again. Instead of letting the music take my some place where everything was fine I decided to stay angry, so I listened to something else and went on a Jeremy Keen break.
While I didn’t stay angry for long, the bad feelings lasted long enough to move Jeremy Keen’s album out of my rotation entirely. This was a mistake that should have been quickly corrected but it took a while. Luckily after a break that was much too long, I was reunited with his music through Facebook, of all things.
Some time late in 2009 I saw that my former roommate had “liked” the Jeremy Keen music page on Facebook. I took a look at it and as I read I realized a few things:
1) Jeremy Keen embodies everything that I think is great about music
2) When he’s not behind the microphone he seems like a genuinely good guy
3) I missed listening to his music
Soon afterward I put his album back on my iPod, and it sounded better than it did the first time I heard it. I felt like I owed him an apology for turning my back on his album, so I made up for this the only way I knew how – I bought his second album, which came out in the late summer of 2010, and I promised myself not to make the same mistake again.
