How have your musical preferences changed over time?

[oldboy]

1983-1995: Heavy Metal, Classic Rock
1995-2000: Power Metal, Prog Rock
2000-2011: Power Metal, Prog Metal
2012-present: Power Metal, Japanese Power Metal

When I started listening music back in the early 80's I listened to some Top 40 radio, Classic Rock, and mostly Heavy Metal. Then stopped listening to Top 40 music, and got into prog rock. Then I discovered Power Metal, and later Prog metal. The Prog/Power metal combination dominated my music world for close to 10 years, but now it's mostly Power Metal for me. Although I still take time to listen to the Classic Rock, and Prog albums I love I do not actively explore the Prog world anymore (except for anything Threshold releases). Power Metal is almost 100% of the music I explore nowadays. I am now discovering the Japanese Power Metal bands, so I think that will keep me busy for the next 5-10 years, hehe( long live Galneryus!!).
I wonder if other people have had a similar experience of their musical preferences narrowing down to basically one style. Has your musical taste evolved through time? Has it widened in scope? Has it mellowed out, or has it become more extreme?

 

[hoodaman]

I liked power metal for a while then I got tired of it. I still love watching it live but recorded it's just not for me anymore. I used to like prog metal. I still do, but I used to too.

 

[Justin G]

1987: Hair Metal
1992: ZOMG DREAM THEATER
1993-1998: Shit
1998-1999: ZOMG DREAM THEATER and all the things that sound like Dream Theater
2000: Power Metal
2002: Melodic Death Metal & AOR
2004: Traditional Metal
2009: ZOMG VOLBEAT
2011: Stoner Metal
2016: Things that sound like Dokken

 

[oldboy]

hahaha, great post!

 

[TwizstedJesus]

mid 80's- I was into punk, played in a punk band that had a fair amount of local success and had a soft spot for 60's Joplin Hendrix Doors Beatles

85-86-discovered Fates Warning and went on a lifelong quest for all things progressive. Found Watchtower, Hades, Dream Theater etc...

As metal died in the early 90's, I doubled down on it and refused Alt crap with a passion.

During the mid 90's I found so much good metal and Prog that was under the radar and expanded my sights into Euro-metal.

Early 2000's I discovered the Operatic style of Nightwish and fell in love. At this point in time I also found an ad for this Festival called ProgPowerUSA and saw that Nightwish was playing. Needless to say, I convinced my wife that we needed to go to Atlanta and I've been going ever since (minus 2 shows which I regret NOT going to)

Pain of Salvation, Evergrey, Epica became staples around the same time and to this day they've been with me on my life's journey.

Not much has changed in the past 10-12 years. I've lost the taste for Dream Theater. Fates continues to be my favorite band. Nightwish and that style has become passé for me, I've started listening more to Stoner Metal and bluesier hard rock, but I'm still on the Prog bandwagon, discovering bands like Need & Ascendia has been a joy in my life, and the yearly trek to Atlanta is my reason to live.

 

[J-Dubya 777]

I think if anything, I've given up on some old favorites, but my music "scope" is always expanding.

Left the kiddie records of the late 60's & early 70's for The Beatles, got into my older sister's record collection, and discovered Hendrix, Rainbow, Deep Purple, Sabbath, stuff that is now labeled as classic rock.

Late 70's - Huge fan of AC/DC & UFO, and also had my first serious listen to Frank Zappa in 1978. Was familiar with the Dr. Demento cuts, but I was missing SO much other FZ material. The NWOBHM hit, and I was in awe of Saxon, Maiden, Def Leppard (when they were a hard rock/metal band for 2 records), others.

80's I was a die hard metal head, started playing guitar in 1980, and at my guitar teacher's behest (show up or no more lessons!) I went and saw a Dixie Dregs clinic that was about 3 questions and an hour plus set of jazz/fusion that blew my mind. Welcome to another genre for me to investigate... Also got in eyes deep into the shred scene.....

90's started off a downer, my music was disappearing all over the place on radio, and there was even less of it to be found at the local record stores I frequented. TG for Dream Theater, who just ruled my world for a few years. I got on the net in 1996, and remember being relieved that so much cool hard rock & metal was still happening in Europe & Asia. Bands like Talisman, Glory, Gamma Ray, were the first 3 I checked out, and was hooked on what was being put out overseas, rather than the flannel clad no guitar solos, talent is BAD in music shit that was taking over here. (I'm no longer bitter about it - lol)

Being a Zappa fan, and a guitar fan, I always followed what past members were doing, and a guy named Mike Keneally, the last "stunt" guitar player in FZ's touring band, put out a cd called "hat" , and I thought, this guy is going to keep the Zappa path moving forward in music....yep, and he still does today, and I cherish his music, as well as his friendship. Late 90's I found out about Freak Kitchen while searching FTP hubs for Zappa stuff (They covered My Guitar Wants to Kill your Momma live in the studio for a radio broadcast), delved into their catalog, wrote their manager at the time to find out how to obtain their cds. Chatted up IA on email, and obviously, still as big of a fan of theirs today, as I was when I first heard them. As Glenn would say, I still swing from their nutsack lol

2001 was the PPUSA festival, and getting to actually SEE some of these bands, as well as being exposed to so many others from then til now.
16 years later, it's still something I look forward to, just as much as a fan, as well as crew.

So, there is no genre of music I've given up on completely, just some bands I don't really pay that much attention to anymore. Roots have gotten deeper in some areas and spread out thin in others.

I still love Zappa
I still love Power
I still love Prog
I still love SOME thrash...
I still love my jazz/metal/fusion (The Aristocrats & Morglbl are the top 2 for me!)
I still love my weird stuff (ie. Bumblefoot, Diablo Swing Orchestra)


I still don't like cookie vocals
I still don't like anything AC/DC after For Those About To Rock...

I don't see this changing anytime soon....... unpredictably, predictable!

 

[Riceloft]

This is a fun topic .

Lets see....

80s, I was a kid, listening to whatever my parents had on. Jefferson Starship, Aerosmith, David Lee Roth, Def Leopard.

Early 90s, I went through a phase where I didn't really listen to music until I had a day home from school sick, which was in....

1995, I discovered and started to dig the Gin Blossoms, Hootie and the Blowfish, Jewel, Madonna, and Alanis Morissette.

In 1997, Be Here Now was released and Oasis became my favorite band.

In 1998, sophomore year of high school, a good friend introduced me to metal, and I started listening to a lot of Metallica.

1999, my music life changed forever. A local radio show aptly titled "The Metal Show" was on one fall night. They played everything metal, no sub-genre was ignored. They're playing their normal stuff. Some good, some bad, while the DJ is excitedly talking about using the entire 2nd half of the show to play a single album. That album was Dream Theater's Scenes From A Memory, and he did play it through (with a few commercial breaks). I was transfixed. At the start of Beyond this Life I started to record onto a tape. Beyond this life thru Home were all I listened to until the album came out a few weeks later. SFAM did not leave my CD player for 5 months. I listened to nothing else.

From there, I discovered many bands, including my current favorite, Pain of Salvation and others like Kamelot and Symphony X. My love of Symphony X led me to ProgPower 4, and ProgPower, along with the MP.com forum have been my source of new music ever since. I still listen to and love both Prog and Power, but I'm leaning Prog still. I also love a lot of the past "oddballs" like Mercenary (while Kral was still there), While Heaven Wept and others.

Oh, and I've never been able to get into a lot of the genre "classics" for whatever reason, like Fates Warning, Stratovarius, Sanctuary, Iced Earth, Therion, Hammerfall, etc.

 

[oldboy]

Thoughtful posts. Good stuff.

 

[MelbCro]

My gateway band into metal was Metallica in about 1999/2000 in my early teens. I remember the exact moment as well, I was listening to the local rock station here in Melbourne and Metallica's The Unforgiven came on the air. I became obsessed with Metallica for a number of years following that. This was then followed by Tool who were the first prog band I ever listened to, though at the time I had no idea what prog was let alone that Tool fell into that space. I was also listening to the other classic thrash bands, in particular Anthrax, also things like the Gothenburg melo death bands like In Flames and Soilwork, the metalcore bands from the US like Killswitch and Shadows Fall as well as more alt metal stuff like Faith No More, Deftones and System of a Down.

It was at this point when I was about 16 or 17 that my older cousin who was a big metalhead took me under his wing and would end up having a huge influence on me, turning me onto prog. He gave me two albums which changed my musical tastes forever, those two albums were Dream Theater's Images and Words and Pain of Salvation's Entropia. Those albums blew me away and I become a passionate prog fan, which has remained my favourite music. For a long time it was primarily prog metal, in the more traditional vein. So I was listening to Psychotic Waltz, Symphony X, Fates Warning, Queensryche etc. But then I started branching out into prog rock and the more extreme end of prog metal. Its to the point now where I identify in terms of music as a prog guy first and metalhead second.

 

[Keir]

Love reading people's stories like these...

I grew up on classic rock, country, folk and novelty music before discovering metal as a young teen in the late 80s. During my high school years I rapidly progressed from hard rock/hair bands (Whitesnake, Scorpions, Ratt) to heavy metal (Ozzy, Savatage, Judas Priest) to thrash metal (Megadeth, Testament, Sodom) to death metal (Obituary, Morbid Angel, Death).

In 1992 I went to college and got tired of death metal and the general state of metal in general so I started listening to a lot of alternative and folk music.

Then in 1995 a friend gave me a mix tape with bands like My Dying Bride, Amorphis, Anathema, and The Gathering, and it blew my mind. There was still life in metal! This began a desperate and mostly fruitless search for similar artists until I got internet access the following year. That was how I discovered that German power metal was not only still around, but was stronger than ever (1991 saw the release of Sigh No More and Pink Bubble Go Ape and I had never looked back). So that became my obsession for basically the next 8 years.

The next big musical change for me coincides with my first child being born in 2004. A combination of stagnation in the power metal genre and my own personal nostalgia caused me to revisit the hard rock and traditional metal bands of my teens. This went beyond simple nostalgia and I started discovering bands that I had missed before, in particular the whole NWOBHM scene. Nearly another decade passed where my main listening habits revolved around uncovering long lost gems of 80s metal.

Now my listening habits are a bit more varied, sampling from all stages of my life (though I've never really gone back to listening to death metal).

 

[HoneyBadger68]

1970's - KISS fanatic
1980's - hair metal, Maiden, Priest, Queensryche ( non-makeup KISS fanatic)
late 80's - Thrash metal, Watchtower, Dream Theater, Fates Warning
the 90's were a musical blur of crap alternative bands but nothing held my attention
2000's -present day - Prog, Power Metal, traditional metal

 

[engmtlhd]

Early childhood I was listening to whatever my parents listened to. Mom liked gospel and pop, dad gospel and Queen (go figure). 1983 changed my musical taste forever...Pyromania. The British Invasion found its way to America. That and MTV. I'd watch MTV for hours...anything metal or alternative. No pop! I'd buy any metal band cassette I could find...RATT, Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, Poison, Iron Maiden, Priest...all of them. 1986 was the year I found Metallica and Megadeth and 1988 was the year of Ryche! So the 80's was the birth of my metal years.

The 90's I still listened to some metal and experimented in grudge. Didn't really to listen to a lot in the 90's due to a military stint, marriage and college.

2006 helped start me on the path of where I am today. I was listening to XM Hair Nation and the new Maiden track "The Reincarnation of Benjamin Breeg" was being played and it was then I dove in head first back to the metal scene, but I didn't want to go back and listen to the old stuff anymore, I wanted new music. Thank God for the internet.

2008...enter ProgPower USA. Helloween was to play the kick-off show. I was following Helloween and immediately began researching and listening to the other bands. Gamma Ray, Iced Earth, Mustasch, JOP, just to name a few. Since then I've been a dedicated follower of this forum for new music and everyone's opinion of music.

So today I'll listen to almost anything once as long as it's not death metal, satanic, or overwhelming grawls.

As cheezy as this may sound, I am forever grateful for PPUSA for opening the doors to my music.

Great topic!

 

[edgeofthorns]

1988 - 1995 Hard Rock, primarily 80's styled
1995 - 2000 Alternative Rock and Pantera (it was a dreadful time)
2000 - 2014 80's hard rock/metal; Euro power metal, some prog metal
2015 - present day: 80's metal (not so much hard rock anymore), select modern AOR, some Euro power metal, alot of modern prog metal

~Brian~

 

[SavaVIDude]

I'm older than most of you but:

1960 - 1965 - Elvis, Jerry Lee
1965-1970 - Folk rock (the Byrds, Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel)
1971-1980 - Harder rock and the British Invasion - Beatles, Doors, Hendrix, Doobies, Zeppelin; Sabbath, Priest (but especially liked the early Moody Blues - In Search of the Lost Chord through Seventh Sojurn)
1980-1990 - hair metal and hard rock - Poison, Van Halen
1990-2000 - Discovered Savatage in 1994 (from a friend) and found so many bands from folks like you on the Savatage website (Edguy, Blind Guardian, DT, Rhapsody, Symph X)
2000-Present - Have really honed in on thrash and symphonic metal (Testament, Metallica, Soul Spell, Avantasia)

I really like all this music to this day. I have been rocking since its inception and I marvel at the way the Indie labels have freed me from the bondage of U.S. radio!! I also went to all the Prog Powers from V through XIV, and have seen so many cool bands (Evergrey, Freak Kitchen and a heavy dose of Oliva!!!!).

HEY, HEY...HI, HI
ROCK AND ROLL WILL NEVER DIE.....

 

[DigitalMan]

I started to get interested in music around 1980 I think. Liked the classic/hard rock such as AC/DC, Aldo Nova, Styx, Zeppelin, Floyd, Rainbow. However, Rush was the first band that I really, really liked. In addition to Rush I got into the great heavy metal of the time such as Maiden, Dio, Priest, Accept, Sabbath, etc. I never liked glam metal, but did like some early disks from bands that went that way in the future such as Motley Crue, Twisted Sister, Ratt, Def Leppard, Whitesnake, Dokken. In 1985 I started college and got lucky that my roommate and a few others on my floor were also big metal heads, so we immediately became great friends. We heard Metallica that year and were forever changed. Got big into thrash in the late 80's so discovered Testament, Anthrax, Megadeth, etc. In 1990 I graduated and moved to a new city where I knew no one other than my non-metal wife. The period was terrible music-wise. I hated grunge and most of the crap they played on the radio. I no longer had my network of metal friends to expose each other to new bands so I didn't find any new bands for a while. Sometime in the 90's I logged onto a Unix system at work and discovered the Usenet newsgroups. Hopefully my boss never discovered how much time I spent reading the various metal newsgroups. I finally had a place I could learn about new bands again. At about that time I actually heard a band on the radio I liked which was very unusual. That song was Pull Me Under by Dream Theater. I didn't know what it was that attracted me to that song, but I loved it. I dug around for info on them on the Internet and discovered people called them progressive metal. Even though I didn't really know what progressive rock was, my favorite band was Rush and people kept telling me they were progressive rock, so that's when I learned I had a taste for progressive music. Then one of the biggest things that happened is that Dietrick Hardwick started the Perpetual Motion forum where I found all these people that liked exactly what I did. Also around this time Erik Welty created a list of progressive metal bands so I gave the list to a local record store, Life By Design, that actually had a progressive section. I bought expensive imports there that I saw on Erik's list. This is when I really started to discover prog and power metal and I loved it. I eventually made a few metal head friends in town and one day one of them left Edge Of Sanity - Purgatory Afterglow in my car. I listened to it and I hated death metal vocals at the time, but the music was incredible so I kept listening. I eventually started to actually like melodic and progressive death metal bands such as Opeth, In Flames, Dark Traquility, Children Of Bodom, etc. Then I attended Powermad and Progpower and was able to see so many bands that I didn't think I would ever be able to see live. I also started the Colorado Heavy Metal Email List where I met lots of other local metal heads and discovered lots of local metal bands.

In general, my music tastes just keep expanding. I still like almost everything I used to like. For a while I got burned out and prog and power metal, so I really explored more extreme metal bands, female vocal bands, etc. In general the new bands I was enjoying were getting heavier and heavier. Eventually I got over my burn out and started enjoying prog and some of the top shelf power metal bands again. Rush and Jethro Tull were the main progressive rock bands I listened to for a long time, but in the last few years I've been going back and really getting into lots of the other prog rock bands I missed.

 

[General Zod]

After growing up on the metal of the day in the 80s (Motley Crue, Queensryche, Tesla, Manowar, Metallica, etc.) I lost track of the genre for a number of years. I rediscovered it in late 1998 with Nevermore, Iced Earth, Control Denied and Hammerfall, being some of the first records to reintroduce me to the genre. It wasn't too long after that I would become fascinated by music with harsh vocals, with Opeth's Still Life and In Flames' Claymanleading the way. Shortly thereafter I discovered black metal with Drudkh's Autumn Aurora and Enslaved's Below the Lights. Since then, my tastes have become fairly broad and often lack any discernible rhyme or reason. The one thing I would say I've lost all interest in traditional prog metal.

 

[TwizstedJesus]

mid 80's- I was into punk, played in a punk band that had a fair amount of local success and had a soft spot for 60's Joplin Hendrix Doors Beatles

85-86-discovered Fates Warning and went on a lifelong quest for all things progressive. Found Watchtower, Hades, Dream Theater etc...

As metal died in the early 90's, I doubled down on it and refused Alt crap with a passion.

During the mid 90's I found so much good metal and Prog that was under the radar and expanded my sights into Euro-metal.

Early 2000's I discovered the Operatic style of Nightwish and fell in love. At this point in time I also found an ad for this Festival called ProgPowerUSA and saw that Nightwish was playing. Needless to say, I convinced my wife that we needed to go to Atlanta and I've been going ever since (minus 2 shows which I regret NOT going to)

Pain of Salvation, Evergrey, Epica became staples around the same time and to this day they've been with me on my life's journey.

Not much has changed in the past 10-12 years. I've lost the taste for Dream Theater. Fates continues to be my favorite band. Nightwish and that style has become passé for me, I've started listening more to Stoner Metal and bluesier hard rock, but I'm still on the Prog bandwagon, discovering bands like Need & Ascendia has been a joy in my life, and the yearly trek to Atlanta is my reason to live.

As I thought more about this post and my music through the years, there are some defining moments that make for a more interesting read, so here goes...

I remember my first purchases as a teen. I found The Knack's "...But the Little Girls Understand" in the reduced/sale bin at K-Mart some time shortly after the release. I would guess late 1980. I had heard "Get the Knack" at a friends house and was enamored with the sounds coming from my speakers, so I bought the new disc with my saved up allowance money. To this day I can put this on and it takes me to a magical place far far away.

Queen came next. I remember picking up "Night At the Opera" & "A Day At the Races" at K-Mart sometime in the summer. These may have been the last 2 vinyl I ever bought in that era from the hard rock genre.

Next up was Christmas 1980. My mother bought me Judas Priest "British Steel" and I listened to it all night long Christmas Eve on her stereo, headphones in, singing "United" at the top of my lungs. The next morning at Grandma's house I opened up my gifts...AC/DC "Back in Black" and The Cars "Candy-O", switching back and forth between the 2 cassettes all day long.

Some time a bit later, fall 1981'ish I discovered Randy Rhoads and "Blizzard of Oz". On the same day I picked up Blue Oyster Cult "Mirrors". Randy Rhoads became my all time guitar hero on this day, and a few months later I bought my first concert tickets to see OZZY in Erie, PA. Shortly after, Randy died and nothing would ever be the same...

In 1982 there was the discovery of Motley Crue "Too Fast For Love". A friend and I, at the ripe old age of 15, wandered up to the local college on a Friday night after seeing a flyer for a metal Battle of the Bands, snuck in and somehow were able to stay until it was over. Damien Steel played, and later released a cd which was a fantastic slab of progressive metal.

Around this time I discovered the LA punk scene, Fear, The Germs, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Social Distortion etc.. And I formed my first band. I went full on punk rock for the next 3 years as my band gained a bit of local momentum and metal took a backseat to this movement which, I finally felt I had found a home.
.

 

[labrekk]

I'll write about the predominant genres in order of preference for each period, because I played metal all the time since I turned a metalhead at age 15 in 1984.

1984-1985 Heavy Metal
1986-1988 Thrash Metal / Crossover
1988-1991 Hardcore / Punk
1992-1997 Heavy Metal / Hard Rock / Classic 70s Rock and Metal bands /Prog Metal
1997-2004 Prog Metal / Heavy / Power

Since 2004-2005, it's pretty mych all the styles I mentioned, save for way less Prog than before, no more punk/hardcore stuff, and just a bit of thrash here and there. Mostly melodic metal and hard rock.