Jackson Tenclay

Cultivating a taste world

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 23:03:06 -0600

At the end of last year I canceled my subscription to Spotify, for a couple of reasons:

The pushing of AI-generated music above human-made music
The investments in AI war technology
The atrophy of my own “taste muscle”

I’ve heard friends name the first two as reasons they’ve felt uneasy as well, but today I’d like to focus on the third.

The taste muscle

“Good taste” strikes a balance between what’s familiar and what’s novel. Something that’s 100% familiar is boring, but something that’s 100% novel is difficult to connect to. I wouldn’t be interested in listening to music that’s just a copy-paste of what’s been done before, but I also might have trouble appreciating something that’s so far out of left field that it just registers to me as noise. And something that’s comfortably familiar to me might feel challenging to someone else, or vice versa. Someone that I personally would consider to have good taste would be recommending things that sit somewhere in the middle of that continuum for me: not so familiar to be boring, and not so challenging to be inaccessible.

Balancing an equation

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 22:01:50 -0600

I’m at a bit of a crossroads. I’m happy with where I am in my career, but looking back I can see all the other paths I could have taken if I had made different life choices. I’m in my thirties and it’s easy for me to think that some paths are closed permanently to me. This is false, of course – I might not be able to become a professional dancer or athlete, but most paths are still available. Adults older than me go back to school or start a new hobby or career all the time. But the crisis is there for me all the same.

Deleting as pruning

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 18:51:34 -0500

I used to be somewhat of a digital hoarder. I would leave tabs open for weeks or months because they felt like uncompleted tasks and if I closed them (or, heaven forbid, they got closed on their own during some sort of system reset) I would end up forgetting whatever I was supposed to do with them, and miss out on a movie, a restaurant, an album on Bandcamp, a clothing brand. Every once in a while when my browser started to get slow, I’d be brave and shove them all into an aggregator like OneTab and tell myself I’d get back to them later. That inclination is how I ended up with a big graveyard of lists – random tidbits in my Notes app, email newsletters left unread, drafted tweets, a set of reminder-style calendar events that I move from month to month, unread messages on every social media platform, favorited recipes I have not made; lists on Letterboxd, Goodreads, GameFAQs, the Chicago Public Library website, Discogs; unfinished Ableton projects, screenshots of things to remember on my desktop, folders of previous years’ worth of similar screenshots, saved albums on Spotify, playlists on YouTube that I’m 30% through.

A reset window

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 14:03:04 -0500

Yesterday I got back home after being away on a trip for a couple weeks. I went to Toronto to visit my boyfriend, and we went to Europe for a music festival and then spent some days here and there afterwards. We had a really great time, but at the end of a long trip you start to miss some things about your routine at home – things you don’t normally think about, little conveniences and affordances you didn’t realize were important to you. Two weeks is long enough to disrupt your habits (good or bad), and when I finally sat back down on my couch I felt pretty unmoored, like in the dream where you’re wandering the halls of your high school and can’t remember which class is next, can’t find your schedule, can’t remember your locker combination.

Causing time to echo

Thu, 15 May 2025 23:34:24 -0500

Life has a way of repeating itself as it tells its story. I recently hung out with a friend from college for the first time since last summer, and we talked about how our lives have grown closer or further apart throughout the years: I moved abroad and returned, he moved out of the city, we were roommates for a while, I moved back to the city, he moved out of state and then came back, etc. It’s a really special thing to be friends with someone for long enough that you’ve seen multiple versions of each other and are still able to enjoy time together. Catching up this time felt like a reprise of all the other times we’d seen each other after months away and been excited to share all our news.

Hit send%

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 13:43:52 -0500

I have a bit of a mental block that sometimes stops me from beginning new things. It’s different than the fear of failure or of looking stupid – after all, I know that one of the best ways to learn something is to fail quickly as many times as possible, and continue trying. In any discipline there’s a big spike of learning at the beginning, when the novelty alone can keep you persevering even if you make lots of mistakes. And later on at an intermediate level, the way to keep learning is to be “the worst musician in the room,” right? If you keep an open mind, then spending time with those better than you is the exact right way to progress.

Bit rot and starting over

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 09:49:40 -0500

My last big redesign for my website was in February 2018. I had just started my first grown-up web development job and I wanted it to feel confident and understated. In the years following I made updates now and then (namely to the music log), but didn’t feel the need to do another big redesign. I wasn’t using the site as a blog so it never stayed in the front of my mind for long; there were times when I was months late to renew the security certificate or update what I was reading and playing or where I was working. And…maybe no one cared! Now I forget whether I even had any analytics to see if my site got much traffic at all.

Music Log | Jackson Tenclay

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000