Hi, this is Chris Hubs.

I don’t know why you’re listening to this, but since you are, let’s talk about music.

And, okay, way big subject.

Let’s dial it in.

One of the things I’ve really enjoyed about my current stint of working from home is the opportunity to have a small speaker going and have music playing while I work.

At least the time when I’m not in meetings.

I haven’t subjected my coworkers to music during meetings and probably won’t.

My go-to music of choice during work is some form of classical music, but I have some very specific—it feels like boundaries for what works for my brain and what doesn’t.

The morning is for classical, and it really needs to be earlier era classical.

So anything from Renaissance and Baroque up through about the classical period, right?

So I end up with a lot of Bach, Mozart, up through Beethoven, a little bit of Chopin, depending on how wild the Chopin is getting.

And that’s about where my brain can handle it in the mornings.

Maybe I’m just not awake enough.

Maybe I need more coffee to get there.

I’ve had the occasion where I’ve had a shuffle on or picked a CD and it’s turned out to be Liszt or Rachmaninoff or something that—I don’t know—Brahms, somebody that I would enjoy typically.

Even something like Debussy is a little lighter, has the potential to be lighter and less intense than, say, Brahms or Rachmaninoff.

But Just doesn’t, doesn’t work for me in the mornings so well.

So a lot of classical music and found some things I enjoy there.

This morning I’ve been listening to a recording, Arthur Rubinstein playing Chopin piano concertos, and that’s been quite lovely.

But a lot of interesting things with Bach and Mozart out there.

Also some recordings of Scarlatti I found that I’m enjoying.

So my meeting schedule tends to crank up after lunchtime, thanks to having a home office on the West Coast.

But if I do have music going in the afternoons, I really like to switch over to jazz in the afternoons.

And again, I can’t get to things that are too complex here, and I largely keep it instrumental.

But finding jazz pianists or jazz combos that I can turn on and enjoy something with a little more structure and a little more interest, but again, not that draws my focus away completely.

So I can get up into a lot of Dave Brubeck is fun there.

Thelonious Monk is familiar enough to me at this point that even though he’s a little more complex and engaged, he fits in the structure there.

I’ve been listening to a bunch of stuff lately by a younger jazz pianist named Joey Alexander, and he’s working in less modern jazz style than some.

But it really kind of fits that groove for me and is a thing that I can have in the background.

I can enjoy and not get my attention drawn completely away by it and have it be conducive to my work that way.

I pretty much try to stay away from pop music, things with vocals while I’m working, just because I find that the words draw me away so much.

Like my brain wants to focus on words.

The one exception there would be the handful of albums that I know so well that my brain doesn’t have to think about the words or isn’t inclined to think about the words.

So the one Arcade Fire album, The Suburbs, that I’ve listened to incessantly since it came out.

When you know all the words backwards and forwards, my brain can tune them out somehow a little bit.

I had a while where the Hamilton soundtrack was like that.

A few of the really old, like, Cadence Call records that I listened to like crazy.

It’s all there in the back of my head somehow, and so I guess it doesn’t need to come forward.

Now that I’ve gotten into my Arthur Rubinstein kick, I expect that my next couple listens are going to be recordings of his.

I’ve got some Beethoven queued up here.

Probably go for some Chopin solo stuff rather than the concertos, and just see where we go.

But a lot of fun to listen.

Does seem to help my work focus too, so as long as I’ve got that, it does help the home office be less quiet.

We’ll talk later.