Brierly Hill 90210

There's a lot to unpack in this episode. Along with several long-running stories coming to a close, there are many story lines that, although unknown at the time, were the start of bigger things to come; stories that would define the next 4 or 5 years. Battle lines are drawn between adversaries that will become nemeses.

I mentioned last time that I wasn't really enjoying my job. I felt too old to mix it up with the youngsters at a New York technology start-up. But after a few years of job hunting, I finally landed a “proper job” with a manufacturing company in Pennsylvania. It was a 1-hour drive each way, but that meant 2 hours listening to new music in the car every day. I was listening to some pretty crazy stuff, a lot of home-recordings from experimental artists. To save your ears and sanity, most of the music in this episode is more accessible tunes discovered later.

Elsewhere, more important events are afoot. While the Black Lives Matter hashtag was already in use with the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin, the deaths of Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Ferguson bring it to main-stream attention.

The world grapples with events in Ukraine and Crimea and, as the new year begins, a new presence in the middle east that nobody's heard of. Is it ISIS or ISIL?

This and other questions will completely fail to be answered. Welcome to 2014.

This is a period when I was lost in the music I was listening to. I couldn't really complain about my job but I wasn't enjoying it and was spending time searching for a new one. That likely sucked the life out of me and the joy of discovering new music. As a result, I was only recording 1 or 2 podcast episodes a year.

I often think about the greatest periods for new music and they always seem to coincide with when I'm enjoying listening to it the most; in the early eighties listening to the John Peel Radio Show, in the mid 2000s when I started broadcasting my own show and there's another one on the horizon as I rediscover my love for hunting out the new and wonderful.

Is that just coincidence? I find that it to believe but I'm too close to tell.

So welcome to a musical placeholder. Welcome to 2013.

In America, the economy continues its slow recovery; too slow for several big name brands and retailers that didn't sufficiently prepare for a digital economy. Will economic recovery be fast enough to secure Barack Obama a second term as president?

Meanwhile, across the pond, the UK prepares to celebrate 60 years of Queen Elizabeth's reign. There's also the small matter of the summer Olympics coming to town.

I started a new job in 2010 after spending the best part of a year out of work. I was working for a start-up company in New York and 2011 saw me working on an assignment on Wall Street in the city. That meant 4 hours on Amtrak and 2 hours on the New York subway each day.

On the world stage, a horrifying event went almost unnoticed in Tunisia but it was the starting point for revolution there, Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere that became known as the Arab Spring. Some resolved themselves relatively quickly while others continued to run for 13 years.

The year started with me doing contract work for corporate America. That's not the same as regular employment so when one of my clients offered me a full-time position, I took it. I was earning half of what I was before the financial crash but it put us in a better place than many others.

My first assignment for my new employer was in New York State which meant a long drive up the New Jersey Turnpike and Garden State Parkway on a Sunday night, back again Friday and start all over again after too brief a weekend.

It was exhausting and I must admit that I wasn't the best father and husband as the stress took it's toll.

After living in our new house in Pennsylvania for a year, we corrected our mistake of not selling our old house first, by finally off-loading it for far less than we'd planned. That was obviously not great but things got worse in March when, with a wife and two very young children to support, I was laid off from work. A lot of other people around the world suffered the same fate that year. We were more fortunate than others. Welcome to the real world. Welcome to 2009.

Does any day, week, month or year feel like the end of something as it's happening? It's only in hindsight that, usually as the result of a new beginning, you see the previous end for what it was. Even then, it's most likely a gradual evolution, not a sudden end. But in looking back, 2004 is an ending. There's personal sadness that goes with it which, while devastating at the time, gains clarity later as the necessary metamorphosis into something new and glorious.

We were trying for a family and, as for many others, it wasn't as easy as one thinks it will be. There were some heartbreaking moments along the way. In retrospect, with two normal, healthy, annoying, teenage sons, the pain of 2004 seems worthwhile.

It wasn't just a year of personal sadness. Many families had a far worse year than we did. That probably helped to lessen our pain, putting into a wider context. In this episode, you'll hear about the loss of a national (and personal) hero and musical legend in October and the loss of many more lives in December.

The musical metamorphosis starts in 2004 with the shedding of musical skin, made more necessary by the shock in October. This really was a year when I didn't like the songs I liked; one song in particular. See if you can spot which one it is.

The year started with America still coming to terms with a new world after September 11th the year before. Everybody was getting used to new security restrictions, myself included, as I continued to work in California, traveling from New Jersey once a month. If I was lucky enough to get an upgrade, I now had to eat my deluxe airline meal with a plastic knife and fork! Oh the humanity...

But we all learnt to cope like adults. We ain't babies no more.

I started my new job in January and began a new routine; 1 week in the office in California and the rest of each month working from home in New Jersey. That suited me, greatly reducing the amount of time spent in airports and on airplanes. There was still a 12-hour round-trip once a month and it's hard to imagine now that was pre portable MP3 players and smart phones so I read a lot. The 3-hour time difference usually meant that, by the time I got home on a Friday night, I couldn't sleep so took to catching new music on late-night MTV. Music on MTV was still a thing back then.

There were many people heading from east coast to west coast on September 11th that didn't come back home to their families. This episode does get a little intense at times but I hope you stick with it. You can handle it.