My brother teased me about my musical taste the other day by calling it sad-girl indie. He was mostly right. It’s not that I don’t listen to male musicians and bands, some of them are my favorites—including Leonard Cohen, The National, Moody Blues—but, there’s something about a really skilled passionate anti-mainstream female musician that makes me crazy happy.

I think I had some formative musical experiences when I was a teenager in Olympia, WA in the 1990s during the Riot Grrrl movement. I distinctly remember one show that I went to with my much cooler (and more musically knowledgeable) friend-who-happened-to-be-a-boy. It was a Bikini Kill show—early '90s girl punk. (If you like Sleater-Kinney, go get yourself some Bikini Kill) and all the girls were in the mosh pit with their big black boots on. My buddy made the mistake to jump in and got kicked in the head. The irony was that he was the one who dragged me to the show. One ice-pack and a few PBRs later, he was as much in love as ever.

That’s not good, right? I certainly don’t think men should get beat-up for trying to dance to an all-girl punk band, but that raw girl-centric music appealed to me, and still sometimes does. Now I find myself leaning toward the sad, sometimes low-fi, quieter stuff. Bands I’m listening to lately include Cat Power, Jesse Sykes, Hem, Jolie Holland, Beth Orton, Kristen Hersh, Lhasa De Sela, Mazzy Star, Tegan & Sara—you know the stuff.

One of my favorite things to do is see what my friends have on their iPods, and I’m sometimes really surprised! I have one friend who only cleans while listening to Michael Jackson. One of my coolest Austin girlfriends has an iPod stocked with girl pop like The Spice Girls. When I’m in the mood to get angry or workout, I listen to PJ Harvey (love her for all occasions actually), the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Throwing Muses (old school!), Le Tigre, She Keeps Bees, Pretty Girls Make Graves, The Geraldine Fibbers, etc. I love going back to the '80s and '90s to find bands I missed, which is something I did a lot at our Bookmans store before it collapsed (that’s how I discovered my love of Bauhaus and Wolfgang Press). Hopefully I’ll get to do more digging again soon!