Last year I moved from Evanston to Albany Park, and serendipitously my radio options changed. For decades I’ve appreciated the wide-ranging, unconstrained programming on local college and community stations, but I never spent much time actually listening to them, even during the years I hosted an international-music program on Loyola University’s WLUW. Maybe I couldn’t hear one station because I was too far from the transmitter, or missed out on another because I lived in a signal shadow cast by tall buildings. Maybe my home stereo just wasn’t configured right.
When WRME plays a song I detest (about one tune in three), I switch to one of those other stations. Sometimes I stay there for an hour or more, if the DJ strikes my fancy and doesn’t yammer too much; sometimes I leave after 30 seconds. It’s fun and informative—you can never learn so much about music that you can’t be surprised.
