The Same Old Songs: What Musical Taste Reveals About Financial Change

Welcome to a special edition of Money Lessons! I'm Andy Temte and today is August 24, 2026.

Most weeks I write about money. Today I'm writing about a rock band — mine — and a three-word complaint that sent me back to something I've been teaching for years and getting slightly wrong. Stay with me. The wiring underneath that complaint is the same wiring that decides how you handle money.

For twenty-two years, I've been the frontman for a modern classic rock band called The Remainders. Every summer, when we post a setlist ahead of a show, the same three words show up in the comments.

Same old songs.

I've seen some version of it for years, and for years my reaction was the one you'd expect. This time it landed differently, and I've been chewing on it ever since — not as a musician defending a setlist, but as someone who has spent a good part of my career writing and talking about why change is so hard.

And I want to be precise about that, because I think we get it backward. Organizations don't resist change. Organizations don't have a nervous system. People resist change, one at a time, each on their own timeline and for their own reasons. What we call organizational resistance is really dozens of separate people moving at dozens of different speeds around one change, all at the same time — some three steps ahead, some dug in, most somewhere in the middle and quietly hoping it blows over. If you want to understand why that big transformation at your workplace has stalled, you have to start with the wiring of one human being.

Which is where the three words come in. Because same old songs is right. And the reason it's right is one of the cleanest illustrations of that human wiring I've ever come across.

Fourteen

Our musical taste gets set early. There's real research behind it.

Psychologists call it the reminiscence bump — our tendency to recall a disproportionate share of life's memories from between the ages of 10 and 30. A 2020 study out of Durham University showed 470 people, aged 18 to 82, a list of 111 hit songs spanning sixty-five years of the charts, and asked which ones carried memories. The peak came right around age 14. When the economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz went through Spotify's listening data for the New York Times, he landed in the same place: the most important window for men forming their lifelong musical taste was ages 13 to 16, and for women, 11 to 14.

Fourteen. Before most of us could drive.

Sit with that. The music you loved before you had any idea who you were going to become is the music you'll be reaching for at seventy. Not because you evaluated the options and concluded it was superior. Because of when you happened to be alive.

I'm exhibit A. I've been singing rock music in front of people since I was 14 — almost fifty years now. I don't call myself an old rock'n roller for nothing. That's not a preference. That's an identity.

Depression babies

Music is the easy example. The same thing happens with money, and there's research behind that too.

Two economists, Ulrike Malmendier and Stefan Nagel, published a study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2011 with a title worth remembering: "Depression Babies." They took nearly fifty years of household survey data — what American families said about money and what they held — and lined it up against what the stock and bond markets had done over the course of those families' lives.

What they found is the money version of the reminiscence bump. People who had lived through stretches of weak stock market returns said they were less willing to take financial risk. They were less likely to own any stocks at all. When they did own stocks, they kept a smaller slice of their savings in them. And they expected lower returns in the years ahead, long after the weak stretch that shaped that expectation had ended. People who'd lived through bad years in the bond market were less likely to own bonds.

The effect was strongest in the young, and there's a plain reason for that. A fifty-year-old watching the market fall has thirty years of other evidence to weigh it against — good years, flat years, recoveries. A twenty-two-year-old has almost none. That downturn is close to the whole of what they've seen, so it counts for far more in shaping what they come to believe about markets. The same rough patch an older investor shrugs off can set the terms for a younger one's next four decades.

So your taste in music locked in around fourteen, and your appetite for financial risk locked in around whatever the market happened to be doing when you first had money in it. Neither one was a considered judgment. Both feel like one. That's the uneasy part — the wiring never announces itself as wiring. It announces itself as taste, as common sense, as the way I've always thought about money.

The clay layer hums along to the radio

Here's why this matters well beyond music.

In Balancing Act, I wrote about the clay layer — the permafrost that forms in the middle of an organization, made up of middle managers and long-tenured staff who dig in their heels and wait for change to pass. I argued that resistance to change stems from a fear of losing control and a desire for consistency, and that the need for security and safety sits just above food, water, and shelter in Maslow's hierarchy. I also wrote that we get so comforted by the knowledge we already have — because it makes the world simple and understandable — that we resist information that might challenge it.

I stand by all of that. What I didn't appreciate until a distant acquaintance complained about our setlist is how ordinary the underlying mechanism is, and how far it reaches beyond the workplace.

Nobody in a strategy meeting says "I refuse to learn the new system because the old one is wired into me and I find the new one threatening." They say it in code, or they say nothing and slow-walk it.

And nobody at a kitchen table says "I've never once looked at what's inside my retirement account, because the way I first learned about money is wired into me, and looking would mean admitting there's something here I don't understand." That one doesn't even get said in code. It just doesn't get said.

But that same person will announce at a bar, cheerfully and without a shred of embarrassment, that rock music peaked in 1979 and everything since is noise.

Same instinct, all three times. Same wiring. Two of them we keep to ourselves. The third we'll say out loud to a stranger.

That's what makes musical taste such a useful mirror. It's resistance to change with the stakes removed. Nobody's job is on the line and nobody's savings are on the line, so we admit it freely — which means we can actually look at it. And what we see is that the preference isn't a considered judgment at all. It's a groove worn in at exactly the age when we begin to explore, flex, and find our own footing in what we like and don't like — often in direct reaction to the adults raising us, whose own tastes had hardened decades before. We think we're choosing. We are, partly. We're also being handed the terms of the choice.

If something that harmless can wire in that deeply, what do you suppose is happening with the beliefs that do have your livelihood or life savings attached to them?

The balancing act

Now, the obvious conclusion is that we should all fight this. Continuously broaden our horizons. Never let the groove form.

That's wrong, and I want to be careful here, because it's the kind of advice that sounds rigorous and isn't.

The comfort of the familiar isn't a character defect, and it isn't something we should be trying to engineer out of people. The music, the places, and the ideas that formed us early are a good part of what makes us who we are. Strip all of that away and you don't get a nimble person. You get an unmoored one. In business, the equivalent is the reorganization that burns down everything the long-timers knew and never wrote down, all in the name of transformation. Most of us have watched one of those slow-motion implosions at our own place of work.

So the work isn't to demolish the core. It's to keep expanding the edges.

I sing periodically with the La Crosse Jazz Orchestra. Standing in front of a big band is a genuine thrill, and it has stretched me as a vocalist in ways rock never has — different phrasing, different breath, different relationship to the beat entirely. Has it made me a jazz aficionado? No. I'm an old rock'n roller and I'll be one for the remainder of my days — pun intended.

But I'm a better performer for it. The core didn't dramatically shift. The edges got wider.

That's the balancing act, and it's the same one I'd ask of anyone on a team I lead. I'm not asking you to stop being who you are. I'm asking you to be purposefully uncomfortable at the margins, on a regular basis, in small doses, as a practice rather than an emergency. Curiosity at the edges is what keeps the center from turning into permafrost.

With money, that turns out to be more concrete than it sounds, and a good deal less painful than people expect. Open the statement you've been leaving unopened. Find out what you're paying for the thing you set up six years ago and haven't looked at since. Run the real number on something you've been carrying around as a rough guess — what a balance is costing you in interest, what a subscription adds up to over a decade. Learn one term you've been nodding along to for years without quite knowing what it meant.

None of that asks you to become a different person about money. It's the same move as singing with a big band. The core doesn't dramatically shift. The edges get wider. And the reason to do it in small doses on an ordinary Tuesday is that the alternative is doing it all at once, under pressure, in a month when something has already gone wrong.

The most adaptable people I've worked with were never the ones without strong convictions. They were the ones who held their convictions and stayed genuinely curious about everything outside them.

What this looks like in practice

Let me bring this thread back to the setlist, because the same principle governs how we build one.

Our 2026 Moon Tunes set list runs twenty-four songs. Fourteen of them weren't in the 2025 set. Exactly half of the 2025 set didn't make the cut this time. And nine of the twenty-four are ours — songs we wrote. The year before it was four.

So the literal complaint of same old songs doesn't quite hold up. But the more useful point is that both numbers are deliberate. The turnover is intentional. So is the repetition. They're the same job, not opposing ones.

That's because people don't show up empty-handed. They come carrying specific songs they're hoping to hear — the ones wired in at fourteen — and a band that ignores that is telling its audience their memories don't matter. It's why greatest hits albums exist at all. I saw Rush in Chicago on July 20, 2026 with my son Nick — Geddy and Alex back on a stage after eleven years, with Anika Nilles behind the kit in the seat Neil Peart made sacred. If they'd walked off without playing "Limelight" or "Spirit of Radio," I'd have gone home genuinely let down, and I'd have been within my rights. You go to hear the songs that define the band.

Rush know it. They've been open about what the tour is — a celebration of the music and a tribute to Neil.

That's why there's a Rush medley in our set this year, and why it's in every set we play in 2026. Not because we're short on ideas. Because Rush came back, and that deserves marking. And because for every one of us who got to a show in Chicago, there are hundreds of people in the Coulee Region that didn't.

And the new material? That's the edge work. Every original we play is a small act of purposeful discomfort — for us and for the audience.

As a songwriter, the distance between a song existing in your head and a song existing in the world is enormous. I dreamt up "Paradise" on my tractor on the first of June, 2025, mowing our walking paths, riding past the blackberries in bloom. The first lines and the melody arrived together, more or less whole. We released it a year later. A year — of refining, arranging, recording, mixing, mastering, and second-guessing, for three minutes and ten seconds of music.

Twelve original songs published now, and a good many more I wrestled with that will never see the light of day.

Three words

I owe the commenter a thank-you, and I mean that without a trace of irony or sarcasm. Okay — maybe just a hint.

Those three words — same old songs — started a song thread going in my head. There will be a few nights in the coming weeks where a melody and a couple of lyric lines rattle around at two in the morning while I lie there quietly next to Linda, not moving, hoping I'll still have it in the morning. Whether anything comes of it, who knows.

They also sent me back to my own work with a sharper question than I had before. I've spent years telling leaders that their teams resist change because of fear and a hunger for consistency. All true. But I'd been treating it as an organizational disease to be managed, when it's really just what human beings are — visible in every one of us, every time we skip past an unfamiliar song to get to one we already love, and every time we leave an account alone for another year because opening it would mean learning something we don't yet know.

You can't manage that out of people. You can only build the habit of stepping past the discomfort, a little at a time, on purpose.

The same old songs. We'll keep playing them loudly and proudly.

Grace. Dignity. Compassion.