During the summer nights of my high school years, my friend Dylan and I drove to the nearest city to explore life outside of our suburban farm town. These nights were filled with coffee shops, photography, and indie-pop rock.
As you can tell, we were baristas in the making. As we discovered more and more cafes, we began to rank them by 3 categories: the coffee, the people, the vibe.
There were almost always tradeoffs. Sometimes the coffee was just okay, but the people were rad, and the place was chill. Other times, the coffee was marginally better, the people were cool, but the vibes were just off. I trust your imagination can tell you all of the possible combinations.
Time and time again though, it always came down to that overused California-slang word: vibe. What is attributed to this though? The build-out, the music, the climate? Much like a late night car ride through the city, nothing impacts the vibe like music.
“Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.” - Daniel J. Levitin
Getting coffee is certainly the activity I need to prepare myself for speech communication. Sometimes when I go to a coffee shop in the morning I'm not ready to have a full on conversation. Music allows us to connect nonverbally. It allows us to enjoy the present moment without the need for conversation.
I imagine your local coffee shop provides a similar feeling. If not by music, feel free to reply. Let me know why you choose the coffee shop you go to each morning.
That indie-pop rock band that Dylan and I would listen to on our night drives was usually Tokyo Police Club. My favorite album by them is “Champ”. And we chose the name Juno because it was the coolest song name that fit in our coffee shop name test sentence, “Wanna go to Juno?”