As I'm sure my closest stalkers know, I do music playlists for every year. I started doing it when iTunes first came to Windows in 2003, and back-filled lists to 1991 (some of which are pretty weak). The lists got to be really big starting in 2005, with lists over 30, but last year I only hit 20.
There were a couple of things at play here. First, I wasn't driving to work because I worked at home. No commute meant no frequent XM or AltNation, so already my discovery mechanism was limited. The other thing is that it was very much a year of albums for me. A lot of years get filled out by singles, but there was a remarkable number of albums that I enjoyed last year. Garbage, Metric, Sleeper Agent, Grouplove, Fun, Muse, Sleigh Bells, Florence + The Hendersons, and of course The Naked and Famous, a hold-over from the year before. There were only three singles in the list of 20 songs.
After three weeks of driving to a job, I've already picked up quite a bit, with singles from Crystal Fighters, Blondfire and Capital Cities. The album that makes me moist is Django Django. Seriously, it's the tits. "Default" is the big single right now, and an instrumental called "Skies Over Cairo" makes me wanna dance around naked. I love it. It's the first thing I bought in years that I knew almost nothing about and ended up being a great find almost instantly. And it was only five bucks on Amazon MP3!
I have high hopes this year for music. Variations on what we called "alternative" in the late 90's seem to be making a comeback. I suppose all it really took was for everyone to stop trying to sound like Blink 182, who tries to sound like old Green Day.
No comments yet.