Favorite Songs of 2024
It’s taken a little longer than normal – I am almost certain this is the latest in the calendar year I’ve ever posted it – but at last I can reveal my 20 favorite songs of the year. This year I’ve had the the least enthusiasm I can recall about the process.[1] Usually I’ll dive into the songs in mid-fall…
Favorite Songs of 2023
It seems like most Decembers recently I write something like “Well, it wasn’t a great year for music…” as I prepare to share a bunch of songs I both liked and listened to a lot. Something was different this year, though. According to Last.fm, I listened to about 15% less music in 2023 compared to 2022, and my least music…
Friday Playlist – Bests Of
In preparation for next week’s unveiling of my Favorite Songs of 2023, a review of my past favorites. This playlist begins with 2004 and includes co-favorite Songs of the Year for 2017 and 2022. Also below are links to my annual Favorite Songs posts. 2009’s list has been, somehow, lost to time. 2011 was the year I was stupidly using…
Favorite Songs of 2022
We have arrived at one of the most glorious days of my blogging year: the reveal of my favorite songs of the past 12 months. I often attempt to find common threads that wind through my selections. At first I wasn’t detecting any this year. There were a few songs about dead people, but that was a small subset of…
Favorite Songs of 2021
We’ve made it to another year-end list of my favorite songs of the past twelve (-ish) months. Usually I start working on these rankings in early October. This year I didn’t put any real work into it until after we returned from Hawaii on December 1. Some of that was because my working list was about as tight as it…
Favorite Songs of 2020
My pre-list State of Music comments are pretty simple this year: 2020 felt like a weak musical year. I don’t know whether to blame that on Covid, me getting older and having to fight changing tastes harder, or that it was just a rough year for good tunes. There are some high quality tracks in this list, but I’m not…
Favorite Songs of 2019
This was not a classic year for music. There were only a couple albums that I listened to more than a few times, only one of which that I went back regularly over the course of several months. There were long stretches in the year when there were no new songs that I was crazy about. But there were still…
Favorite Songs of the Decade: The 2010s
Well shit, I’m late. Last week I looked back and saw that I released my Favorite Songs of the 2000s on November 23, 2009. I was aiming to post this decade’s list on December 1 but when I saw that date, I figured I better get my shit together and drop this on your heads. Besides, I haven’t even started…
Favorite Songs of 2018
After about six weeks of hard work, here they are: my 22 favorite songs of 2018. Yeah, 22. Got a problem with that? I didn’t think so. I’ve provided both a Spotify playlist that goes from the end of the list to #1, and individual videos for each song. These posts are always hard to get right with all the…
26 Favorite Songs of 2017
Twenty-seventeen was solid, in music terms. It won’t go down as an all-time great one in my book, as the year lacked a legendary album (or two) and the wave of solid tunes pretty much dried up in the final quarter. And, compared to last year, not nearly as many albums stuck with me. But, as always, there were plenty…