My Year in Spotify Listening
Like a lot of people I checked out the Spotify year-end summary thingy, and since Spotify is only a certain percentage of my listening, the results were surprising, and I tried to figure out what it meant. In general, I listen to new music via iTunes, if I am sent promos. That only encompasses a certain amount of new music of course, but if Iām sent a download, I tend to use that for my listening all year long. Often, IāmĀ ādone withā an album more or less by the time it comes out, but sometimes Iāll keep listening (as w/ DJ Koze this year) and I do that with my promo files. My Spotify listening tends to be a mix of things I stick on a few different playlists based on mood or genre, and they could come from anywhere (but they arenāt usually new).Ā
In terms of my favorite artists (Bill Evans wound up in my top spot, somehow, followed by Joni Mitchell) it was hard to figure out how itād happened, because I didnāt spend the year obsessed with either. Then I looked at my 100 most played songs, and that did bring back a few things. Iām not sure if the whole list is in order, but the first 5 songs in the playlist are the 5 listed when Spotify gave me my most-listened-to tracks of the year, so I think so? Anyway, thatās what I am going with here. This is how my Top 10 songs show up on the playlist, in order, with one exception: in the middle of the list was Bow Wow WowāsĀ āSee Jungle,ā which I already wrote about on Tumblr 8 years ago (and about which I have very little to say now, except that yes I do still listen to this song a fair amount), so Iāve omitted that and included No. 11.Ā
Wussy: āRunawayā
This was my favorite song of the year, it has 600 plays on Youtube and 5,400 on Spotify, which makes me a little sad. Technically itās not from this yearāWussy put this out on a small-release tape or CD-R a few years agoābut Iām still counting it. This is the rare case where the streaming media playcounts tend to match the responses of folks Iāve talked to about this songāI mentioned to 4 or 5 people, and in each case they saidĀ āYeah thatās kind of nice I guess...why do you like it so much?ā Iāll try to answer that here.Ā Ā
First I should say that I have no real interest in or knowledge of Wussy. Theyāre an indie rock band from Ohio, most notable at this point for the fact that Robert Christgau loves them, and has written rapturous reviews of their work over the years, which surely has helped them to achieve whatever small amount of notoriety they have. I checked them out here and there but they didnāt make much of an impression on me. I wish I could remember how I came across this particular song, but I canāt, probably either Twitter or a streaming media algorithm. But I loved it immediately, like, stop-what-you-are-doing-and-listen kind of loved. It just clicked.Ā
The first thing that comes to mind is the chorus:Ā āI love you, letās run away.ā Thatās the theme of so many of my favorite songs, I mean, the first album I bought in my life was āBorn to Run,ā and if you could sum up the first three Springsteen albums in in 6 words,Ā āI love you, letās run awayā wouldnāt be bad. And I think I liked that this song didnāt try for poetic phrasing, just said it in the simplest way possible.
But the romance of a song like this has a shade of darkness to it, and that draws me in even more. Escape is never a long-term strategy. Eventually you have to figure out how to make life work when youāre in the thick of it. So while itās such an appealing dream to exit the world with someone youāre crazy about, there is a shelf life to that sort of gesture. I relate to this idea of being fed up with everything in the moment and wanting to jump in the car with the only person who gets you, but eventually, the car is is going to need gas. What then?Ā
I didnāt know when I first heard this song that it was a cover, so the immediate impact of it was as a Wussy song. But I learned that it was written and recorded by another Ohio artist that people in the band had known, a woman named Jenny Mae. She died last year. Pitchfork did a news story on her passing. She was 49. And when I found that it was her song, I listened to her versionĀ and I loved it almost as much (but not quite), though her take also made my Spotify Top 20. I did think enough of her version to order the 7-inch, which was her first release. When I read about Jenny Maeās life, the song took on another layer of meaning. She suffered from mental illness and self-medicated with alcohol. And she was described by people who knew her as brilliant and creative and hilarious but also impulsive and self-destructive. Which for me gives a sentiment likeĀ āNo one likes us anyway / I hate my job / Sweet, sweet are the innocent / I love you, letās run awayā andĀ ā40 ounce between your legs/ Shakin up my heart / Turn around and look at me /Ā Light another smokeā a different tint. These are the kinds of things you say when in the throes of a rush of feeling, but theyāre not impulses you can safely follow for a lifetime, even though goddammit, sometimes I want to.
Bo Diddley:Ā āNursery Rhymeā
In Richmond early this year I bought an old Bo Diddley album called The Originator. I saw it in a used bin, it was $20, and, it was pure instinct, I had a feeling it was interesting. For me, buying used records, $20 is a fair amount of money, I donāt pay that for something Iāve no idea about, typically. But something compelled me to pick it up. I was intrigued that it had none of the hits I knew. And I took it home and when I put it on a short while later it blew my mind. This surprised me because on the one hand it sounds so much like the idea of āBo Diddleyā I keep in my brain, the one rhythm we know from the song he named after himself, but this was just so controlled, so well rendered, with so much atmosphere. The whole thing is brilliant. I became particularly obsessed with this cut from the record, and then I started exploring theĀ āBo Diddleyā beat in general, reading whatever I could about it and listening to examples. This kind of random deep-dive is the best thing about the internet era for a music fan.Ā
Mulatu Asatke:Ā āTezeta (Nostalgiaā
At nights when I hang out with my Mom at her condo in Michigan I play music over a Bluetooth speaker I bought a year ago. My Momās default has for a while been to put the television on, but at some point I asked her about playing music instead so we could talk or just hang out, and she grew to like it. Sometimes weāll chat about stuff, and sometimes she will play Candy Crush on her iPad while I do things on my phone, which sounds distant but is actually very comforting to me. One of the things Iām doing on my phone during these evenings is finding songs to play. Itās quite fun (and interesting) for me to say to myself āWhat is a playlist that would make my Mom happy?ā and then try and figure out what that might be on the fly. She was never really a music person so I donāt have a lot to go on, mostly her age, a story or two about a song she liked, and a vague knowledge of what she might have heard on the radio in my lifetime.Ā
In September, my Dad died, and I stayed with my Mom in her condo for a number of days that month. I felt a strange mix of feelings. On the one hand, he was father, I missed him, I thought about never being able to talk to him again, to not be able to share the things in my life. I thought about the fact that I wouldnāt be able to learn more about his life, my knowledge of which is pretty sketchy. There were all the usual things a person would be sad about. But then there was the fact that he had a severe and debilitating case of Parkinsonās disease for the last eight years, and at times he suffered so terribly. I remembered how on a few occasions he called me while he was delusional, he would tell me that he was sure he was going to die. One time, he told me that he saw someone in the driveway who was going to kill him. Another time, he said that it was hard to explain but that he had been split into two people, and he couldnāt take it, he was terrified. I told him that it would be better tomorrow and he yelled,Ā āIām going to be dead by tomorrow!ā I would get calls like this while I was walking to work in Brooklyn 700 miles away, and I would feel so helpless. And so when he passed, I thought about him during situations like that, and also felt like maybe not he had some peace.Ā
A night or two after my Dad died I was sitting with my Mom, talking, and playing music. She dug out some old photos and we were looking at them, pictures from her in high school that I had never seen. I wanted to see everything, learn every detail. And over that Bluetooth speaker I was playing some random playlist I had found called something likeĀ āJazz for late night.ā I wanted background music. And while we were hanging out and talking, this song came on,Ā āTezetaā by the Ethiopian jazz bandleaderĀ Mulatu Astatke. And man, itās hard to describe, but the mood of this song so perfectly captured the exact feeling I had. The phrase that comes to mind isĀ ābombed out,ā thatās the way it seemed, like Iād been beaten up and thrown in a ditch and my ears were ringing and now I was trying to reorient myself after all that had happened. There was a feeling of weariness and sadness but also a feeling that life continues, that we have to gather our memories and keep on. And this impossibly beautiful song captured every bit of that, the one-chord riff moving ahead, in spite of it all, while the sax line captures all the sadness dripping off everything at the same time. I listened to it constantly in the weeks afterward.Ā Ā
Galaxie 500: āFourth of Julyā (live)
One of my favorite songs by one of my favorite band in my favorite version. This song is indicative of how (as with all songs on this list) when Iām in the mood I can listen to one track over and over. On a couple of occasions in 2018, I listened to this maybe 8 or 9 times in a row, immediately hittingĀ ābackā when it had finished. And the thing I was typically listening to was Naomi Yangās bassline, which to me holds the lionās share of the songās feeling. Her bass playing in Galaxie 500 is so incredibly emotional to me, and it was never more so than here.Ā
Pusha T:Ā āInfraredā
The one trulyĀ ānewā song on here.ā I didnāt have an advance of this record so I listened on Spotify when it came out and I loved it. And this song in particular seemed so perfect, the carefully constructed rap, executed as if itās coming off the top of his head, the sampleāI listened to this many times in a row on a few occasions, and it also sent me to revisit Clipse, which brought me a lot of joy.Ā
Joni Mitchell:Ā āCareyā
Another song about freedom, but here itās real. Blue is a perfect record but I probably revisit this one more than any other single song because Iām so in love with the productionāthat bass, that hand percussion...sonically, an album recorded almost 50 years ago simply cannot be improved upon. I remember hearing this one on AM radio when I was very young. It was a single, b/wĀ āThis Flight Tonight,ā one hell of a 7-inch. Iāve always thought the picture it painted was so incredibly romanticāāMaybe Iāll go to Amsterdam, maybe Iāll go to Rome / And rent me a grand piano and put flowers 'round my room.ā Hey, why not! And if Carey is indeed keeping her in this tourist town, we know itās only for another hour, another day, another week, whenever sheās ready, she canāt be tied down. But then, thatās the future: this night, now, is a starry dome, and weāre alive, inside it.Ā
Arthur Russell:Ā āThatās Us/Wild Combinationā
Sometimes w/ my favorite Arthur Russell songs you can hear the strain as he creates a new genre trying to get a particular unnamable feeling across. But not this one. Sitting in a room with his friend Jennifer Warnes he made a song that feels as natural as a breath.Ā
Carole King:Ā āPleasant Valley Sundayā
Iām in awe of Carole Kingās ability to write songs that sound perfect on the radio. Even if her prime hitmaking years only lasted a bit over a decade, the number of her songs with her name on them that left a huge mark on culture is staggering. Her demo for the Monkees hitĀ āPleasant Valley Sundayā shows how perfect everything was before the artist who would bring the song to the public got anywhere near it. I found this one on Youtube 8 or 9 years ago and itās been in regular rotation since.Ā
Hank Williams:Ā āThe Angel of Deathā
In February and March I was doing research my Pitchfork Sunday Review on Bruce Springsteenās Nebraska. Itās one of my favorite records, and Iāve wanted to write something long on it for years, so spending time w/ it as the winter wound down was an intense pleasure. Itās common knowledge that Springsteen was listening to a lot of Hank Williams when he was writing the album, and when I came across this song, I became obsessed with it. One, the melody sounds right off Nebraska, andĀ āMy Fatherās Houseā (another song I listened to a lot this year) especially seems directly modeled on it. But this song has so much going for it on its own. Itās about death and the moment of judgement, but Hankās melody and phrasing donāt sound frightened. Itās hopeful, a prayer instead of an admonishment.Ā
Guided by Voices:Ā āMotor Awayā
Iāve loved this song for years but I listened to it intently around the same time I was playing the Hank Williams, when I was thinking about leaving Pitchfork. Iāve never been a big fan of Robert Pollardās lyrics (though I love many of his tunes), but he second line here is the one I couldnāt put out of my mind:Ā āWhen you free yourself from the chance of a lifetime.ā Thatās where I felt I was. Editing this music magazine that I cared so much about was the culmination of a dream that took a long time, a ton of work, and a fair amount of luck to realize. When the chance of a lifetime comes along, youāre supposed to hold on to it as tightly as possible for as long as possible, until someone finally pries it away, which will happen eventually. I knew that. And yet, deep down, I knew that after 11 years, I wanted to try something else. Run away, motor away, drive away. Sometimes a song can give you the tiniest push.