Most everyone who’s an obsessive music fan – like many of us here – has to have a connection to High Fidelity:
Either the book,
the movie…
or both.
If it’s not in your vernacular, you’ve got to get into it.
It’s essential. At the level of The Big Lebowski for being quotable and a great shared cultural artifact.
Among many memorable scenes is this exchange between Rob, a record store owner (John Cusack in the movie), and one of his employees Dick (Todd Louiso). Dick has stopped by Rob’s apartment to ask if he wants to go to a Marie de Salle concert (who Dick describes as a “post-Partridge family, pre-LA Law Susan Dey, but… umm… black”).
He notices large stacks of LP’s all over the floor, and stops in his tracks.
Dick: I guess it looks as if you’re…
Both (in unison): Reorganizing your records…
Rob: Yeah.
Dick: What is it? Chronological?
Rob: No.
Dick: Not alphabetical.
Rob: Nope.
Dick: What?
Rob: Autobiographical.
Dick: No. F’ing. Way.
Rob: Yep. I can tell you how I got from Deep Purple to Howlin’ Wolf in just 25 moves.
Dick: Oh man…
Rob: If I want to find the song Landslide, I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the fall of 1983 pile, but didn’t give it to them for personal reasons.
Dick: That sounds…
Rob (cutting in): Comforting.
So:
I do not remotely have a huge record collection like Rob.
But I have spent the last five years practicing a form of musical autobiography.
Whenever I can, I like to have music playing.
While I’m at work. While I’m cleaning up around the house. While I’m taking a walk around the neighborhood.
I have music in my life quite a bit – it’s really part of who I am.
(OK, we’re all tnocs-ers… no surprise there…)
Here’s the thing: even when I’m not actively listening to something, I pretty much ALWAYS have a song stuck in my head, playing on repeat.
And to my good fortune, it’s something I like 95% of the time.
Sometimes I get those annoying songs I hate stuck in there, but usually it doesn’t last long. Like this past December, I sometimes found my head going toward those annoying Jennifer Coolidge Old Navy commercials, “hashtag sorry not sorry.”
I love you, Jennifer Coolidge, but those commercials are too much! #sorrynotsorry
“NO MERCY!”
Anyway, starting back in 2018, I decided to keep a spreadsheet of the songs that got notably got stuck in my head. Then at the conclusion of the year, I made a YouTube playlist “mixtape” with some of those songs.
Since then, it’s been a tradition I’ve kept up, and I just completed my 5th one for 2022.
I don’t play them on the “mixtape” in any sort of specific order – I just take the songs from the spreadsheet and try to make them flow reasonably well.
It’s always a mix of genres and eras – from the 1960’s to recent releases. Seems like there are themes every year – artists who stood out above the rest or genres that jumped up in my listening habits.
And of course, after I make my mixtape, it’s in constant rotation for at least a month.
It’s like comfort food. Some of the songs may be literally memories of childhood – for example, on the 2021 mixtape, I have Sneaky Snake by Tom T. Hall, which I remember as my very first favorite song, back when I was a preschooler.
The teachers at Kiddieland preschool in Clarksville, Tennessee, would play that for us – back when my dream job was stunt man!
Some of the songs are songs that really kick me in the gut – e.g. Tile by Tile by Alvvays on this year’s list (coincidentally, also Scott Lapatine’s song of the year). Or some are more like a punch to the stomach, like Slaughterhouse by Chat Pile – also on this year’s mixtape.
I share these mixtapes just among very close friends and family typically, mostly to complaints or generic praise.
They are not for everybody – really, they are for an audience of one:
me.
I do not give any thought to any other person’s like or dislike as I’m constructing the mixtape. I like to think that you could get some insight into my mental space in a particular year by listening to a mixtape, but I’m not sure anybody is interested in that.
At the end of the day, is it just some sort of mirror or a form of masturbation? And even if it is, is that such a problem? It’s something I really look forward to making at the end of every year – trying to order the songs, to make them flow. (Not claiming to be good at this either honestly – I think my mixtape skills are “mid” at best.)
And to encapsulate my year of musical taste in one place – to make a mixtape that I will remember and will remind me of the year in question.
Maybe a song here or there will remind me of some event in my life, but they mostly live on their own plane in my heart – stirring my melancholy, tugging at my nostalgia, making me want to dance, or just filling me with something large and inexpressible. (Seriously, listen to I Love Your Smile by Shanice – and tell me you don’t want to smile yourself.)
Anyway, I’ll share the mixtapes here in case you are interested. I can guarantee you that you will find something you’ll like… and something you’ll hate on every year’s mixtape.
Unless you’re me. In which case, it’s wall-to-wall gold!
2020:
Grimes and Tennis
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Very cool, and thanks for sharing them with us. I guess I’d lean toward “introspective” and “expressive” as the adjectives describing this pastime. Not very different in some ways from scrapbooking (which I do and just recently finished for 2022) or even what we do here with our writing. Sharing pieces of our lives… Just to a great soundtrack!
Chuck, I think scrapbooking is the perfect analogy. Or may not even an analogy but an acccurate description of the process. But I’ve always been an audio-centric person, not visual at all. So a physical scrapbook would be hard to wrap my brain around, but a musical scrapbook would be right up my alley!
Thanks for sharing those. Had a quick look through and there’s some really great songs i already know and the added bonus of ones I’m not familiar with so can broaden my own horizons with. Made me smile to see Biz Markie Just A Friend in the 2021 list. Was it the continual mentions from Tom that did it to you?
The songs that get stuck in my head – as in go to bed and suddenly the internal stereo kicks in or sat in a waiting room with nothing else to do – tend to be the inanely catchy ones that don’t reflect my actual tastes and listening habits. Therefore a playlist of them would be very bad for me. I need my regular listening to get rid of that song from the toothpaste commercial from the mid 80s that my brain inexplicably dredged up from nowhere.
Totally get the compulsion to make your playlists and I like that they aren’t ordered by genre or theme, just a reflection of whatever comes up. I haven’t made any annual playlists but have numerous ones named according to the month and year I compiled them. I keep a note of anything I hear that I like as a one off song and every few weeks or months put them all together into a random playlist and then have separate playlists covering every decade from the 60s in where I would sort them all into as well. Though the decade lists started reaching the point of containing many more hours than was feasible to listen to so haven’t added into those for a while.
JJ, The Number Ones column, Stereogum in general, and even TNOCS.com have all influenced the songs that get stuck in my head. Some of you will no doubt recognize songs, like “Just a Friend” that we have actively discussed in one forum or another — though I think only one song has actually been one of the Number Ones. I believe it was Phylum who got that Vashti Bunyan song from this year’s mix stuck in my head. 😁 Many have been artists I learned about through Stereogum (Chat Pile) or artists I was curious to explore more thanks to SG (The Beths).
I’ve mostly been fortunate that the songs that get stuck in my head are ones I like. I realize not everyone is so lucky. However, the down side of the process is that long or challenging songs probably don’t make for good earworms and therefore don’t make the list. So it would be inaccurate to call this list my favorite songs of the year, though it’s not terribly far off if you drew a Venn Diagram.
I’d be curious — you have any of your playlists you’d like to share here?
Here’s a couple of mine. November 21 – a fine vintage. They’re generally a mix of new and old songs I’ve just discovered or rediscovered, sometimes swaying more in one direction than the other. As you’ll be able to tell they aren’t collated in any particular order, I like the randomness they throw up like Iggy Pop into The Flamingoes into Nick Lowe into Rostam.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7DnpD3YILGx80QkPlglwtV?si=UCDEsjCCRYK8rcNtLQkOjA
March 22 – a shorter album length list;
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/16K4IiEYk2OE9URq1EAiU0?si=jBgJuid5SjWzZT83LbsATw
JJ, I tried to listen to these but I could only get the song previews. However I really liked what I heard!
Hmm, not sure why that is. I’ve never actually shared a playlist before but it’s not set as private and the link is what I got from selecting the share option. Glad you liked the previews anyway!
I’m considering sharing a playlist as a future blog post on here. I’ll run it by mt58 and maybe we’ll see it soon.
👍
Yay, a fellow fashioner of “phono albums!”
I wrote about my own hobby in a previous tnocs.com post. But your slightly different rules are intriguing. At least early on, I tried to capture the stuff I was absorbing at the time, and so I mostly selected songs that I had encountered for the first time, and also did not allow repeat artists for any mix. Thus, I was prioritizing “newness” for each year, be it a new release or newly discovered classic.
You prioritize “ear-worminess,” and the mixes thus serve as veritable snapshots of what’s bouncing around your head the most in a given year. That’s pretty cool. If I were you, I’d be tempted to chart the frequency of most re-occurring songs over the years, assuming there would be much to chart. Do you see any notable patterns of re-occurrence across years? Those would be the Earworm kings, at least for your brain.
Looking forward to checking out your mixes, thanks!
I’m not sure about patterns per se. I feel like each year has a bit of a theme if you squint real hard. And if you squint even harder (not recommended), you may see some sort of progression from year to year. But yeah, what I’m drawn to explore relies a great deal on my past listening habits and recommendations from Stereogum and the SG / TNOCS commenting community.
I do try to limit a single artist to no more than 3 songs in a year — or else nearly the entire Blue Rev album would have made the list.
The first year I kept the list, I did have lots of repeats (the same song multiple times on my list because it was stuck in my head multiple days). But afterwards, I decided not to re-enter a song if it was there already.
I also made the decision not to allow repeats. I’ve been re-listening to Sheer Mag a lot lately, and I was tempted to put “Just Can’t Get Enough” on this year’s mixtape as well, though it appeared in a previous year. Decided not to cross that Rubicon — don’t want the nostalgia to get too meta…
By the way, HUGE shout out to the Grimes/Tennis playlist. I’ve seen Tennis a few times (their first album was one of the best since 2000, IMO), and my daughter and I fell in love with Grimes when Art Angels came out.
We don’t like to discuss her private life choices…
Tennis has a new album Pollen coming out next month, and I’m all anticipation!!!
I have loved Grimes’ musical evolution up to Miss Anthropocene. I don’t love the singles that have come out since then, so I’m more curious than hopeful if/when Book 1 ever comes out. Hope she hasn’t completely sold out to making random video game background music…
Speaking of earworms I just can’t get enough of…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6FBfAQ-NDE
What a great idea. I’m very tempted to start one myself, seeing as how we’re only nine days into the year. Right now, the only earworm I remember this year is “I Know What Boys Like” by The Waitresses, and that was before Tom mentioned it in today’s Number Ones. How very odd.
This one’s on the house:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOYZaiDZ7BM
I took a Country-Western dance class in college, so I learned how to do the cotton eyed joe dance (the partner version, not the line dance). Its purpose is to be the opening song in a barn-based dance party — literally to kick / scrape the shit off your boots before the night of dancing begins. A lot of backwards motion and shuffling…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmaWh6wVUII
Where did you come from?
LOL!
Whoops, not directed at me… retracted
Where did you go?
Tokyo, Japan, most recently. 😀
Philadelphia, originally.
Man, there is some solid stuff there (I’ve already added “Fire” to my 2010-2019 Spotify playlist)!
I have a subscription to YouTube Premium — family edition, so I share with with Mrs. Pauly and Stey’s Teen. It’s not cheap ($14.99/month for family version), but A) no commercials, B) access to any song any time on demand, and C) will play on background on mobile, so I can listen to music while I do other things.
I’ve more or less dropped Spotify and gone full time YouTube for music now…
I came up with the same concept as you back in college around 1990. Write down and keep track of songs that get stuck in my head. I found it became too difficult to do.
Eventually about 20 years later I finally came up with a solution. I started producing a weekly personal top 30. It was nerdily produced via spreadsheet with points awarded to each song, tallied strictly to produce a top 100 playlist at the end of the year. I did this for about 7 years. (What made me stop? Tom’s The Number Ones column! I started spending too much time writing for it.)
My rules weren’t very strict. If I wanted to hear it in a top 30 playlist that week, then it made the chart, though I did try to limit re-entries during the same year. I have been working pretty hard lately at tidying up my iTunes/apple music database lately (a labor of love) and I hope to get my countdowns going again eventually. Maybe not until Tom finishes his TNO column.
Here’s my list of my #1 songs for the years that I did my countdowns:
2012: “Linus and Lucy with the Band” – Vince Guaraldi
2013: “Genius in France – “Weird” Al Yankovic
2014: “Perfect Mother” – Basia
2015: I can’t find this spreadsheet! I hope that I didn’t delete it 🙁
2016: “Sausalito Summernight” – Diesel
2017: “Undun” – The Guess Who
2018: “Rio” – The Doobie Brothers
2019: “West Coast Blues” – Nancy Wilson
I can totally relate to your efforts. Keep up the good work!
That’s awesome and commendable, Link! I hope you have kept all those lists for posterity’s sake — they will be fun to revisit from time to time.
I kept a weekly top 10 for about a year and a half in 1988 and 1989, then I calculated a yearly Top 30 based on those rankings. But that was all on paper, and those papers are lost to the annals of time. I’m not much of one to keep stuff — don’t have a lot of pics, memorabilia, that kind of thing. It all lives in my head… (of course, now that my memory is getting weaker with age, maybe that’s not the best retrieval system…)
Also, I’ve talked about this before over at stereogum, but the most intense earworm that I’ve ever had was the Theme to Little House on the Prairie by David Rose. I had owned the 60 second song for years on a collection of TV themes, but for some reason in 2005 one time I got that song stuck in my head for about 4 days in a row. Would fall asleep thinking of it, would wake up thinking of it. I love the song, but that was crazy. Eventually it went away like a bad case of the hiccups. Weird.
My Mom would always sing “Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone,” and so that constantly runs through my head. Waking, sleeping, whatever.
Seems there’s a worm for every ear, and there’s a worm for me.
I loved this piece Pauly, and making the mixtapes it’s a great idea, actually it sort of reminds me the long procrastinated idea that I have about making a playlist with my irrationally loved songs, but I couldn’t even know how to start.
That’s a great idea — I was thinking about doing a similar thing. Making a mix of my “irrational” favorite songs, like Barnable used to do… Anyway, you should give it a shot — would be fun!
Sheer Mag is my favorite contemporary band. I think David Letterman would have put them on American television. Also, Hop Along and Soul-Glo. Those three bands are unquestionably great. Philadelphia is amazing.
I can’t locate Rob Sheffield’s Love is a Mix Tape, so I can’t quote verbatim, but Sheffield has this great passage about freeing a song from its original context and giving it a new life. I like what you did with Eddie Rabbitt’s “Drivin’ My Life Away”. For me, the transition into “Pretty Pimpin'” makes sense because Kurt Vile has some pretty big Nashville fans. Keith Urban, in particular. He singles out “Pretty Pimpin'”. He described it as “automatic writing”. Was there alt-country in the early-to-mid eighties? I don’t think so. You’ve got “Passionate Kisses” on the 2021 mix. Nashville covering Austin. Lucinda Williams is like the missing link between both worlds. And then I notice Jason Isbell. He’s alt, but he could pass as both, like Kacey Musgraves before she went “pop-timistic”. Williams passes as both, too.
Oh, god. I could go on forever, but I’ll stop here.
Quick shoutout to June, Eric Bachmann, and the awesome Jessica Pratt. I forgot to buy Quiet Signs. On Your Own Love Again reminds me of Julie Delpy in Before Sunset.
Iben Hjejle is pretty convincing as an American. I’m not sure what happened to her stateside. Her filmography is mostly Norwegian-based.
Thank you Cappie, for getting it! I wouldn’t say I lean too hard into country, but I also have to admit it has its place in my brain. The hard part is finding songs that can serve as natural transitions into and out of the country selections.
Had to get some Triangle Area bands in there… who knows? Maybe Shiny Beast or Picasso Trigger will make a future appearance? (Or Superchunk if I keep it mainstream-ish.)
A huevo, Sheer Mag freaking rules. I’m ready for a new album, but haven’t heard any scoop. You got any goods on them? I saw them on a festival poster recently, so they’re still active at some level.
Geez. It’s been three years. Nobody sounds like Tina Halladay. “Fan the Flames” sounds like rock’s last stand.
At first, I thought people were down on Everything Now because they graduated to a major, but I don’t think indie cred is a thing anymore. Superchunk is so accessible. I’m not sure why they never came close to crossing over. Either “Web in Front” or “Underachievers March and Fight” should have broke Archers of Loaf.
I have no idea who Shiny Beast is. I have to check them out. I do remember Small 23 and Vanilla Trainwreck. I’m not sure if the latter has a signature song, but “True Zero Hook” approaches Eric Bachmann greatness.
I got friends to check out Dolphins/Niners, but there was zero interest in seeing The Connells live. In retrospect, I should have gone by myself. Writing a political song that doesn’t sound overly preachy is hard. That title track to Steadman’s Wake gave me chills.
Thanks, Pauly.
“Rock’s last stand” = perfect encapsulation. F*** Greta Van Fleet, this is Sheer Mag’s throne, b****!
And Mannequin Pussy!
Missy and MP rule too! Let’s put them on the album watch list with Sheer Mag. You heard any scuttlebutt about a new album forthcoming Phylum?
“Drunk II” was on my 2019 mixtape and a highlight barnburner of that year. We’re ready for more, Mannequin Pussy!
No scuttlebutt as of yet, but I am ever searching!
There are so many godawful band names out there.
Scuttlebutt works.
What would Scuttlebutt sound like?
https://open.spotify.com/album/3AVgHXcwdiwioGpkQfbgoQ
Yes, please share the mixtapes with us! Can’t wait!
Mt, how did you find a picture of Kiddieland in Clarksville, TN? What a coup!
Again brother, kudos and thank you for sprucing up my essay and making it better in every way!!!
High five!
(Place hand against screen)
✋️
🖐 🙂
Fascinating. It’s like a journal in song form, where you play a song and immediately associate to a particular event. Saves a lot of writing!