My Year In Music 2014
And a definition of music taste in the internet age.
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I love reading the Pitchfork writer’s ‘Years In Music’, so I decided to do my own.
Favorite Albums This Year:
01 The War On Drugs — Lost In The Dream
02 Kurt Vile — Wakin On A Pretty Daze
03 D’Angelo — Black Messiah (minus ‘1000 Deaths’ & ‘The Charade’)
05 Todd Terje — It’s Album Time
Favorite Tracks This Year:
01 The War On Drugs — Under The Pressure
03 Lykke Li — I Follow Rivers — The Magician Remix
06 Something For Kate — You Only Hide — Live Acoustic
07 Fatboy Slim — Talking Bout My Baby
08 Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers — You Tell Me
09 Caribou — Can’t Do Without You
Most Played Song of 2013:
A lot of Nils Frahm. I’ll pick just one: Nils Frahm — Says — but really it could be most of his catalogue. If I’m writing at work, words in songs muddle me up, so instrumental music is a necessity. Along with Nils, 2014 has been all about Keith Jarrett (Sun Bear Concerts) and a lot of Max Freytag.
An Old Album I Discovered/Rediscovered This Year:
It’s a tie between Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers — Damn The Torpedoes (Remastered) and Destroyer — Kaputt.
‘Damn The Torpedoes’ was my favourite album as a very young child. I would listen to it before I was trusted with putting a vinyl record on my Dad’s turntable, so we’re talking 4 or 5 years old here.
It’s. Such. A. Good. Album.
And Destroyer was the final piece of the triumvirate for me along with Lost In The Dream and Wakin On A Pretty Daze. I think there was a month there where all I would listen to was those three albums in a row on repeat.
Musical Highlights:
Ringing in the New Year on a boat in Sydney Harbour to the sounds of LE YOUTH — C O O L * Interpol’s surprising return to form * Justin Bieber — Believe * Duke Ellington — Jeep’s Blues — Live owning that party scene in American Hustle * Nils Frahm at The Independent on a Sunday night in March and exploding my mind with his mix of 1972 Keith Jarrett + Nicolas Jaar + James Blake instrumentals:
hearing the Kygo remix of Kyla La Grange — Cut Your Teeth over the din at Oscar’s 30th * Blood Orange — Chosen on the speakers at Salumeria while we drank champagne and ate roast beef sandwiches to celebrate moving out of our dogshit apartment in the Mission * Otis Redding — For Your Precious Love in the driving scene at the start of Tell No One * hiking in the Sierras, stopping for lunch and listening to Sorry while I looked out over this view:
driving from Tampa to the Dali Museum in a rented Dodge Charger with a huge sound system cranking Stromae — papaoutai * Black Messiah dropping out of the blue just in time for the holidays * dancing to Purple Rain at Kanyi’s wedding in Santa Fe * listening all the way through I Never Learn on Christmas morning while eating pancakes and maple syrup * finally seeing Arcade Fire live, singing my freaking lungs out to ‘Wake Up’:
Drake — Doing It Wrong on the long drive to Bend we were forced to take to avoid the snowy pass * everything I discovered through Tebs, but especially the real rnb not that D’Angelo sh*t playlist * the bbq scene in ‘Blue Is The Warmest Colour’ where they dance to I Follow Rivers — The Magician Remix * Sam Smith on Letterman:
every song with a saxophone, but most memorably Red Eyes * Yeezus, still * never getting sick of Drake — Shut It Down — Album Version * winding our way through a foggy Marin morning to the sounds of alt-J — Choice Kingdom * driving from Venice Beach to Highland Park after the best dinner of my year at Gjelina, listening to an impromptu mix of The Rapture — In the Grace of Your Love > Soul For Real — Every Little Thing I Do > Bronski Beat — Smalltown Boy > Steve Winwood — Higher Love — Full Album Version > Frank Ocean — Thinkin Bout You.
Musical Lowlights:
Ghost Stories. Three trips to the SF Symphony and I just couldn’t get myself immersed. Still do.not.get iLoveMakonnen, Minaj, Iggy, ‘Move That Dope’ or Owen Pallett. No Taytay on Spotify. Coming to grips with Band of Horses’ catastrophic fall into hyper-mediocrity. Papa vs Pretty calling it quits. Skrillex & U2 being ahead of War On Drugs on (t)Rolling Stone’s Best Albums of 2014.
A better definition of music taste in the internet age
If you follow music on the internet, it’s easy to fake having ‘taste’. It’s easy to say, yeah, I love Spoon and The Shins and Arcade Fire and Lana Del Rey and have people give your taste the benefit of the doubt.
But just rattling off a list of popular bands doesn’t tell you anything about how much joy someone gets from music.
Because taste is subjective, you can’t just make a list of songs and say, the people who like these songs have better taste than the people who don’t.
Real taste is something different. The people with real taste are the ones who are best at finding stuff to listen to that they genuinely love for a long time.
That’s the superior gauge of someone’s taste. How much joy they manage to extract from music. How much they bump their quality of life through music.
Good taste in music matters because it makes your life better.
This year, I listened to ~1100 hours of music on Spotify alone, which is about 3 hours a day. On any given day, on average, that means I’ll listen to at least 40 songs I love.
That’s a meaningful quality-of-life bump.
Building up the ability to find songs you love (aka taste) is something you have to work at. You have to be clear about what you like, fast at identifying it when you hear it, good and patient at unearthing it and proactive in fostering new sources of it.
You can get a better measure of someone’s musical taste by knowing:
- how many songs they find per year to love
- how much they love each of those songs
- how many times they can listen to that song before their love for it expires.
Musical Taste = Found Songs × Love Per Song × Listens Before Love Expires
Taste requires effort. You can’t just sit back and hope all those great songs fal in your lap. You could be listening to the radio for 3 hours straight and not hear a single song you love.
You need to really get out there and find things if you want to have taste.
My 1100 hours of joyful listening was spent almost exclusively on @nickcrocker Radio [updated weekly], a playlist I keep of the songs I love at any given moment.
When my love for a song expires, it goes into Radio Archive. I archived about a thousand songs this year, which means I found roughly the same number.
It takes work to keep @nickcrocker Radio accurate, to move the stale stuff out and find good new stuff to push in. But it’s made a lot easier by the fact many of the people whose taste I admire do the same as I do:
- @maqstunna radio [updated hourly I’m insane]
- @styalzfuego lord shit 2014
- Kanyi (@km) — On the rotation right now.
- Keller Radio
- ~songs
- SpoDoddify (Updated When I Feels Like)
- @mikekarnj radio
- Infatuation December 2014 EEEEEATS Playlist
I share these (1) because I think everyone should have a similar setup and (2) those lists are going to give you a lot of gold if you dig in.
Thinking differently about taste is important because the list of bands you like doesn’t matter. What does matter is how much music improves your life.
Current definitions of taste seem to focus too much on the former and too little on the latter.
If you want music to make your life better, it’s best to ignore what people say you should like and just focus on finding as many songs as possible that you can love for the longest time.
That’s the taste that counts.
