Here we are, halfway through 2024. Congratulations on making it this far. Where does the time go? Hell if I know. So there’s this tradition that right around the start of July every year, you get a playlist. 100 songs that function as sort of a capsule of the many great things released over the last 6 months. There are no rankings here, even if Spotify assigns numbers to each track in order. Rather, the way these are arranged is more by genre and vibe than anything else. Smooth transitions and similar-ish sounds abound so you don’t end up in some weird mish-mash of a rap song into a folk song into a dance song into a harder rock song. If you listen on shuffle (which I do recommend!) those sorts of shifts might happen regularly, but if you listen in order I can promise a lovely time from start to finish.
One of my favorite things about a playlist like this is it provides the opportunity to share a bunch of songs you might have missed during the first half of the year. If you’re curious about new music and enjoy a little adventure, this is the playlist for you! I can firmly promise you haven’t heard all 100 songs (yet, unless you listened before reading this), and there are plenty of baby indie artists that could use some love and a bit of discovery. There are also some big hitmakers should you enjoy Chappell Roan and Taylor Swift and Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar. One thing I might recommend is picking a song you know and then listening to two songs before and two songs after it. That’ll give you a little nudge around your comfort zone.
The only “rules” for this playlist are as follows: all songs must have been released within the first 6 months of 2024, and no artist gets more than one track in order to maximize the spread (featured artist spots are excluded from this rule). Simple enough! This playlist is available via Spotify and YouTube, because pretty much everyone can access one or the other. The individual songs will be linked on YouTube as well, in case you only want a taste. Please enjoy all 6 hours! Put it on when you’re hanging at the pool or working the grill. There will inevitably be songs I’ve missed, so hit me up on social media and let me know what I should be listening to!
Well we have once again made it through another year. As such, the time for reflection and list making is upon us. Did you listen to a lot of new music this year? If you did, congratulations because 2023 happened to be a pretty great one overall in terms of pure artistry and quality recordings. Some years it’s a struggle to name 50 records that both held my attention and truly impressed. This one both came together with relative ease, and left me a little sad not everything I loved in 2023 could be included. 50 is a manageable number, plus another 10 honorable mentions because I can’t help myself. Even still, everyone from Jessy Lanza to PJ Harvey to The Armed to Lydia Loveless to Bar Italia all couldn’t quite survive the inevitable cuts and it breaks my heart.
One thing that fascinates me about year-end lists is how little true consensus there tends to be between them. It makes the moments when everyone actually IS in agreement so much more powerful, and a testament to the quality of something. Call it the Paddington 2 effect, or I suppose the Dolly Parton effect, because nobody actually dislikes either of those two things. My favorite song of 2023 falls into that “broad consensus” category. So many people and publications ranked it as their top track of the year that seeing another list fall in line like this one might induce another eye roll and a “here we go again”. But I can’t deny something that’s objectively true, as much as I’d like to be a contrarian. You’re of course more than welcome to disagree with me, along with the hundreds of other music writers who listed this as the #1 song of 2023. What’s wilder, in my mind, is how this 7+ minute track received no commercial or terrestrial radio placement, as far as I’m aware. Instead it just got a lot of organic, fully chosen plays across a variety of formats. If you know your music and have been paying close attention to year-end lists, hopefully my favorite song of 2023 won’t come as a surprise.
We’ve once again reached the halfway point of another year, and as such it creates a perfect opportunity to reflect on the past six months just to check in and see how things are going so far. You don’t need another recap of pandemic fatigue, vaccine distribution, and the “return to normalcy” while our democratic institutions remain in constant peril. That’s not what this site is about. Everyone is stressed out enough already, so let’s take a moment to remember the good things, like music. Oh hey, remember music? It’s that thing you can play to soundtrack your life and enhance your emotional state. The right song can turn your entire day around, for better or worse. A fond memory can be triggered by a song, or an uptempo beat can somehow make a sunny day that much brighter. Great stuff, right?
Selecting and ranking 100 songs as the “Best of” any given year is a fool’s errand. There’s simply too much music to choose from and the notion that any of these lists can truly encapsulate what it was like to listen to music in 2020 inevitably leaves some important things out or places too much importance on certain artists or genres. In the end it’s all subjective anyway, and what captures one person’s imagination might leave another in the cold. Plus, with so much music available there’s no way you can listen to everything. I know I’ve discovered plenty of songs and artists weeks, months, or years later, only to wish I had known about them sooner so they could’ve been included in a year-end roundup. It’s the way life goes sometimes. But that’s also the benefit of any list like this! For anyone to tell you these are songs that meant something to them in 2020 automatically elevates those tracks above your standard fare. If you’re looking to put your music listening in focus, a list like this can help to some degree. 
