Welcome once again to another year of coverage for Pitchfork Music Festival here on Faronheit! Every July, we spend one week diving into the various musical aspects of the Pitchfork Music Festival lineup. This comes in multiple forms. There’s the playlist featuring every artist on the lineup, which is what always kicks off the coverage so you can hear music from every artist performing and get a better sense of what you might like and who might be worth checking out over the course of the 3-day weekend. More on that in a minute. But other coverage will include day-by-day preview guides to give a little more context to the artists and schedule matchups that can cause some serious conflicts if you know and like multiple artists performing at the same time. Then we get into the daily recaps, which deliver a lot of the play-by-play looks at exactly what happened, what songs were performed, and what crazy thing that one artist did on stage. Whether you’re going and want to learn more about this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival itself, or aren’t able to attend but would love to hear about what’s happening in Union Park from July 19-21, this coverage will provide all of that and more.
As I previously mentioned, Pitchfork Music Festival week always starts with a playlist. Two songs from every single artist on the lineup. It’s arranged by date and set time, so for example Black Duck starts things off on Friday afternoon so they are first on the playlist, while Alanis Morissette closes out the weekend on Sunday so she’s last on the playlist. If you listen in order, you’ll journey through Friday, Saturday, and Sunday over the course of about five hours. Easy peasy. Jump into it, get familiar with a bunch of artists you haven’t heard before or have only heard a song or two from. A big part of this festival is discovery of great up-and-coming artists, so get started on that process right now with the playlist below. Sadly it’s only available through Spotify, so if you prefer a different streaming service you’re out of luck. But since most everyone I know has a Spotify account, hopefully it won’t be too much of a lift. Please enjoy, and come on back tomorrow for the start of the preview guides!
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. 
It seems like every year I comment about how challenging it is to put together a “Top Songs” list, because unlike albums, which are larger works meant to be taken as a whole, songs are fractions of that whole. There are multitudes more songs in the world than albums, so in essence it’s like splitting hairs. Imagine my surprise then, when this Top 50 Songs of 2019 list came together rather easily. Perhaps there were fewer standout tracks than normal to really catch my attention. It was a slightly “off” year for music, so that might have helped too. Color me clueless as to the actual reason, because all that matters is these are 50 songs I can say without a doubt are the ones I loved and in many cases listened to most this year. My sincerest apologies if your personal favorite didn’t make the cut. Everybody has their own unique tastes, and while I’d hope most of these songs will satisfy, you might feel differently. That’s okay! The songs on this list span across nearly every genre of music and range from dancefloor bangers to depressing bops and back again. My sincerest hope is that you’ll discover something new you haven’t heard before, and may even fall in love with it as much as I have. There are really only two rules I set when composing this list: 