Of the thousands of songs I heard this past year, narrowing a list down to my favorite 50 was exceptionally tough. There was plenty of heartbreak and disappointment upon the realization that some great songs were being left off of that final list. So in the spirit of giving attention to even more great music, please take these extra 25 tracks and give them a listen if you aren’t familiar with them already. They’re listed in alphabetical order so as to not prioritize any one over another. The only rules are that the tracks must have been part of a 2017 album, soundtrack, or single release. While you can click on the play button below any song title to hear it streaming (via YouTube), there’s also a Spotify playlist embedded at the very bottom of this post should you prefer to listen that way. Cool? Cool. And make sure to keep an eye out for my Top 50 Songs of 2017, which will immediately follow this post.
Tag: playlist
Welcome to the beginning of Pitchfork Music Festival Week 2017! It’s become tradition here on Faronheit in the last few years to spend a full seven days celebrating the three day blissful orgy of music that descends upon Chicago every July in the form of the Pitchfork Music Festival. In my opinion, you won’t find a better curated or more diverse festival lineup anywhere other than Pitchfork. They put their brand and reputation on the line to celebrate great and innovative artists across backgrounds and genres. If you’re unaware or ignorant of the festival, perhaps a glance at some past coverage will provide an accurate impression of how things go each year. We couldn’t be more excited to bring you a complete festival guide all week long on Faronheit, which includes day-by-day previews, day-by-day recaps, plus a whole bunch of photos and other media along the way. Whether you’re headed to Union Park this weekend and are unsure about what bands to see, or are interested in the lineup and are looking to vicariously experience the festival without actually going, the hope is you’ll make this site one of your stops for key information and on-the-ground reporting. It’s a pleasure to put this guide together every year, and I hope it’s reflected in the content posted.
Let’s get started by providing a proper introduction to all of the artists set to perform at Pitchfork Music Festival 2017. After the jump you’ll find a Spotify playlist featuring two songs from every single artist on the linup, along with individual links to websites, music videos and more. The Spotify playlist is ordered by day and set time, while everything else is sorted alphabetically. There are plenty of ways to get to know these artists, but obviously listening to their music is the most important of all. So click some links, stream some songs, and begin your education!
More Pitchfork Music Festival 2017 coverage:
Friday Preview Guide
Saturday Preview Guide
Sunday Preview Guide
Tuned In is a feature in which special guests from the world of pop culture share a playlist of songs based on a topic or theme of their choice.
Jena Friedman is the definition of a multi-hyphenate. She’s been a field producer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and a correspondent for National Geographic Explorer. She’s written for The Late Show with David Letterman, and is currently hard at work on her first film Serial Dater, starring Imogen Poots and John Cho. She wrote and is directing that one. So yeah, you could say that she’s got a lot of talents, and has been putting them all to good use. It’s left her plate very full, yet you might not know it because she’s not in front of the camera that often.
On a personal level, I found out about Jena Friedman a few years back via her stand-up comedy. She is tremendously funny and possesses that rare quality of being able to make you laugh about some of the darkest and most challenging topics facing our world today. Her recent, pre-election stand-up special American Cunt dives headfirst into politics, feminism, abortion, guns and religion without losing sight of our shared humanity no matter what your personal opinions might be.
After getting her start in comedy here in Chicago more than a decade ago, Jena Friedman is coming back to town next Friday, June 2nd for a set at her old stomping grounds, The Hideout. It is part of the Onion/A.V. Club’s 4th Annual “26th Annual Comedy Festival,” and promises to be a hilarious late night of stand-up with plenty of whip-smart insight about the pitch black turn our world has taken in recent months.
Jena Friedman
Friday, June 2nd at The Hideout (1354 W. Wabansia Ave.)
10:30 PM / $15 / 21+
Buy Tickets
As is tradition, I’m very pleased to welcome you to yet another year of Pitchfork Music Festival coverage! Once again there will be a full week’s worth of focus on Chicago’s premiere boutique music festival, complete with day-by-day previews, recaps throughout the weekend, and plenty of photos so you can see some of the action too. It’s extremely comprehensive, so if you’re planning to attend or just wish you could, I hope you’ll keep a close eye on the site to learn more about the lineup, who you need to see, as well as reports straight from the festival grounds.
We begin with an audio introduction to all the artists performing at this year’s fest. Those familiar with Pitchfork know they carefully curate the lineup every year to highlight important, often up-and-coming acts. That inevitably leads to a fair amount of obscure names you might not recognize. For example, you may be wondering, “Who is Jlin? What kind of music does he or she or they make?” Well, hopefully this post answers those questions with relative ease.
After the jump, you’ll find a full list of every artist performing at this weekend’s Pitchfork Music Festival, complete with links to their website or Facebook or Tumblr or Bandcamp or whatever their primary web presence might be. You’ll also find links to stream two songs on YouTube or Soundcloud from each one, so you can get a basic idea of what they happen to sound like. Artists are grouped by the day they are performing and arranged in alphabetical order. If you prefer to stream your music using Spotify, you can find a full playlist at the very bottom of this post, also featuring two songs from every artist on the lineup. Those are grouped in order by day and set time.
Really what I’m saying is, no matter your audio preferences, there should be a format here that will give you access to the music, which is of course the most important part of this whole festival equation. So sit back and get familiar before spending the weekend in Union Park, so you can go in with a head full of knowledge and impress your friends.
Check out the preview guides for Friday, Saturday and Sunday!
We’re halfway through 2016, so now’s as good of a time as any to take a moment for reflection before we march onward through the rest of the year. It’s been a wild six months, filled with surprise and high profile releases from some of music’s most prolific artists, not to mention quite a few underground successes as well. There’s probably no way you’ve heard all the great stuff, which is why I wanted to share this Spotify playlist filled with all of my favorites. If it seems like 69 songs is an intentional joke, I can assure you the number is 100% arbitrary. There’s nothing particularly official about this, nor are there rankings, simply a collection of tracks released between January and the end of June that you should probably spend some time with. They’re ordered in a way that I think flows best, in an effort to optimize listenability. It’s worth noting that this also makes a great playlist for your summer BBQ, as it’s packed to the gills with uptempo brilliance. Please enjoy and share!
Site news alert! We’ve now reached the halfway point of 2013, and with that I’d like to use that as a springboard to make some changes to the site moving forwards. Really by “changes” I mean one change, and that’s going to concern album reviews on the site. A little earlier today, I posted my review of Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City. If you haven’t had a chance to look at it yet, please do, because it gives an in-depth analysis of one of the year’s strongest records. You may also notice that review is quite lengthy. Like the sort of lengthy that maybe makes you not want to read it, or wait until you’ve got plenty of time to read it. It’s also the first album review I’ve written in a few weeks. Why? Mostly time constraints, and when I did have free time, I kept writing that Vampire Weekend review. It went through an editing process and I didn’t put it out there until I felt satisfied with the end product. This sort of perfectionism and relentless need to dive head first into deep analysis of every record I hear has ultimately crippled my ability to write reviews in a timely and easy to read fashion. In a sense those longer reviews do stand out a little from a lot of other music bloggers, who will toss an mp3 at you with a paragraph about the song and call it a post. Alas, I’m just not getting the diversity and lending my opinion to enough records these days. There’s so many great albums out there I want to write raves about, but simply don’t have the time or luxury to do so. Which is why I’m changing the way I write album reviews. From now on, a vast majority of my reviews will be very short and to-the-point. Certainly something will be lost in these quick hit reviews, but I hope to give you a basic idea about the worth of an album in a nice economical package that’s easy to read and reveals whether or not it’s worth your time and money. Look for that new album review format to start later this week or early next week. I’ll begin by playing catch-up with a few notable releases from the first half of the year that I failed to get to, and then quickly jump to current and future releases. The hope is to put together 4-5 of these reviews each week, which is much better than the 1 or 2 every week…or two that my review rate has fallen to. I hope it will increase your overall enjoyment of the site just a little bit more. One of the other things I wanted to point you in the direction of now that we’ve officially hit mid-year is a new Spotify playlist (U.S. only) featuring 80 songs from the first six months of the year that I genuinely loved. There’s tracks from well-known artists like Vampire Weekend, Phoenix, The Joy Formidable, Kanye West and Justin Timberlake paired along side more interesting discoveries such as Lady Lamb the Beekeeper, Alpine, Daughter, Savages, The Knife and Autre Ne Veut. I encourage you to listen to the whole thing if you have time (take it in chunks), and click the follow button in your Spotify app to keep an eye on things. Of course new music doesn’t stop coming just because we’ve reached July. Here’s your Monday edition of Pick Your Poison as well, featuring tracks from Black City Lights, Flaamingos, Gladiola, Kodacrome, Little Big League, Obits, Sinden, The Static Jacks, Steel Cranes and Walking Bicycles. Wow, lots of good stuff today. In the Soundcloud section after the jump, stream new songs from Chelsea Wolfe, Duke Dumont, Holograms, Janelle Monae, Torche and Chicago’s own Twin Peaks.
Kitten Forever – Famous Friends
Little Big League – My Very Own You
Hello friends, and welcome to the official start of Listmas 2012! It’s been a long time and a lot of songs coming, but we’ve finally made it to that crucial end of the year point where we can look back on the music from the last 11 or so months and place the ultimate judgement upon it. Then we’ll forget all about it weeks later when 2013 starts to consume our brains. Some songs stay with you more than others, just as some songs stand out and make you question what you knew or thought you knew about music as a whole. Selecting my Top 50 Songs of 2012 was no easy task; in fact, I find it much harder to do than selecting my Top 50 Albums of the Year. It’s because albums are collections of songs, and judging 40-60 minutes of music is easier than judging 3-4 minutes. Still, I felt very strongly about a number of tracks this year, so much so that I’ve created a list of 50 more “runners up” that I feel are worth listening to if you haven’t already. I didn’t rank the runners up, but simply placed them in alphabetical order. It makes for a remarkably exciting playlist that I hope you’ll listen to. As for my official Top 50 Songs, that starts in the here and now, and each is assigned a number and official rank. We’ll be doing this 10 songs at a time, one set each day through Friday. That said, please enjoy Faronheit’s Top 50 Songs of 2012: #50-41.
This isn’t much of a post, except to say that in advance of my Top 50 Songs of 2012 list, I wanted to give you more this year. What follows below is a Spotify playlist featuring 50 songs that I consider to be great tracks from this year, but not quite enough to make the official list. I haven’t assigned any of these tracks numbers, and they’re all in alphabetical order by artist. It’s just another great snapshot of some tracks you may have missed, so I hope you’ll at least check some of them out, if not listen to the entire 3 hour playlist. Call it a bit of bonus fun. Enjoy!
