Spotify Wrapped

I've felt like my musical tastes have been very boring and predictable this year. I've sort of gravitated towards 90's Adult Contemporary this year, because it connects me with the past in a way that I needed. Reminds me of sitting around listening to music with my mom and Josh. Learning new artists, playing the radio game, and generally just sort of hanging out.

Those days are gone, and they have been for a while. But that doesn't mean that I don't necessarily like to sit around and think about various stuff I've done before sometimes. Falling asleep and waking up to memories of happy times. Not happy-er, necessarily, but happy nonetheless.

So before I'm judged for, like, being boring... I guess just know that I already know lol

I don't actually have a basis for comparison for any of this data really, being maybe the first year I've ever really had a full Spotify Wrapped. So I'm not sure what these numbers mean in the grand scheme of things. And honestly, they're probably not boring at all. The few comparisons I do have to go on indicate that maybe even my "boring" is "immensely eclectic". But as your favorite cartoon character, I suppose there are people out there who are looking for exactly this and really just want me to get to it already.

The location I share listening habits with is Colorado Springs, USA.

Over the year, I listened to 8,338 different songs.

Of these songs, I have listened to "Jessie" by Joshua Kadison 60 times. I genuinely thought it was more than that, because this was one of my mom's favorite songs and she had this thing where she'd tell us that artists that shared our names were special. It's dumb, I know. Mine was "Aaron Neville" (and Elvis, because middle names count "in spirit").

To that end, the second top listen is "Painted Desert Serenade" by Joshua Kadison, with a similar play count.

I listened to a grand total of 93,517 minutes, or 64 days of music, and have month's where I am in the top 1% of the world's listeners. I guess? This does not feel like very much, all things considered. Y'all need more music in your lives.

Related to the aforementioned "old favorites", I am in the top 0.005% of fans that listened to Joshua Kadison this year. I will be expecting my t-shirt in the mail any day now.

Once you get out of the 90's Adult Contemporary void that consumed my early days this year, we start to see some more variety. Django Reinhardt re-enters the mix in May, which is probably about the time I started to reconnect creatively. He's a favorite of mine, doing more with three fingers that have poor articulation than most people can do with five, and is definitely an inspiration to me musically. He embodies the sense of "Just fucking play the guitar, don't worry about it" for me that I then inflated into a personality. The world of music molded itself around his presence, not the other way around. It makes sense that he'd be the artist that shows up the most as I re-engage certain things.

Then there's Hozier and Norah Jones. Hozier is unsurprising. I've been a fan for a long time. Norah Jones is a little surprising. Obviously I'm a fan of her work, but I'm surprised to see that she breaks my top 5 artists this year. I then got a video from Hozier thanking "everybody for listening to my music". I'm not sure if that's prompted by being on the list or not, but Hozier is welcome to message me anytime with anything he wants.

Then Spotify called me a Vampire for being a moody little bitch. Which is fair, I suppose. I definitely sit around in the dark a lot.

But here's an interesting element that calls of this into question, and it's important to remember:

I fall asleep to music. It is always on, and I'm not always "listening to it", as it were. I have a playlist of bands that consists of nothing beyond "If I listen to this playlist while I do something, people I know will make a little bit of money", and so maybe my numbers are a little artificially inflated.

Or, maybe, it all counts in the end. Even the stuff we think nobody else knows about.