Hi. Thanks to friends and family who took the music survey. If you just came here for the Spotify playlist, here it is. Put it on shuffle and discover some songs you didn’t know you liked.
Usually I write a summary of the survey favorites, but this year I’ll keep it focused on my own choices. Here are some of my disorganized thoughts on my favorites this year.
First, my favorite “album” was the FIFA 17 soundtrack. “Haha you like video game music what a dork” you might be saying. YES. I do. It’s rad. I was on the couch quite a bit at the start of 2017, recovering from a surgery, and because of that I played quite a bit of soccer on the PS4 by myself and with my daughter. My family loved a lot of the songs. There are a couple established artists like Beck, but it’s mostly up-and-coming fun musicians from all over the world. You can listen to it here on Spotify. Or you can come over and play FIFA 17. Seriously, I can only beat my daughter 6-0 so many times.
Second, I felt like there were a ton of great pop and alternative songs this year. Lots of joyous, mad, powerful, hopeful, emotional music that I enjoyed. The overall crowd favorites seem to have been Despacito by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee and Feel it Still by Portugal. The Man (that’s a band’s name with punctuation in it to confuse old people).
Third, I’m waiting for a Maggie Rogers album at some point. I loved Dog Years and Better.
Fourth, this felt like the year of the lyric-less chorus. Like this one. I don’t know the name of that phenomenon but it’s definitely the trend these days. By the way, my kids think every song without any words in it is called “classical.”
Fifth, for John Mayer fans, I loved Helpless, In the Blood, Rosie, and Moving on and Getting Over (my #1 this year); those first two, especially, are opposite sides of the same coin. For non-fans, go listen to this solo or this or this old favorite and maybe I’ll see you back here again next year.
Lastly, I don’t know that I saw many great music videos. Maybe Instagram is numbing us all to great visuals, and every video was fantastic and I’m just like “oh 360 AR from a drone, who cares, seen it, next” Not sure. Let me know if you had a favorite video of the year.
Thanks again and see you in the new year!
