10 Years in Music

August 8, 2017August 8, 2017 Joseph Lyttleton4 Comments

Looking back is looking forward.

I’ve been known to indulge in my share of excavating. As I prepare for my next big move, I’ve been looking back, not only on the decade-long 10 Cities/10 Years, but also on my youth and even more recent history. Writing these chapters from my life has been rewarding, allowing me to scrutinize my memories and re-examine pivotal moments in my history, recontextualizing my history as it relates to my present. But there are other ways to explore the past.

One of my favorite tools for documenting my life in real time is Last.fm, a website I’ve mentioned not infrequently in these pages. It’s the simplest of ideas: the website tracks the music you listen to on your various devices and compiles that information into charts and data points. It’s extremely nerdy and entirely unnecessary, and I love it.

I started using Last.fm just a few months before I set out on my decade of travel, so I have a document of all the music I listened to throughout the entire journey from day one: my ups and downs, my relationships come and gone, my periods of depression and moments of hysteria, all of it soundtracked. It’s the kind of thing that I can nerd out over for hours, and often do.

I decided it would be informative to look at my Top Songs charts for the various years of my 10 city project to get a sense of the tenor of each year through my musical obsessions. I’ve taken a snapshot of my Top 5 tracks, so now, if you’ll indulge me, I’m going to take another look back at my project, this time through song.

Call it 10 Cities/10 Years: The Soundtrack.

Or don’t, IDGAF.

1. Charlotte

How predictable. In my first year of traveling, I was still mostly listening to the artists who had gotten me through college, so Radiohead and Rufus Wainwright had been getting heavy rotation for a few years by this point (and still do). “Fake Plastic Trees” was my go-to favorite song for years, though its stature has diminished some over the years.

In terms of evolving musical tastes, The Decemberists were one of the many new artists a friend introduced to me while I was living in Charlotte. Especially in those early days, the Pacific Northwest band was known for their whimsical and eccentric mix of British folk and sea shanties. I was besotted with “The Engine Driver” which has this one verse:

I am a writer, writer of fictions
I am the heart that you call home
And I’ve written pages upon pages
Trying to rid you from my bones

It’s the kind of melodramatic sentiment that I absolutely adored back then. (Eh, still do.)

2. Philadelphia

Not much had changed in terms of favorite artists, though I was definitely listening to a more varied selection. “Come Pick Me Up” is my all-time most listened song and has never lost its “Favorite Song” status, but by this point I was starting to seek out more obscure artists. Mirah was another new discovery from my year in Charlotte, and she rapidly ascended into the realm of favorites. Though I’ve only followed her career intermittently recently, I was fortunate enough to see her play live just a few months ago at an intimate benefit show for LGBT youth. She was lovely.

Ghosty, for those that don’t know, is (was?) a band from my hometown in Kansas. They played a set at the famous World Café in Philadelphia and I saw them perform. Staying after to talk with the guys, I was surprised when the lead singer said that he actually knew me because he had seen me read poetry back in Lawrence. That was wholly unexpected and kind of cool.

3. Costa Mesa

For a time, Beirut was the musical artist I felt most spoke to my increasingly disparate tastes in music. I used to say that if I had any musical talent (I do not), I would make music exactly like Beirut. It’s interesting how, as especially so-called “indie” music has expanded in form and genre, the once unique Baltic sounds of Beirut have become just another common trope. I still enjoy Beirut, but my fervor has lessened considerably.

4. San Francisco

Starting to see some more female artists gain prominence in this list, though none of these three particular artists would be in my favorites. Still, Beth Orton’s Central Reservation did receive considerable play for a few years. “Concrete Sky,” which is off of a different album, features one-time Orton beau, Ryan Adams, so that probably helps explain its high chart position here. It’s also just a beautiful song.

“No Children” is, for me, the perfect song about a doomed relationship, that kind of love where the two people are terrible for each other but still work in a twisted sort of way. John Darnielle is a storyteller, and the entire Tallahassee album is arguably the best novel he’s ever written (though his two actual novels are worth a read).

5. Chicago

My fifth year was, at times, arduous, as you might recall, so it’s not really surprising that the songs that got the most airplay in that year were in large part downcast affairs. I adore Neko Case’s entire oeuvre, and I consider her song, “Star Witness,” to be one of the defining songs of 10 Cities/10 Years (I’m frankly shocked at its absence on these lists). Although “Don’t Forget Me” is a Harry Nilsson cover, she definitively makes it her own.

Yeasayer’s “Tightrope” stands out from the other songs on the chart with its propulsive and infectious rhythms. It appeared on the Dark Was the Night charity compilation (along with Iron & Wine’s “Die”) and was basically the standout track from two discs of excellent but mostly similar sounding indie rock and folk music. Worth tracking down.

6. Nashville

In the wake of a bad break up in Chicago, Nashville’s list consists of a lot of old favorites; comfort food, I suppose. Ironic that the one Adele song that I was really into that year was actually one of her more upbeat tracks. Also, “Dear Chicago”? How on the nose could I be? (Granted, it’s a fantastic song.)

7. Seattle

Ryan reclaims the top track, but this time with a song that was never officially released. Both “Karina” and “Angelina” appear on the famously unreleased 48 Hours (bootlegs are available, obviously), which was scrapped in favor of Demolition, a solid but ultimately less cohesive album. I’ve said this elsewhere but, after Heartbreaker, 48 Hours is Ryan’s greatest album, and the fact that it has never officially been released is a tragedy (a few songs appear on Demolition). “Karina” is his most sympathetic and piercing character piece and deserves to be loved by millions.

Otherwise, this list clearly reflects the counter-intuitively sunnier times I was having in Seattle. Also, funny to note just how much Childish Gambino has evolved as a writer and performer since those early days. “Freaks and Geeks” is still a banger.

8. New Orleans

This was another hard personal year, but still a year with a lot of partying, which is nicely exemplified in the dichotomy of Justin Timberlake and a pair of The National’s bleakest songs. The Divine Fits’ “Shivers” splits the difference, an old school proto-punk cover with the lyrics:

I’ve been contemplating suicide
But it really doesn’t suit my style
So I guess I’ll just act bored instead
And contain the blood I would’a shed

Considering my state of mind that year, the song was clearly speaking to me. (The song also includes one of my all-time favorite lines of shade: “My baby’s so vain / She’s almost a mirror”.)

9. Boston

I’d been a fan of Death Cab for Cutie since college, and yet, somehow, I had never bothered to acquire their most critically acclaimed album, Transatlanticism. I rectified that in Boston and soon after became enthralled with the eight minute centerpiece. I was also still obsessing over Hurray for the Riff Raff, a folk/mixed genre band from New Orleans that you should also be obsessed with. Get on that.

(Also, yes, Justin Timberlake made the list two years in a row; no shame.)

10. Brooklyn

And then came Brooklyn. Kanye West is an asshole. Kanye West is too full of himself. Kanye West lacks impulse control. All true. Also true: Kanye West can produce some amazing music. When Boston roommate, Emily, helped drive me to my tenth and final city, “Power” literally started playing the moment we passed the city limit sign. There couldn’t have been a more thematically appropriate song for that moment.

I had a brief fling with a French girl when I first moved to Brooklyn; my infatuation with The Stills’ french-language “Retour a Vega” lasted much longer. At the same time, I fell absolutely head-over-heels in love with HAIM’s debut. Their latest release is very good, but I still play the hell out of Days Are Gone.

Goddamn right JT threepeated.

Album Credits

Notably, while many of my favorite artists are represented in these lists, there are plenty of others that don’t appear (no Sufjan Stevens, no Elliott Smith, no Spoon, no Rilo Kiley), while a number of artists who I barely listen to anymore (Night Terrors of 1927, really?) showed up.

I could have done this kind of list with my Top Artists or my Top Albums and gotten some very different results. For instance, these were my top albums from my year in Charlotte:

All five albums came out between 2005 and 2006, yet only one, Picaresque, is represented on the most played songs. I suspect that I was still getting to know these albums and thus listening to them straight through instead of just cherry picking my favorite tracks.

I chose to look at my top songs instead of albums or artists because I think they reflect my moods in those years more accurately. The album lists lean heavily towards recent releases, and my top artists stay pretty static from year to year (Radiohead and Ryan Adams are almost always in the top spots). By contrast, my ever-changing top song lists across my ten year journey illustrate not only an evolving musical taste, but they also provide insight into my mental state in those particular years.

Perhaps this sort of thing is only interesting to me (if so, you probably aren’t still reading, so who cares), but if you have a Last.fm account, I recommend taking a gander into your own past. Maybe you’ll learn something about yourself.

Epilogue

For the completists in the continually dwindling crowd, I’m including my second and third year lists from my time in Brooklyn. As I’ve written about previously, the music of Songs: Ohia carried me through a very difficult post-project year, hence The Lioness charting so many tracks. And then, this current year’s list is a result of my concerted effort to seek out more diverse artists and voices, in particular more women.

Brooklyn (Year 2)

Brooklyn (Year 3)

Ideally, the list will continue to evolve every year because I will continue to evolve. In that way, these charts serve both as a document of the past and a challenge for the future. Who knows what my playlist will look like after a year in Spain? I look forward to making fresh comparisons next August.

Year End Lists

December 27, 2010December 27, 2010 Joseph Lyttleton

I’ll admit it. I’m a sucker for Best Of lists and Top 10 anything. I’ll read through a Best Opera of the Year list if I see it. I eat it all up.

So when my favorite sites/magazines/bloggers put out their annual Best of the Year lists, I read them religiously, listen and watch samples and vote in their polls. Some years I feel like I have a very vested interest in who tops the lists and I root for my favorites.

Something kind of unusual happened this year, though, while I was reading through Pitchfork’s Top 50: I realized I didn’t care. Now, it could partly be because any list that doesn’t include Arcade Fire’s killer third album, The Suburbs, in their top 10 has epically failed (and maybe Kanye’s new album is amazing, but I just can’t work up enough interest to care).

But even more so, I realized that 2010 just wasn’t a big year for music, for me. I like to make my top 10 list every year just as much as everyone else, but I realized that I couldn’t do it this time. For one, I don’t think I bought 10 new albums this year (albums that released in this year), and for another, of the new albums I did buy, only a few made much of an impact on my listening habits.

Frankly, I’m surprised how much Arcade Fire stuck out for me this year, because despite their solid first two albums, I never gave them more than a cursory listen before this year.

Both Rufus Wainwright and Antony and the Johnsons released albums this year, two artists who I love religiously. And while both albums are solid entries, neither has managed to wiggle their way into regular rotation for me (yet; sometimes it can take as much as a year or two before an album really grabs me, so we’ll see).

This is why I love Last.Fm. Instead of racking my brain trying to scrape together ten albums that I can say I liked, maybe even embellishing a bit so that my tastes seem hipper, I can just look and see what albums I liked this year. I simply zip over to my album chart and click on ’12 Months’ and I can see exactly what albums I’ve listened to throughout 2010, with a Top 10 (Top 20, Top 50) list already made out for me.

So, what do I see? (Click picture to enlarge.)

Well, Arcade Fire’s is the only album released this year that even cracked my top 10. Florence + The Machine’s addictive album Lungs is essentially tied with The Suburbs, but it came out smack in the middle of 2009 (I just didn’t get it until this year).

Spoon’s stereotypically strong Transference made the top 20 in the kind of unassuming way they have of always hanging around the periphery of my favorite bands, and then Rufus’s All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu squeaked in as well. Otherwise, my top 20 consists of pretty well all modern classic albums (Radiohead’s OK Computer, Ryan Adams’s Heartbreaker, etc) and albums I discovered late (Iron & Wine’s The Shepherd’s Dog, The Hold Steady’s Boys and Girls in America).

Now, to be fair, the one flaw of making a Best Of list based purely on listens is that albums released throughout the year just don’t have the opportunity to be listened to as much as older albums in my collection. Of course OK Computer is going to have a lot of listens, it’s my all time favorite album and I’ve had years to grow accustomed to it and find all its charms.

New albums take time to unravel. I can honestly say that Jónsi’s Go and Sufjan Stevens’s The Age of Adz (and his All Delighted People EP) are in my top 5 of the year, but I just haven’t owned them long enough to earn a high playcount.

All the same, looking at the album chart is fairly revealing of where I was throughout this year. It was a hard year, and for that reason, I turned to the comfort of familiar albums quite often, it seems.

One interesting anomaly is Ryan Adams’s 48 Hours. It’s an album that was never officially released but dates back to Heartbreaker/Gold era Ryan. It’s a great album and it doesn’t surprise me that it has charted so high, but I do think it’s interesting to have something that was never officially released be my 2nd most listened album of the year.

As we’re all making our year end lists and looking back on the past 365 days that has arbitrarily been determined to end and begin January 1st, I think it’s fascinating to examine our past behavior for true patterns, not just tidy Top 10 ready snapshots.

So, tell, me, who have you been listening to this year?

P.S. And feel free to send me your Top 10 lists, cause I friggin’ love ’em and I’m always open for musical suggestions.

Last.FM for your listening pleasure

August 22, 2009October 2, 2011 Joseph Lyttleton1 Comment

Some website obsessions come and go. Of course, they don’t really go anywhere most of the time. They just sit there, unupdated (not a word? well, give it a year, it will be), a snapshot in time of the oddities that the internet can create. Who can forget Eric Conveys an Emotion (my personal favorite is still “Finding Dead Body in Trunk”. Man, I experience that emotion all the time!)? Another one of my favorites that just sort of ended one day but could have gone on forever (in my view) was Book of Ratings (go back a few hundred entries; there is pure gold in them hills).

But, I don’t even read Boing Boing regularly like I once did, despite it still being an amazing blog.

There is one obsession I’ve had since I first found the site (something like 7 or 8 years ago) and it remains with me to this day. I check it regularly, like email or Facebook. Last.FM is a site built for me. It catalogs and organizes and unifies my music listening habits into charts of play and then provides links to other music I might enjoy (including free radio stations based on musical tastes). But, to be honest, I don’t even care about the second function of the site that much, I just compulsively go over my charts. It fascinates me in a way that it simply shouldn’t. I mean, it’s not like day to day the charts change all that much, yet there I am almost every day, looking again.

Oddly (or maybe it’s not so odd), I know that since I’ve joined the site, my listening habits have changed somewhat, and it’s directly because of the site in some instances. For one, I think I consciously try to listen to different bands more frequently instead of listening to the same favorite 2 or 3 over and over again (though, of course, as you can see, I do listen to Radiohead far and above anyone else). Once you get out of my top 10 or so, you start to see a vast branching of music. Obviously, new bands (or old bands I’ve only recently gotten into) take some time before they start to make a big impression on the chart, and bands I used to like but never listen to anymore (MxPx) don’t immediately disappear. But, you can also look at your yearly, monthly and weekly charts, so you get a fuller view of your individual listening habits.

Plus, you can “scrobble” music from your Ipod, so it doesn’t just have to be music you listen to at home. I, for one, like to listen to upbeat and energizing music when I’ve got my Ipod and I’m out (anyone say, “99 Problems”), whereas when I’m on my computer or reading or writing, I like slower, more atmospheric stuff. And as more and more people ditch car radios for their Ipods, I think this site will, in general, be a truer representation of the listening habits of the population.

Patterns fascinate me, and what’s great about Last.FM is that the patterns get more interesting the more an individual listens, and the more people who join up to the site. One of the fascinating aspects of the site is that it creates charts of all listeners’ habits. Radiohead and Coldplay battle it out for the top spot (usually Radiohead sits on top, but anytime Coldplay releases new music, which is a bit more frequently than Radiohead, they take the top spot for a few months), with the Beatles usually residing in the top 3 or 4. Right now, Muse is 4th and Michael Jackson is 5th. What can be extrapolated from all that info? Well, for one, I’d say Last.FM must have a large European (British) population, because Muse just isn’t that popular on this side of the Pond (I’m not making a quality statement, just a general statement of their fanbase in the States versus Europe). Despite the seeming ubiquity of rap and hip-hop inspired music in the mainstream, specifically radio and Billboard charts, on Last.FM you have to go to the 26th spot (Black Eyed Peas) before seeing a ‘hip-hop artist’ and the first rapper (Kanye West) doesn’t appear until number 36.

The takeaway from this is clearly not, “Rap is overhyped, people aren’t really listening to it.” Rather, it implies that the type of people who join Last.FM tend to lean towards the more rock/indie fields of music listening, which makes sense since Last.FM is kinda nerdy as an idea and would draw that sort of personality (and there is definitely a casual link between nerds and Indie music). Also, the type of people who listen to most of their music on their computers (and thus would have use for Last.FM) as opposed to those who listen mostly in the car on the radio or whatnot probably leans more towards the type of music fans who like ‘album’ music as opposed to just ‘single’ music. (Which means I just refuted my earlier assumption that there might be a lot of European listeners affecting the charts; it’s likely that Muse is just more popular among the American nerd crowd.)

I probably am a pretty good base example of the type of listener on Last.FM (go ahead, take a look), though my more folky/Americana leaning is not really represented in the site’s top 10, and I’m not really into “Rock” bands like Metallica (or Muse, for that matter, though I do listen to them a little bit). Also, my listening habits don’t tend to be affected by world events, so there is no spike in my Jacko plays after his death.

I think Last.FM only gets more interesting as more people join. Especially as the represented tastes diversify. I think you can find an example of every type of listener on the site, but certainly the more Anglophile-types represent the largest majority. If you’re on the site, encourage people to join up, and if you’re not with the site, sign up (and then, hey, you can be my friend; you lucky sonofabitch). This is the sort of grouping and calculating of mass information that the internet is specifically designed for and it only gets better as the numbers grow. Even if you aren’t a chart-nerd like me, you’ll find use for the site in the way it offers you new musical options that correlate with your personal tastes (their suggestions only get better and more refined as more people join). If you love music and are constantly wanting more, and wondering what else is out there, this is a great site for you.

If you don’t like music, I’m sorry your soul is dead. Can I have your stuff?