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A little late, but I think this is still a pretty accurate picture of 2014’s listening patterns (it’s a top 31 because I couldn’t bring myself to leave out Grandaddy):
No surprises up top, as Mark Lanegan was definitely the big discovery of the year for me. The next five entries are all pretty much in line with my thirtysomething default listening habits.
Kind of nice to see Pavement in the top 10 after many, many years’ absence. Waxahatchee would be higher if only there were more of it (the Crutchfield sisters were another one of the year’s big finds; listened to a lot of Swearin’ & PS Eliot in addition to Waxahatchee). Fuck is a question mark, but Woods and Lambchop were two more exciting discoveries that I kept returning to.
Parquet Courts and Frank Sinatra, tied for lucky #13. That’s probably my favorite thing ever.
Everything else seems perfectly unsurprising: yep, that’s what I listened to. Except that I wish Jim Croce was higher. I was hittin’ that stuff hard over the holidays.
I can definitely see the impact of deciding that I needed to have the VU boxed set, all 4 good Danzig records, and at least 3 Black Sabbath records on my phone at all times.
I also seem to listen to Bowie, Dylan, and Neil Young at a very consistent rate through the years.
Also, I totally forgot about Edith Frost, Davy. I’ll have to spotify/youtube some of that stuff later.
I remember starting this thread on LPTJ about 10 years ago, as a fairly new poster, and it being dismissed as ‘pointless’. Which it is. Which is exactly why it’s interesting. I will be reading the above closely and posting/analysing my data as soon as I don’t have to teach narrative tenses to people.
While I wouldn’t say my chart is unrepresentative of my listening habits, it’s not entirely accurate for a number of reasons. If I have an album on my computer and/or my iPod and I listen to it on anything other than those things, I often play it on the computer on mute just to get the numbers up, but some of the numbers reveal that I didn’t do that as often as I thought I did last year. And while I do love Guided By Voices, 336 plays doesn’t necessarily tell you that. It takes less time to listen to Bee Thousand twice and rack up 40 listens than my 4 listens to Ash Ra Tempel would have taken.
Windows98 said: While I wouldn’t say my chart is unrepresentative of my listening habits, it’s not entirely accurate
Yeah, I listen to half my music on headphones, out and about, and my mp3 player doesn’t scobble. Even so, here goes:
midnight_augury said: 9. The Velvet Underground 169
I should listen to the Velvets more. I always bung half a dozen tracks on my card night soundtrack for my rockist poker buddies, and the girls sometimes like to hear the Nico songs, but generally I should just get those albums going around more.
Windows98 said: 4. Throwing Muses 143
Was the Paradise/Purgatory, still? Or old school stuff? If I had to swear on one all-time favourite band it would have to be the Muses.
davy said: A little late, but I think this is still a pretty accurate picture of 2014’s listening patterns (it’s a top 31 because I couldn’t bring myself to leave out Grandaddy):
Davy, I just wanted to reassure you that after the shock of us sharing a couple of overlaps the other year, the world has returned to its axis and I think I’m right in saying that unless I slipped a Tindersticks song in there somewhere that I don’t remember, I didn’t, in 2014, play a single track by a single artist from your list. Which just goes to show that a person needs more than one lifetime to get time to listen to all the music there is, because I remember Doug Paisley and Yo La Tengo, and they were pretty damn good.
Anyway, mine looks like this in mid-January. It’s slightly skewed by a recent splurge on Panda Bear’s new album, and a couple are late 2013 albums that I must have played a lot in January - Lee Gamble, I think was one of those.
Lately, I’ve been going through the HD archives a bit, and it really struck me how much less ambient/drone I’m listening to compared with 2010. It’s just gradually tapered down to a small but still important strip of my listening.
I suppose my list reflects my listening pretty well actually: there were big 2014 albums that I just loved (2, 17, 23), stalwarts that seem to be on my list no matter what year it is (3, 4, 5, 21, 24, 27, 29, 39), a continuation of my reggae and dub enlightenment that begun a couple of years ago (9, 20, 46, 47), a regular drip-feed of Ghostbox (1, 6, 8, 16, 41 etc), a smattering crucial early 80s New Romantic artpop (14, 19) and a few bits of forward-thinking techno that KDSB told me to listen to (7, 17, 35, 43)
Cool thread. I want to see more people’s lists
I’m surprised, that an early-year Popol Vuh binge and a handful of Cluster apart, my krautkosmische requirement seems to be on a much reduced dosage. A Winged Victory must have elbowed out SotL time too.
My last.fm chart is more representative than it used to be, since I only have about 100 LPs these days and most were cheap $5-10 scores. That said, I still listen to a fair bit of vinyl.
It may be a sign of creeping irrelevance that even my “albums I loved in 2014” are either stalwarts or else made by people who are probably in their 40s.
I did like some of the hot new fashionable jams of 2015 (FKA Twigs, Future Islands, Perfume Genius, etc) but I tended to not care much for those albums as wholes.
I should probably go forth and indulge in an Inko-esque odyssey of discovery down the musical rabbit holes of orientalist jazz (I do dig some Yusef Lateef), Chicago post rock, Turkish surf or something like that.
Early last year I embarked on a mission to listen to every album I own (which I’m only a fraction of the way through), but it hasn’t affected my chart much. John Lee Hooker wouldn’t have 172 plays, but mostly it’s bumped up artists who probably would have made the cut, just further down, eg. Elliott Smith, Nirvana, Lonnie Johnson, The Beatles, Johnny Cash and Blind Willie McTell.
nickinko said:
Windows98 said: 4. Throwing Muses 143
Was the Paradise/Purgatory, still? Or old school stuff? If I had to swear on one all-time favourite band it would have to be the Muses.
Both. I probably would have listened to them even more if I hadn’t also listened to a lot of Kristin Hersh solo. I only discovered them in 2011 and they’ve been third on my all time chart for most of that time, behind Guided By Voices and Radiohead and ahead of Tom Waits, Elliott Smith, Pavement, Fugazi and Beck, all perennial favourites.