20X17 | 340 TUNES FROM 2017
I told myself I wasn't going to do it in 2017.
In fact, I'd even overwritten all the past 20x year end playlists I had laboured over on previous calendar years (which, in hindsight, was a dumb move because I ended up making them over again). It had become clear that putting these year end playlists together was a whole lot of work for the very brief time that people were actually interested in looking at / listening to them.
So why then are you reading a sentence that will eventually be contradicted with an embedded 2017 year end Spotify playlist?
I don't know. I guess there is something that I find both comforting and addicting when it comes to putting playlists together. It's probably some sort of undiagnosed OCD (side note: is it still undiagnosed if I diagnose it?).
The truth is, putting together an end of year playlist based on the math that happens when you put an X between the 20 and the 17 is a really good (albeit, slightly daunting) way to do a deep dive on the year that was. And for me, this year had been my most "checked-out-of-music-industry-society" stretch of calendar for some time. So trying to find 340 good songs from 340 different artists became my own little musical Everest. Having completed the task a few times before, I knew the brief but intense feeling of accomplishment that waited for me at the end; sometimes that's enough for me.
And no, this is not a playlist of 'The 340 BEST Songs of 2017'—because it would be mental to have a strong opinion of 340anythings. And no, there is not any order of preference to this playlist. It's just 340 songs/artists from the year 2017 that my ears got around to and liked a little more than some of the other things that made it into my headphones (don't @ me, unless of course it is with praise and or quality 2017 recommendations I may have missed).
Now, bring on 20X18 (and every “whatever year this is now” that follows).