Every year—first started in either 2012 or 2014, but retroactively done as far back as 20X10—I do this thing where I put an 'X' in between the TWENTY and the CURRENT YEAR and then I make myself put together a big-ass mix cd based on the result of the equation. And every year, as another 20 songs gets added to the playlist total, I am amazed at how quality the overall quality manages to stay — while, at the same time, anyone can do a quick scan of what I include and still go:

“How the f*ck do you not have ______ in this ridiculously long mix of great music released this year?!”

But this is more a testament to just how much great music is being released each year, and not so much about who has got better taste in music. Also, taste is super subjective and no end of year list is ever going to perfectly represent the personal relationship you had with music this year—because that stuff is based on all sorts of different factors and it’d be kinda weird if all the exact same things resonated on all the exact same levels. Besides, nobody can listen to everything anyways (believe me, I’ve tried) so everybody’s list automatically excludes a bunch of stuff on the basis of never got around to it.

So, with that in mind, what HI54 has to offer into the end of year hullabaloo is my 20X19 playlist — which is a Spotify playlist with 380 great tracks, from 380 different releases, all from the year 2019 (listen/follow the full thing on Spotify, as the embed below just shows the first 100). Yes, I know, that’s A LOT of music — so much so, you might even say that it’s probably just easier to press play and see what catches your ear…

…because when you get this high in the count, there’s no need to overthink song order/placement, or who is or isn’t included —instead just know that the whole thing has been put together as if I was making a nice (and massive) mix cd, based on the music that resonated with my ears + what was still grabbing my ears when putting this playlist together over the last couple weeks of December.

And since I’ve been doing this bit for awhile now, thankfully somewhere in 2018 I finally got smart enough to realize I should start doing a better job keeping track of everything I liked throughout the year (here’s that ongoing playlist, which will get reset to 0 to do it all over again in 2020, if you want to follow along on Spotify). Which means that 2019 was the first year where I went into making my giant End-Of-Year’r with WAY more than the needed 380 tracks (which means I didn’t spend a bunch of time trying to ‘catch up’ with what I missed on everyone else’s EOY lists). As ridiculous as it sounds, I still had to make a lot of cuts/tough ear decisions when headphone filtering things DOWN to the final 380.

So think of this 20X19 playlist more like tuning into a radio station that just plays 2019 gem after 2019 gem (for 24 hours straight, if you let it) — some tracks you’ll have heard before, maybe already dig, and a bunch of tracks I bet your ears will be discovering for the first time. Sure, have a scroll thru to see what wasn’t included and curse me out under your breath appropriately, but don’t forget to press play and listen to the music that’s in there too, because it’s a REALLY good playlist for listening/discovering.

Like all HI54 Mix CDs, if you don’t use Spotify but still want to listen, jump over to Soundsgood for some other listening options (ie. Apple, Youtube, Soundcloud, etc). And, as an extra nice extra bonus, I’ve also tried to replicate this playlist on Playmoss with the releases that are available on Bandcamp (so not all of them, but still a pretty hefty 295).

Also, Episode 118 of Mix Tape Radio is 2019-flavoured.

And so is Episode 122.

Finally, as always, when you hear something you like, do the universe some good and check those artists out further (handy feature - every track on the Playmoss playlist links directly to Bandcamp).

And high five for another nice year of music \m/