HIGH FIVE FOR… End Of Year / End Of Decade Blog Task Confluences
When you have a blog that shares music, the approaching years end often comes with even more anxiety and dread than the usual ‘another year of life is gone’ variety that every aging adult starts feeling post-Halloween. And when the end of the year coincides with the end of the decade? Hello darkness, my old friend.
Luckily, because of so many past iterations of putting myself through the ringer of putting together year end posts, I eventually stumbled upon a format that worked better with how I actually enjoy experiencing/sharing music (ie. I like listening to stuff I like & passing that on to others who might appreciate the same, but I don’t really enjoy trying to analyze & communicate why I liked what I liked).
So, maybe around 2014, I came upon the idea of making really big end of year playlists based on the math that happens when multiplying 20 by whatever year it was. Which means, if the year was 2015, 20 X 15 = 300, so my 20X15 playlist would have to contain 300 nice tracks released that year. And just to make things a little challenging, it had to be one track per release/project.
Now, the first few years of doing these big playlists was still a major pain in the end-of-year ass, but that was more because I wasn’t prepping throughout the rest of the months (also Spotify sucks at sorting by years & organization/functionality in general). So I would end up going blind scouring ‘End Of Year’ lists in search of hitting my increasingly getting higher 20X number before December ends.
But, no matter how many songs short I seemed to be when starting on the playlist, every year, without fail, even when it’d feel like there’d be no way to keep the quality of music good at such a high number, I always got to the point where I had to start making decisions on what tracks to cut.
And, yes, it is still possible for anyone to go through each of the ‘20x YEAR’ HI54 Mix CDs and go…
“how the f*ck does this playlist not include…”
… because how ever much good music you think gets released every year, it is more than that. Like way more.
Eventually, I got wise and started an ongoing tracker of every song that caught my ears throughout the year. So now when the ball is getting ready to drop on December 31st, I’ve already got my “short list” of personal faves waiting for me to start whittling down to however many tracks/artists the ‘20 multiplied by current year’ math works out.
And “short list” is in quotations above because my first full year of keeping track of liked songs has resulted in there being over 750 tracks from 750 artists in my ‘EVERYTHING LIKED IN: INSERT CURRENT YEAR’ playlist (as of December 5th, 2019 - so should be no problem hitting my ‘20X19 = 380’ quota of nice songs this year).
OK on EOY, But what about EOD?
I guess what I am getting at is that I feel more ready for this End-Of-Year than any other EOY yet. So of course the universe would throw a curveball by also this an End-Of-Decade too, but you know what? I also feel pretty prepared for that.
Not only am I only one ‘20X19’ playlist away from having the full decade set complete, but if the math I scribbled in my notebook last week is right, those 10 EOY playlists will contain 2900 nice songs from the last decade.
Which means I should have no problem finding 95 tracks to make a 2010s playlist for my “HIGH FIVE FOR… DECADES” series.
Your boy is on the ball.
The only blind spot appears to be my end of year mix tapes, which I only appear to have done for 2018, 2016, 2015, and 2012. But even that blind spot actually aligns perfectly with me starting to make weekly mix tapes based on my Spotify playlists + the amount of weeks left in the year.
So, long story short, start expecting some ‘lost years’ episodes (aka 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014 & 2017) of the Mix Tape Radio show over these last handful of 2019 Mondays, slowly leading our way up to signing off this year AND decade with a 2019 Mix Tape & 20X19 playlist + a 2010s Mix Tape & a HI54… THE 2010s playlist.
That’s right…