Jeeeeezus god, 2023 couldn’t see itself out fast enough and I am so relieved that I might get a few days to breathe before 2024 starts hinting at what fresh new hell it brings. Yeah, sure, I figured out a lot about myself, but it came from the haunted solitude and numb panic and absolutely all-consuming heartache of grief that comes from family emergencies becoming deaths in the family, and it’s all tangled up in still not knowing how to accept that my favorite person I’m not married to no longer lives just 10 minutes down the highway, won’t ever again and hasn’t for what will very soon become three years. 

Because I’d very much rather navigate the hard stuff on my own, I leaned hard on my emotional-support music library in isolation all throughout the last full year of my 30s, reveling in the company and peace of something requiring only one-way engagement instead of attempting human connection. But it wasn’t all clinging to familiar favorites, new tunes and second-chance rediscoveries like desperately deployed life rafts: There was so much joy in my musical consumption, too, whether it was the novelty of a new car and its Spotify-friendly gizmos turning my daily commutes into full-throated car concerts for the only audience who can tolerate my singing, or swapping multipurpose playlists with friends and mutuals, or wringing every last drop of dopamine from playing the songs that feel like home on infinite repeat.

However I devoured music this year, both Last.fm and Spotify agreed that the songs largely remained the same across both the cumulative listening log and the streaming platform, respectively:

It also does merit mentioning how 2023 was the year that Last.fm, a site that I’m low-key convinced gets the majority of its traffic and tabulations from people whose last act on the site was syncing their Spotify accounts to it a decade ago, stepped up its Last.Year game and not only offered up a ton of stats but also threw, like, at least three quarters of its annual budget at creating a legitimately impressive Wrapped-adjacent recap visualization and experience. Every year that site is still running impresses me, so it was an especially nice surprise to see the more comprehensive of the year-end stats going absolutely balls to the wall with ’em.

And even the typical Last.Year fare felt a little more polished and expansive than usual, which was just a helluva treat:

Wrapped had its own surprise gifts, too, including the gut-punch of telling me that my listening habits are with my heart and my best friend’s new home on the other side of the country. And I also enjoyed the nod to how being invited to friends’ other friends’ monthly playlist contest did not go unnoticed by an app that plays fast and loose with users’ privacy:

But all those numbers are just a part of the story and tell nothing of the music generating all those tasty stats. Where some years absolutely reflected this project’s impact on my listening habits, last year’s wrap-up data (including the Top 100 playlist that is secretly my favorite part of the whole EOY wrap-up) scream comfort music and reveling in my favorites. I mean, Matt Pond is all over these lists, including 2/5 of both my artist top fives: If playing the fuck out my long-running favorite contemporary musician’s stuff isn’t indicative of how immediately I turn to the music I can always trust to spark joy in even some small, remote part of my heart when shit gets unimaginably rough, I don’t know what is.

(Though I can confidently say that both Pernice Brothers’ Goodbye, Killer and Big Scary’s Vacation are below because of their respective second-chance G-named ditties; The Gaslight Anthem’s ’59 Sound, however, would have probably landed on here even without a boost from this project because it is such a perfect album.)

Anyway, I’ve been hacking away at the G Songs’ wrap-up—which is just two more song posts away—so it feels like it’d be overkill to cover too much recapping ground here when I’m hoping to post that within the next week. I’ve dragged out that letter long enough and it’d be lovely to get 2024 started with a return to the alphabetical listening I’ve been missing something awful for months. I will say that there has been an unusual amount of traffic finding its way to this vanity project of mine recently, so thank you for being here! I hope you meet or reconnect with some music you love just as much as I do.

And also thanks lots for being a reason why this happened to my happily unknown little blog, too, which Word Press announced at me in the middle of cobbling together one of this post’s collages: