A wonderfully weird year deserves a weirdly wonderful soundtrack, and 2022 has delivered in abundance.

After two asterisk years, this one was an absolute embarrassment of musical riches. I never really wrote about all the new albums that 2022 just biblically dumped on that niche-corner of the musical world I hyperfocus on for a lot of reasons—lack of time, mostly, but also because I never really got to dive into any one album for very long because there was just an endless stream of new tunes to roll around in, a number of which were all the more intimately appealing for the timely commentary and COVID-churned-up feelings that they gave a needed vocabulary to. I felt rewarded in excess like a lab rat frantically whaling on their treat-dispensing lever with no regard for the proportional consequences, like not having the bandwidth to appreciatively savor each individual treat like such a staggering bounty deserved.

There were, of course, some notable exceptions, most significantly a surprise Pedro the Lion release that set my expectations high early in the year and got under my skin in ways that still surprise me, and the bookending Aqualung album that essentially did the same. Jens Lekman remained the year’s greatest discovery even if it came shamefully late, but it was the best kind of immediate gratification to fall in love with his music just in time to grab two elusive albums’ rereleased and repolished incarnations not too long after successfully snagging their out-of-print predecessors. Three reliable standbys (Spoon, Superchunk and Andrew Bird) each put out solid efforts that once again prove they can do no wrong, and the post-rock-meets-jam-band genre-defiant absolute treat of Black Country, New Road’s sophomore album emerged as one of the most irresistible, brain-tickling aural gifts that made 2022 a better place than the years immediately prior. Gogol Bordello, The Real Tuesday Weld and Completions all added their own wholly unique sounds to an absolute musical turduken of a year, though I was admittedly a little bummed at first that Completions toned down the strings to comparable nonexistence since that was such a charmingly unique aspect despite evoking winter’s melancholia better than anything else.

I wound up herding every 2022 release on my radar into a playlist that was still growing into December, a mammoth beast cresting the 30-hour mark. That’s dozens of LPs, EPs, singles, covers and collaborations equalling 464 songs and countless genres that I was shamelessly balls-deep in ’til this year’s Spotify Wrapped playlist eclipsed everything else.

While I usually have a pretty good handle on what my Wrapped will yield (I called Havasu‘s absolute domination of my listening habits back in January, which, while ultimately usurped by my hard segue into Swedish singer-songwriters, is really even more impressive for being a thing relegated to essentially two months’ time), this year’s was legitimate surprise. Rather than being shaped by my well-documented tendency for playing the absolute shit out of one song for days, this year’s Wrapped and especially its accompanying playlist were awash in not only my attempt to digest all these new releases (it’s no wonder that four of my five top Spotify artists put out new albums this year) but also reclaiming my music library letter by letter and song by song. 12,700 Songs is all over this year’s Spotify wrap-up, from the second-chance songs I was openly smitten with to simply letting its accompanying playlist play on when I didn’t know what I felt like listening to. (It is also worth noting that one of the year’s latest contenders for most-played song ranked hilariously higher than I anticipated.)

Coming face-to-face with my Spotify stats also reflected something in absentia that my much more comprehensive Last.fm yearly wrap-up better articulated: This year both was defined by a CD-buying renaissance and reflected just how much I’ve started actively listening to CDs again, and the five commuting hours I spend listening to those CDs in my car every week evade digital data collection. But I have missed the tangibility of the music experience that comes with having a physical disc, and giving into the technologically regressive joy of buying CDs has been a treat I had no idea I’d get so much out of.

On a deeper, more compensation-motivated level, with my most reliable concert-going buddy no longer being close enough for a night in Philly or a weekend in New York, I have not been going to shows like I used to, so it’s been nice and probably a little necessary having something to fill that void when one of my most favorite ways to experience the music I love has been woefully underrepresented after being such a significant part of me for so long.

But more about Last.Year, because it is a much more all-encompassing and accurate picture of my listening habits, and one that actually didn’t look all that different from Spotify Wrapped this time around.

Just by Last.fm’s nature (i.e.: providing weekly and monthly stats, in addition to its primary function as a visual, real-time music tracker), its annual summary is always less of a surprise than Wrapped and a little more satisfying of a way to look at the year’s listening habits. It is more about a data deep-dive through stats than the proprietary stabs at conversation- and taste-making that Wrapped uses as filler where more quantifiable data could be, and that more concrete stuff is exactly what I want.

I do enjoy seeing a convergence of personal trends manifest themselves in this year’s two wrap-ups, probably because I choose to interpret that as requiring multiple unified forces to contend with my proclivity for playing favorite songs on infinite repeat. And while 12,700 Songs, my comeback love for CDs and 2022’s releases all left their own unignorable marks on my listening habits, nothing equalled the impact of discovering Jens Lekman.

I really can’t overemphasize just how hard I fell for Jens Lekman’s music this year. It has been a while since I so thoroughly consumed an artist’s catalogue and obsessively tracked down the must-own rarities with a completionist’s maniacal focus. I could wax introspective about how intrinsically intertwined a Swedish musician is with my reclamation decade extending to a heritage I never really felt that in touch with, but I’d rather focus on how I met so many of my favorite songs this year during my gleeful romp through a veritable treasure trove of music I didn’t know I needed.

Completely unrelated to and independent of all of this, one of the best local radio stations ushered in December with an alphabetical-by-song romp through the ’90s, which not only tickled the part of my brain that was driven to both undertake and document a similar path through my music library but also turned out to be a deeply enjoyable listening experience that meandered through a sincerely surprising vast expanse of familiar terrain. Getting an earful of Counting Crows, Elliott Smith, Ben Folds, The Tragically Hip, Dave Matthews Band, Leonard Cohen, Bush, Gin Blossoms and a decade’s worth of my most formative years distilled into, like, 10 days of almost nonstop scattershot ping-ponging through a whiplash of colliding genres was such a lovely reminder of how interconnected time and music are, and it assured me not for the first time that music is one of the most trustworthy time machines we have at our disposal.

Also tangentially, 2022 seemed choked with think-pieces about emo’s revival, an external factor that coincides nicely with one of the genre’s monoliths making gottdamn sure it reintroduced itself to me and the internal influence it exerted on this blog inspiring me to dig into the entire albums I rediscover when individual tracks facilitate one helluva reunion. I long ago made peace with the fact that nothing I have ever loved has been cool, but I can’t say I’m mad about those things enjoying a newfound relevance for a while, especially if nostalgic cash-grabs and the cyclical nature of every trend combine forces for some accidental and obviously wholly objective good by way of revivals and reunions.

Aside from a few forced office closures (one for a remodel; the other when COVID took down a huge swath of our team—including me), I was back on-site for most of 2022 and thus denied the daylong soundtrack I’d so quickly gotten used to as one more perk of working from home. But I’ll take a year that might lack a bit in tracked listening habits when it comes bearing a bounty as rich (and still waiting to be fully explored!) as the one 2022 left in its wake.