2022: My year in Music
The 2022 I ended yesterday felt like a very different year from the one that I had started. The wife and I had received our booster shot on 31st Dec 2021. It was arranged at the last-minute and we knew from the last two vaccines that we’d probably be spending the first two or so days of the new year in bed recovering. That’s exactly how it went down. And it’s easy to forget now that the Netherlands was also under a partial lockdown for most of January1.
So to go from there and be able to travel internationally for work and leisure, have family and friends over in Amsterdam, change jobs - and a month or so into the new one, get COVID - 2022 was quite packed. And the discovery of new music (new only in the sense that I heard it for the first time this year) kept pace with it. This is the 7th iteration of my annual playlist making exercise. And like annual playlists before, this one too has music in many languages (Basque, Bengali, Catalan, English, French, Spanish, Italian to count a few) spanning multiple genres. And oh, I also started learning Spanish seriously. To be able to understand fragments of lyrics of some of the Spanish songs in this playlist gave an extra dimension to them.
I found these tracks in all manner of places. Stole (borrowed?) a couple from the playlist of a colleague I was seeing in person in San Francisco for the first time in over two years. Shazamed one at an ice-cream parlour in Athens. Found one when Apple Maps egged me on to explore the favourite haunts of a famous LA-based artist (whom I hadn’t heard of) but instead, I chose to explore the artist’s latest album. And of course, the algorithmic recommendations from Spotify were a big source too.
Without further ado, I present to you, the 2022 musical retrospective:
Exhibit A: This government press release announcing opening of shops, barbers etc. till 5:00 PM in the evening↩︎