2024: My year in music
Another year, another playlist - Spotify | Youtube Music
I start each year with a silly and irrational fear of not discovering enough worthwhile music to fill a playlist of 50 or so tracks. I end the year with a playlist that’s thrice as long and requires careful culling.
It also feels a little surreal to think that this is now the 9th iteration of a ritual I started in 2016. That said, for the past few years, I haven’t been able to muster the enthusiasm to compile detailed liner notes like I was doing till 2019.
I am now in the 3rd year of learning Spanish on Duolingo1 and if I am to trust their grading, about to start approaching CEFR B1 proficiency. This has allowed me to appreciate the lyrical beauty of a lot of Spanish songs I heard this year. And so the 2024 playlist is a tad heavier in music from Spanish speaking parts of the world than the years before.
While algorithmically created playlists by Spotify - both their discovery weekly as well as the newly introduced ‘daylist’, were a big source of new music, I continue to discover new music and artists through other sources, like TV shows2 and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts.
Lastly, there are a couple of songs in the playlist that I want to give a special nod to.
Ryan Downey’s ‘Running’ (track #1 in the playlist) got plenty of play in our house - what a stunning voice. For some reason, he reminds me of Leonard Cohen.
The other one is Plantar un Bosque (track #12 in the playlist) - mostly for the quirky lyrics that could well be an exchange between me and my wife about me bringing in too many plants into the living room:
Yo te voy a plantar un bosque
I am going to plant you a forest
Ay, si lloras, por si lloras
Oh, if you cry, just in case you cry
Tú me lo riegues
You’ll water it for me
Y poco a poco
And little by little
Gota a gota
Drop by drop
Los ruisenores vendrán a cantarte
The nightingales will come to sing to you
An unbroken streak of 878 days as of today.↩︎
The Peanut Vendor in this year’s playlist was featured in Boardwalk Empire↩︎