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Tag: playlists

  • Week 50.23

    Week 50.23

    Christmas is creeping closer, but the Goodreads Challenge angel won’t be darkening my doorstep as I’ve redeemed myself with two weeks to go! James Hogan’s Thrice Upon A Time was the twelfth book of my year, and definitely one of the better ones. It’s a 1980s time travel story where no time travel takes place, but it grapples with ideas about how timelines are rewritten, plus some other global topics that seem quite prescient when read today. Stylistically, it’s aged, but in that classic sci-fi way I love, which takes me back to reading books in the library after school. I think those hours, that precious access back then to a ton of books I couldn’t wait to read, were the part of going to school I looked forward to most. Anyway I’ve started a dumb new book that I should be finishing this year for bonus credit: The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley.

    If you’re looking for reading material, it may interest you to hear that I somehow managed to finish B’Fast, the AI-generated breakfast zine project I mentioned last week. The InstaZine GPT I made to create the content is also available through the same link (I updated the page with some additional usage tips today). Now that it’s done, I’m planning to make a companion breakfast-themed zine called “B’Fast (Brandon’s Version)” which will be made entirely by me, in a way that an AI presumably would not. But probably not straight away.

    ===

    Earlier this year, Hipstamatic redesigned and relaunched their Hipstamatic X app. The “X” was dropped, and they added a new social feed. It was the official replacement for their original app which became Hipstamatic Classic. Where the original was funded by in-app purchases for new filters (at a pace of roughly one new 99c release each month), the new Hipstamatic charges a $30/year subscription, doubling their income from faithful fans.

    I used the new app for some photos during my trip to Japan and mostly enjoyed the experience, but it was too buggy and the UI was still too cluttered and confusing (a longstanding problem with the original Hipstamatic app as well) for me to consider continuing with a paid subscription.

    Their main problem is that there are now over 300 filters in the forms of “films” and “lenses” and “flashes” that you can combine to make infinite looks, and no good way to make the attractive human-curated combinations they recommend accessible and discoverable. In the last version, they tried to give a few of these combinations the tangible metaphor of being unique “cameras”, each one with a different skeuomorphic body you picked off a shelf, but essentially they were presets you could call up. But you can keep, what, ten of these aside in a little drawer before you couldn’t tell them apart? And so many of the other combinations were left out of sight and out of mind.

    Now, after a week of teasing social media posts, wherein a “physical camera” was shown in videos — quite obviously a 3D model rendered in AR, but some people believed they were going to release a hardware product anyway — they’ve released a major update (v10) that tries to untangle the Gordian knot of their UX issues.

    In this new version, they’ve tried to marry what worked in the original app with a new info architecture and set of metaphors to manage the library of looks they’ve accumulated over the last 14 years. You get just ONE skeuomorphic camera to call your own and customize the look of, and this camera is capable of loading up many presets. You can either let the camera detect the scene and choose a suitable preset for it (Auto mode), or specify the preset yourself (Manual mode). There are 9 possible scenes, such as Travel, People, and Still Life, but in a puzzling and unfortunate move, when you start using the app, each of these scenes has just one or two associated presets. That means you’re going to see the same looks over and over, when there are over a hundred more hidden away in a long list. This was presumably done to allow you, the user, to customize your experience and assign your favorite presets to the scenes.

    There are two major problems at this point. One: leaving it up to the user to gain their own understanding of all the pre-existing “good combos” and assign them to 9 scene categories is insane. It’s a lot of work to hand off to a customer you hope will pay you money. The team should be doing the work of tagging each preset combo with a recommended use case, AND making it easy to assign them. It’s not currently easy. I had to move back and forth between two sections of the app looking at presets and memorizing their names to go assign to a scene, because these things aren’t placed together. Off the top of my head, it just needs an in-line list of suggested presets (from the aforementioned tagging exercise) on the same screen where you customize a scene’s presets. Perhaps this is coming. I’d argue it should have been in the MVP release of such a big redesign.

    Two: as I mentioned, there are infinite possible presets given the number of ingredients they’ve accumulated. You can make your own combos, but there’s no great way to experiment and do this — there should be a sandbox where you can explore each lens/film/flash’s characteristics and try them out in real time to find a good combo. There used to be a section of the app called the “Hipstamatic Supply Catalog” where you could browse all these effects (it was only like a static magazine, but they could have made it interactive), and this now seems to be gone or I can’t find it anymore in the maze of menus and buttons. Perhaps they’re okay with most users just using the curated “good presets” and never making their own, but it seems like a missed opportunity.

    I was feeling a mix of optimistic and bored, so I paid for an annual subscription anyway and will be trying to take lots of everyday silly snaps with this, and maybe even use it on my upcoming trip to Thailand. But if you know someone who works at Hipstamatic, please talk to them about taking on some external advice.

    ===

    • I finished watching Pluto on Netflix. It’s still a strong recommendation for me; a modern anime made with classic sensibilities and a story that really keeps you guessing. It’s also a very different Astro Boy story, suitable for people who hear “Astro Boy” and think it’s stuff for kids.
    • We started watching A Murder at the End of the World and I’m really liking it so far. Especially its star, Emma Corrin, who I’ve never seen in anything else before. They’ve got the most strikingly similar face to Jodie Foster, I was sure they were related.
    • New playlist! BLixTape #3 is done, made up of mostly new songs that I’ve been listening to since mid-October. Add it here on Apple Music.
  • Week 41.23

    Week 41.23

    Trying to keep things short again.

    • First, a correction to last week: I believed that the Leica Sofort 2 will offer little functional advantages over the Fujifilm Instax mini Evo camera that it’s based on. But I missed that the Sofort 2’s design favors a landscape orientation; its camera strap connection points and tripod mount are placed with that in mind, whereas the mini Evo seems intended to be used in portrait. This is another point of annoyance because the Fujifilm’s design visually indicates it should be used in landscape. Well, it also visually indicates its a vintage analog camera, but we’ll ignore that.
    • Cameras are for capturing memories anyhow, so on Friday night when we had a team barbecue for the first time in years, I brought my Instax mini Evo out to get some lo-fi, low-res, flash-enabled snaps. A camera never gets as much use as it does in the days just before its replacement is due to arrive — if that isn’t a camera addict’s maxim, it ought to be. But I wonder if Leica is ready for the backlash when the photos from this low-grade 5mp sensor start being associated with their premium brand. It’ll be the worst digital camera they’ve ever made. At least with the fully analog Sofort 1, the results were just little Instax prints. But now some really questionable digital files are gonna come from a Leica camera and start circulating.
    These were the only ones without faces in them
    • Anyway, in a big coincidence, the last time I remember having a work barbecue was when Oya left in 2019 to return home, and I met her this week for the first time since as she passed through town for a day. A bunch of us who were around back then met up for Mexican food, margaritas, and refried memories.
    • I finally got access to ChatGPT’s new features (these couple of weeks felt like forever): image uploads for multimodal chats, a voice-driven mode, and DALL•E 3. I’ve yet to make proper use of the first feature, apart from a few tests. I gave it a photo I took at Toa Payoh Hub (what can you infer about my location from this photo? And it correctly guessed Singapore from some visible shop names); a receipt (split this bill, and would I be an asshole if I asked for this money back as a billionaire?); and a photo of a dying plant at home (how do I nurse this withered thing back to life?).
    • I wish the voice mode could listen out for your interruptions, which would make it much more conversational. Right now you have to tap the screen to stop it talking first. The synthesized voices are really good, and enhance the illusion of talking to a trustworthy intelligence. Using Siri Shortcuts, you can now just start talking to ChatGPT on your phone at any time, but I still hope Apple finds a way to design a more responsible, private version of this with a future Siri.
    • The ability to interface with an image generator with natural language is a big deal — in theory, ChatGPT can break down your detailed, context-laden instructions into the right prompts for DALL•E to work with — and affirms my belief that “prompt engineering” will be designed out of relevance for the majority of users. It can’t do photorealistic images as well as Midjourney, but it may be close for illustrations.

    I made a new playlist on Apple Music, mostly made up of recent releases I’ve been enjoying, with a few oldies thrown in there: BLixTape #2

    iOS 17 introduces crossfading, and I think it works great for mixtapes, making the intentional juxtapositions even clearer and jam-mier. Crossfading is when one song fades out just as the next one fades in. It’s like having a budget DJ. (Edit: AI suggested I explain it for those who might be unfamiliar, but Kim says this is mansplaining. I guess this is an explainer for the explainer.)

    I played with this cover art idea for awhile in Midjourney over the past few weeks, but wasn’t super happy with any of it. I gave the same brief to ChatGPT + DALL•E 3 and decided to use its version. It came up with a more interesting composition than all the other centered, literally middle-of-the-road shots, and it was able to follow my instructions that the headphones should be Beats Studios.

    Some unused Midjourney versions
  • Week 35.23

    Week 35.23

    The nation voted for a new president this weekend and the winner was Mr. Tharman Shanmugaratnam, which autocorrect changes to “That Man” (a tad disrespectful in my opinion). He got 70% of the vote which is pretty solid, but nobody’s surprised on account of how well liked and competent he is. It’s worth mentioning how painless the process was: my vote was in the ballot box less than three minutes after I showed up, and I was back home watching TV in 15.

    Appropriately, we started Jury Duty on Amazon Prime Video and I think it’s gonna be great. It’s a pseudo-reality show where one man thinks he’s on the jury for an actual case but the whole thing is staged and everyone else is an actor. I’m watching this and wondering if everyone’s following a tight script or just improvising based on their characters, because there are events happening all the time whether the mark witnesses them or not.

    That real-time play concept always makes me think of The Last Express, a classic but underplayed PC game by Jordan Mechner set on the Orient Express. It kicks off with a murder onboard and you have to move around the train investigating and staying alive amidst political intrigue and wartime spy stuff. Events are always happening, and if you’re not in the right place at the right time, you’ll miss crucial conversations. You can experience this for yourself on iOS but the app hasn’t been updated in five years and may be removed by Apple soon if they stick to their controversial plans.

    A lot of other TV was seen. We finally finished season 3 of For All Mankind, an extremely strong show on Apple TV+. I binged all of the anime Oshi no Ko which is as great as everyone says; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a stronger (or longer) first episode. It’s a 90-minute movie in itself. I’m now midway through another highly rated anime: last year’s Lycoris Recoil, on Netflix. And on Michael’s recommendation we started on a Japanese drama, My Dear Exes, which is very enjoyable so far, maybe because it doesn’t feel like typical Japanese TV. It’s snappier and funnier somehow.

    Oh, if Jordan Mechner sounded familiar earlier, it’s because he’s the man who created Karateka and Prince of Persia. And if you want to experience the making of a gaming classic, a new playable history lesson on The Making of Karateka is now out. And in a case of lovely things cosmically coming together, it was helmed by former Wired games editor Chris Kohler, who also wrote the article on Japanese curry that probably changed my life.

    Staying on topic, we went down to the Japan Rail Cafe (operated by the actual JR East railway company from Japan, for some reason) in Tanjong Pagar because I’d heard they were doing a tie-up with the Kanazawa style Japanese chain, Champion Curry, for one month only. I had my first Champion Curry back in March, after meaning to check it out for years, and while it didn’t unseat my current favorites, it was still decent by Japanese standards and incredible by Singaporean ones. They sold a small sized plate here for S$19.90 including a drink, but it was sadly inauthentic. The curry’s consistency and deployment over the rice is not going to qualify for a Kanazawa cultural medallion any time soon, but I guess it was good enough that I’d take it any day over most local competition. But I still hope they open a proper operation locally someday and accomplish what Go Go Curry failed to do.

    Champion Curry in Japan
    Champion Curry in Singapore

    ===

    I was suddenly inspired to make a new series of playlists, which will periodically capture what I’m listening to, sequenced like a proper mixtape. If I had the skills to make a DJ mix of them, I would! Here’s BLixTape #1 for my Apple Music fam.

    And the tracklist for people still on *ahem* lesser services:

    1. Gold -Mata Au Hi Made- (Taku’s Twice Upon A Time Remix) — Hikaru Utada (I said I wasn’t a fan of the regular version but this remix works!)
    2. TGIF — XG
    3. bad idea right? — Olivia Rodrigo
    4. You Are Not My Friend — Tessa Violet
    5. Dancing In The Courthouse — Dominic Fike
    6. For Granted — Yaeji
    7. Bittersweet Goodbye — Issey Cross
    8. To be honest (SG Lewis Remix) — Christine and the Queens
    9. Sprinter — Dave & Central Cee
    10. DON’T EVER DISRESPECT ME — NEMS, Scram Jones, & Ghostface Killah
    11. Iceman (feat. Morvasu) — Earth Patravee
    12. ETA — NewJeans
    13. Silent Running (feat. Adeleye Omotayo) — Gorillaz
    14. Kill Bill (feat. Doja Cat) — SZA
    15. a little more time — ROLE MODEL
    16. happy im — UMI
    17. Rainy Days — V
    18. Memory — Sezairi

    Making this involved a detour into the world of NewJeans’ music videos, which are pretty conceptually twisted and seem to comment on the parasocial relationships fans have with them. For example, in the mostly sunny poppy video for ETA, the girls might only be hallucinations seen by a sick fan, telling her that her boyfriend is cheating on her with someone at a party. So she ends up murdering him and the girl with her car! I guess this is what it takes to stand out now.

    Let’s end on a nice note with another video I came across on YouTube while checking out more electronic music. This guy Don Whiting also does a great job killing it on the road — performing a two-hour drum & bass set on a bike, accompanied by a huge entourage of other cyclists. It looks like an awesome day out, at a pace even I could probably handle.

  • Week 5.23

    We got our fourth vaccine shots today. Based on historical results, I’m going to be ill tomorrow and she’ll be fine. It’s been about four hours and I’m already feeling a little lightheaded and tired.

    It feels like it’s been raining here almost continuously since late December — dark all the time, and practically every day we get storms that last most of the day or night. And so it feels unusually cool and damp indoors, and our dehumidifiers have been working overtime to get clothes dry and keep mold at bay.

    This Chinese/Lunar New Year period is often associated with blazing, cloudless skies, and sweating through one’s new red clothes while shuttling around to visit relatives, which makes this year an outlier. And it’s not just me saying it! Several taxi drivers have used this observation as a conversation starter these past few weeks.

    And every year, there’s an outsized “Hong Bao” lottery draw that generates long queues at betting outlets. I bought a single ticket for fun while in a convenience store one night, and in the process of getting the link above have discovered that I’m sadly not one of the three winners of the S$12M prize. Or a consolation prize, even.

    ===

    I generated some cityscape illustrations using a mix of anime and artwork keywords with Midjourney (no artist names), and got some surprisingly great compositions — good enough that I’m using one of them as my phone’s wallpaper now. And then just to mix things up, I asked it to put Godzilla in the cities, and that actually worked.

    ===

    TV
    We finished all 10 episodes of Echo 3 on Apple TV+, a quasi-action series involving a group of special forces types conducting some personal business in Columbia. It’s not a straightforward, fast-moving Jack Ryan sort of show, although it could have been. Its typographic title styles actually reminded me of 80s-era Golan–Globus films — a look and feel and attitude I wish Hollywood would unironically revive. But no, Echo 3 has arthouse ambitions and slows things down with gauzy dream images, flashbacks, and psychologically troubled characters. Which I can’t say I cared that much for! 3/5

    We’ve now been subscribed to HBO for a full week and only started using it yesterday. The Last of Us is good television after all, not leaning too much on the game beyond key pieces. My main complaint so far is that shots of the wider world look too much like how I remember the game: CGI rather than realism.

    Something odd is happening here in terms of anime licensing. SPY×FAMILY started out on Netflix, then new episodes appeared simultaneously on Amazon Prime Video. I thought this title sharing was a weird one-off, but now Chainsaw Man is no longer on Prime Video only; it’s also on Netflix. If only this disruption of exclusivity happened more so we didn’t have to subscribe to every service.

    Incidentally, I finished Chainsaw Man despite not really having any appetite for demon-hunting stories — this one is wild, weird, and really well done.

    Music
    Speaking of strange behavior, I discovered the #youngstar playlist on Apple Music at some point last year and enjoyed its focus: emerging J-Pop acts that have gained traction first on alternative channels like YouTube and TikTok. But when I checked it out today, I found an international version of the playlist, with English songs only.

    Checking in with Michael, I realized some localizing or geofencing was afoot because he still saw the Japanese version (with a US account, in Japan). Highly annoying that we aren’t given a choice which version we see; is it so difficult to just publish separate playlists like “#youngstar (Japan)”, “#youngstar (International)”? So we’ve done that, manually, for anyone else who wants them. You can send us the checks, Tim.

    The English-language #youngstar playlist still shows up on the J-Pop category page as a relevant item. I want to fix this, call me.

    Singling out one song off the Japanese playlist, I enjoyed XG’s Shooting Star and then found myself sucked into their YouTube channel for awhile. For a group that’s only put out about four full songs, they have a ton of content, from training sessions and mixtape-style demos to random behind-the-scenes videos like one where two members practice a rap segment for about seven minutes. The polish on the Shooting Star video reminds me of early Blackpink, and I think these girls are going to be huge (they have 1.1M YouTube subscribers now). It helps that they sing in English, Japanese, and Korean. How do you even source talent like that, and seven of them? Headhunters and recruiters in every other industry need to learn from the music business.

  • Week 52.22: The end of year playlist edition

    Hey y’all. I worked three days this week (was crazy, back to back calls during the Christmas season wha…?) and then felt good enough during the next two days of vacation time to sit down and make a year-in-review playlist again. For some reason I skipped this tradition last year — probably having too much fun in my time off? Previous installments here for reference: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020.

    So if you’re on Apple Music, here’s L–R 2022, featuring cover art made with Midjourney, in a year dominated by generative AI improvements.

    Quick liner notes:

    • I was happy to see Utada Hikaru returning with a new album, and such a good one at that. I went with Bad Mode as the featured song but there are many great cuts. Aside: we finished the First Love series on Netflix. It fumbled the ending after a pretty good buildup. The last three episodes should be deleted and replaced with a new take.
    • I discovered Stromae this year (I somehow missed the 2009 club mega hit Alors on danse) and what a singular talent he is. With his knack for melodies, writing (albeit translated for me) and intricate beats, and a great singing voice, he deserves to be so much bigger.
    • There was much to be thankful for in hip-hop, with new material from Black Thought, Kendrick, the RZA, Anderson .Paak, Stormzy!? If only Donda 2 were a real album on real channels, I would have included a track but oh well Ye does Ye.
    • Drake and 21 Savage stepped on a Daft Punk classic with Circo Loco but I can’t hate it. Another contender that didn’t make the list was DJ Khaled’s Staying Alive also with Drake, but if you’re gonna rip off a song at least sample it too.
    • Local band Sobs did an incredible cover of Gwen Stefani’s Cool which I thought rivaled the original in deserving to exist. I heard them play it live in October at the Esplanade too.
    • I cheated a little with the inclusion of Jens Lekman’s Black Cab but hey it’s a new recording! He’s deleted the originals and reworked a couple of albums (I still have the old MP3s thankfully). The song is one of my eternal favorites, firmly planted in the mental territory of my mid-20s.
    • It all ends with one of my favorite tracks from the new Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff album, the most beautiful quiet evening at home vibe to ever be captured in a studio.
    A couple of alternative covers I didn’t use

    ===

    I sorta finished two games this week and started on a new one.

    Robotics;Notes was a real letdown of a visual novel: lots of filler writing to trudge through, and an opaque system of affecting outcomes. I won’t explain, but it’s basically impossible to play out the different paths without a walkthrough. For fans only. I abandoned it after completing the first ending.

    Indie darling Unpacking was a lot more fun, despite being literally a simulation of unpacking boxes after moving homes. It was satisfying to see how much narrative they managed to suggest just by having you handle a person’s belongings over a couple of decades.

    On Jose’s suggestion, I picked up Citizen Sleeper for the Switch (currently on 30% sale for the holidays) and was blown away by how immersive a text-driven RPG game can actually feel in 2022. It’s a sci-fi story set on a space station, if that helps you decide any.

    Related to gaming and growing up empowered and inspired by games, I started reading Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow after encountering a passionate mention of it in Dan Hon’s newsletter, and so far so great. If you grew up in the 80s and feel that games shaped your experience of the world, put it on your list.

    I later discovered that it won Goodreads’ user-voted best fiction work of the year award, which is astounding because no one else has mentioned it to me?!

    ===

    Merry Christmas!

    We had good Christmas Eve, Day, and Evening meals in various family configurations over the weekend with no accidents or cooking disasters, apart from several items of food getting forgotten in the fridge (beef brisket, gingerbread houses, etc.), which were probably signs of excessive ambition and unnecessary procurement anyway. I’m deathly full and ready to skip a few meals in the coming week (spoiler: we’ve got a staycation planned on Monday and it involves eating out).

    See you next week.

  • Listening Remembering 2020

    Listening Remembering 2020

    I considered not making one of these playlists this year, but someone said that traditions are most worth protecting when everything else has changed. My instinct with traditions is sometimes just to snap old things off and find something new to do. Maybe a couple of years of therapy will tell me why, but until then, I figured it was pretty low stakes to just make one.

    And to my surprise (happens every time), it was an enjoyable exercise and I’m reasonably happy with the result, even though it contains some really basic hits and I probably left out a whole lot of other great stuff.

    One thing I noticed as I was pulling in favorites I’d saved throughout the year: there was a tendency towards quiet or mid-tempo songs this time around. Probably a reflection of staying home amidst an apocalypse unfolding in slow motion. In trying to balance that out, I rediscovered a few songs I’d saved but never got back to, like the opening song Don’t Die. As usual, I tried to build in continuity of themes and good transitions, and there are a few intentional jokes in the sequencing of titles.

    Edit: Looking back, I discovered many of these songs serendipitously outside of recommendation engines and so on. Apple Music does offer personalized weekly new music picks, but I tend to find new songs by tuning in to the Apple Music 1 live radio station (née Beats 1), or checking in on their curated genre playlists. Algorithms, don’t trust them.

    Listen on Apple Music | Spotify

    1. Don’t Die — NOBRO
    2. Shook Shook — Awich
    3. Cool With Me (feat. M1llionz) — Dutchavelli
    4. Inside Out — Grouplove
    5. Together — beabadoobee
    6. Mood (feat. iann dior) — 24kGoldn
    7. fuck, i luv my friends — renforshort
    8. you broke me first — Tate McRae
    9. PAIN — King Princess
    10. Say So (Japanese Version) — Rainych
    11. Laugh Now Cry Later (feat. Lil Durk) — Drake
    12. I Dunno (feat. Dutchavelli & Stormzy) — Tion Wayne
    13. Apricots — Bicep
    14. The Hill — Model Man
    15. People, I’ve been sad — Christine and the Queens
    16. Kids Again — Sam Smith
    17. Eugene — Arlo Parks
    18. Lover — G Flip
    19. Young Americans — Durand Jones & The Indications
    20. Lockdown — Anderson .Paak
    21. It’s Hard (feat. Email Sandé) — Giggs
    22. Show Me Love (feat. Miguel) — Alicia Keys
    23. snow jam — Rinne
    24. Holy (feat. Chance the Rapper) — Justin Bieber
    25. death bed (feat. beabadoobee) — Powfu
    26. Devil That I Know — Jacob Banks
    27. Believe — Anna of the North
    28. the 1 — Taylor Swift
    29. You’re Still the One — Okay Kaya
    30. Good News — Mac Miller

    Comment section

    Don’t Die — NOBRO
    Not only a fun song with a great animated video, but an obvious message to open with? Don’t die!

    Shook Shook — Awich
    I don’t understand why someone whose husband died from being shot would make a song that appears to glorify gun violence, but it’s a banger.

    (more…)
  • Listening, Remembering: a 2017 Playlist

    Listening, Remembering: a 2017 Playlist

    In the early days of this blog and being online, I’d make mixes and upload them somewhere for friends and readers. Those were usually one and the same, who am I kidding? Personally, I hardly have time to listen to playlists made by experts, so I don’t know why I thought people would listen to mine. Adult hindsight: I made them for myself.

    The end of year mix was a particularly fun undertaking. I don’t scrapbook, or watch algorithmically generated Year In Review videos from Facebook/Google/Apple, and I lack the openness to write an entry all about my experience of the year without doing it in relation to another topic. Hence music.

    Every track you add is inevitably a personal choice. Some were soundtracks to moments, some were recommended by important people, others are evidence of flirting with new genres, trying to stay in touch with the distancing past or the youthfully new. A listener could conceivably read between the lines, but hopefully they’re already too busy forming their own reflections.

    This year, I started a new job and as an end-of-year team activity, I thought it’d be good to compile a playlist with a couple of contributions from each member. Here it is.

    That activity got me inspired to do a personal one, and I think I’m finally done at 34 tracks across 2 hours and 8 minutes. A double album! At the very start, I thought 2017 (not the best year, right?) would be a slim list. And way too many things that came to mind were actually from 2016. A year can seem like a small and fuzzy lump of time by December. But when you start going through your library, the months all come back and start to feel distinct again. It’s really therapeutic and I recommend it.

    Anyway, here’s how my 2017 sounded. A few notes on particular songs follow.

    (more…)