2025 Music

Music is fuel for me, so when Spotify and Apple share my end-of-the-year stats, I get pretty jazzed about it.  I listen to both.  I have my monthly playlists in Spotify.  Each month has whatever floats my boat.  The first song I like each month begins the new playlist, and I delete that month from last year.  Apple has all of my longer playlists, and also all the music I've ever owned from records I've converted to discs I imported to spoken word albums I also imported.  None of the hard-to-find stuff ever shows up in my stats.  I will forever be gobsmacked by how much music is out there that Apple and Spotify do not have.  It's one of the reasons I still look at cds when I see them in the wild.  

Here are just a few of my favorite moments from this year:

Needtobreathe is always in my top five.  This year they were my top artist in both this year.  They have some incredibly profound moments in their lyrics.  I'm excited they're at the top, but I'm ready for a new album from them!    

  

I love most kinds of trap.  It's the genre I listen to the most.  I never heard of it until about fifteen years ago, so I feel like I'm making up for all the time it didn't exist in my life.  At first I had to buy these trap cds that weren't sold in our country.  Thankfully, it's a lot more common right now, and there are gobs of sub genres.  The past couple years I've been listening to quite a bit of Hanzo, who is a music producer from Germany.  It's about as intense and imaginative as trap gets.  The best example of this is their song, Invasion, which is about aliens taking over.  Other than the PSA announcement at the beginning, there are only a few words sprinkled throughout, but Hanzo uses the music to tell us exactly how the invasion is going down.  

I listened to a lot of Latin music last year.  I wondered how that was going to show up in my genres.  Spotify has some crazy genres!  Last year our neighbors tore down their house and have been building a new house.  This is a common thing in my city.  On my street right now we currently have four tear downs/rebuilds in various stages of destruction/completion.  As the walls were going up at the neighbor's house in October of last year the framing crew listened to El Alfa nonstop.  The sound of it blaring from the cavernous shell of the home is something I'll never forget.  Every spare minute I had was spent on the porch listening to El Alfa blast from that shell.  Even though nothing could come close to that same quality of sound, I started listening to El Alfa even when I wasn't on the porch, and this opened the doors to all kinds of Latino and Brazilian music thanks to both Spotify and Apple doing such a great job recommending similar music.

  

I always get a huge kick out of seeing my stats at the end of the year, and I really enjoy seeing others.  My Arizona brother's top song was a Bluey song!  There have been some interesting posts and articles about parents and how their kids have taken over their Spotify Wrapped.  There are ways to fix this of course, but it's always a delight to see my Arizona brother's top songs of the year peppered with the music his kids listen to.  I hope he doesn't fix it!