2024赛琳娜年度之选

on spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6dpqBt37UhSeOTYX9LfsCI?si=33HuvFNXQFaPX9UTZaBdLw&pi=a-kaZ17tiMRbOH

This has been a slow year for me, music wise. There was no groundbreaking discovery, except maybe within the genres that have proven to work magic on me. Even the postponed Spotify Wrapped was pretty bland, and uninformative. I found myself going back to a lot of stuff I liked pre-adolescently. Ergo, I felt pretty unmotivated to write my year end music thing ... In fact, I was ready to release a double CD to avoid writing at all, with the CD1 being songs I have been, relatively speaking, fond of this year, and CD 2 some self-produced demos of covers I did this year, which originally was going to be my debut album as a cover singer, jokingly, of course, but I have people (friends, mostly, very likely forced into) making promises to buy the digital album ... I find this an incredibly amusing idea, but since the plan has been put on hold indefinitely unless someone’s offering me a buttload of money and topnotch production (but why? one may so inquire) , you might never hear the songs as they are housed neatly in a safe somewhere like David Bowie’s original score for The Man who Fell to Earth (1976), which I am still holding onto the belief that it indeed isn’t fiction after all ...

Another thing this year is that I have made substantial changes to the ordering to the songs that would’ve otherwise been ordered chronologically, that is, true to the time that I discovered the momentary and transient, perhaps, importance of the song in my life at the time, which is also why started this tradition, to document my year in music, as I have been doing so in my mind ever since I was a kid. But this year I wanted to make a playlist that isn’t purely personal so I tried to rearrange the playlist in a feasible and, perhaps, logically comprehensible narrative that hopefully makes more sense to people who are reading this.

Haruomi Hosono, TOWA TEI - Ai Ai Gasa (アイアイ傘)

I am kicking off the playlist with perhaps the most important musician alive in Japan now. In the spring, I saw by chance some music blogger posting about mac demarco doing a cover of 僕は一寸 and I got on Google as fast as I could to discover that they’re doing the “Hosono House” tribute album, and NOT that there was any bad news because usually a tribute is released when a musician’s, well, passed away (knock on wood). Before this, Hosono himself released a light, modern redo of the 1973 album five years ago. I didn’t really expect a complete tribute album this soon. They were releasing singles sporadically throughout the year since the LP was announced in February, unsurprisingly, featuring quite a few of white indie men with a guitar, known for their millennial avant garde hipster appeal. I didn’t really need music critics like Mark Fisher or Simon Reynolds to tell me that indie guitar music is basically dead by the time of the 2000s. I never liked millennial music as a millennial, and maybe that’s precisely the problem.

I was pretty surprised to find TOWA TEI on the finished album, but on second thought, the Cornelius connection probably was telling enough. Plus, nobody samples quite like the guy, and I think that’s what makes him the perfect person to do this very song, to give a simulated radio experience on a trailblazing, 60s western music inspired hosono album an unmistakably TOWA TEI signature.

Haruomi Hosono, Akiko Yano – Rock-a-Bye My Baby

This is probably the most foreign-sounding on the original album, and on the tribute album it becomes almost like a jazz standard number, something you hear in a fancy hotel lounge bar, just light and generic enough to be there in the background while you’re trench-coated, off to meet your clandestine fate or whatever. It’s not my favorite song on any of the three renditions of the album, however, I felt obligated to include it because I think people should think about Yano’s voice and style more often, which has a particular way of staying on your mind, and I just happen to like generic jazz piano. It’s an interesting attempt to “contemporize” something that’s pretty much stayed fresh and canonical the second it was released, and you hear range and variety on the album, but I’m a traditionalist, I prefer my music bedroom pop free.

The Enshittification of Everything – Momus

This is the second Momus album of the year, and the much better one in my opinion. It was introduced as a kpop album with the assistance of AI. I had my fair share of doubts about both of these elements, but I think this might be my favorite Momus album after 2010’s “Hypnoprism”. You might think it’s cheating to use artificial intelligence to make music so you can make thousands of new songs in a heartbeat (what a postmodern nightmare and goldmine simultaneously! imagine the kind of essays I would’ve written for my media classes) but it could be some pretty intense and arduous effort with the production side of things. Take this song as an example (as Momus himself explains in the video starting at around the 10:19 mark), he has a 70s british sitcom theme song, a dreamy new jeans piano layer, james brown type of guitar, and tech bro journalist cory doctarow in mind. Et voila, it's a song about neoliberal capitalism, truly the sum of its parts, I guess.

Generally speaking, I tend to appreciate lyrics slightly more than the music because words reign supremely for me, and words I can do, while music I struggle with. Words feel natural to me, while music is something I have to rely on theories (albeit quite limited on my part) and fumble, blindfolded. I envy my pal the pianist’s creative capacity to summon melody out of thin air instinctively without having to consult music theories, the keyboard docile, in her command, while I spend hours and hours on one song trying to figure out the perfect chord, despite my constant effort of teaching myself jazz piano improv on YouTube. For me, this could be the strongest song on the album, pretty much because of the lyrics and the theme (which makes me think of this Douglas Coupland quote along the lines of “healthy people are bad for capitalism. Fat, sick, broken people are the engine of our economy” ). I didn’t get the AI or Kpop much, because this album feels very human, and Momus’s gloomy, melancholic voice defeats the purpose of doing high energy dancy numbers. I think it’s an okay momus album, nowhere near his 80s stuff in my opinion, but I am especially taken with the last song on the album “Faraday” with the ghosts of the David Bowie/David Sylvian doppelgangers in the music video, and the romanticism of the musical arrangement and the idea of mondegreen (he took out the Korean words that AI filled in the song and found similar sounding English words and stringed them together, making no sense, and that precisely shows how words, syllables, sounds are just signifiers, and they can have no meaning at all).

A Dream is All is I Know – The Lemon Twigs

I have been following their career since the first album “Do Hollywood” in 2016 and there hasn’t been significant changes over the years in style, to which I have no complaints as long as they don’t become too prolific. So every few years, I allow for an injection of a healthy dose of happiness and lightness, something that’s reminiscent of 60s surf pop, Disney, and 90 minute rom coms before hallmark and streaming services. Like I must’ve mentioned somewhere last year, they manage to sound “old” without being nostalgic or hauntological. I think doing music genres often associated with the past requires a high level of “authenticity” in finding the right sound of that period without feeling like you’ve dug the graves, and revived the corpses Weekend-at-Bernie’s style. This album still does it really well, much to my relief (as I have a track record of problematizing nostalgic pop music in the new millennium). I chose this song as I feel that this is most representative of their style, but my favorites are In the Eyes of the Girl, and Ember days, particularly the former. I have a pathological obsession with waltz-tempo love songs, something you either hear in the 50s Hollywood monochromatic romance movies, Disney’s Cinderella the animation movie, or the third act prom dance scene of 80s North American slice of life rom coms where balloons and confetti rain from disco-balled ceiling in a flower decorated school hall and the camera pans out ... way out ... THE END.

The Libertines – Shiver

The song on the new album that broke my heart. When it was released as the third single in January, I was devastated by that point as I saw no redeeming quality of or any future for the album, judging by how ill received (by me) the first three songs are. I quickly dismissed it until early April when the full length album was released, and everything quickly fell into places as my probably eternal, undying love for them got signaled right back into action the second “Songs They Never Played on the Radio” came into the picture. “Shiver” was far from love at first sight for me. I didn’t even really care that much about it until just a few days ago I happened to see on youtube this podcast interview they did several months back. Pete said that the first stanza of lyrics was the very first few lines they’ve ever written together, all the way dating back to the genesis of the friendship (which is, indeed, documented as Love at First Sight). They then proceed to play a segment of the demo of the song called Shiver they wrote in the Jamaican session, which is a beautiful, beautiful song that never quite made into the studio album, and it sounds like it might fit into a Pete Doherty album more than a libertines’ album. They took the middle eight in the demo and put it into “Shiver” the album version, and it sounds like a true, quintessential Libertines song. It has all the elements, the William Blake romanticism, love, the pact of death and glory, personal struggles. I am still not entirely sold on the music arrangements, but the other day I was driving and when you drive alone (as I do A WHOLE LOT), you really really concentrate on the music, or radio, or podcast. I was shaken by the lyrics as if I heard it for the first time, but by the time I was already a few months into the album. That I really really heard the lyrics might be the only viable explanation. Pete said that they wrote those lines at the beginning of everything but never saw any real potential, and now it carries a substantial amount of sentimental value a quarter of century later, like a child you never thought could make it came back home as an ice cream tycoon.

Songs They Never Played on the Radio - The Libertines

I cried the first time I heard it, and it’s usually impossible to get an emotional response out of me these days. This is an old song Pete wrote during the band’s ten year separation. You can hear in the video that half of the lyrics are different from the studio version. Pete on the stage alone, slender framed and nose deep in cocaine, accusing who else but Carl, “why did you go away?” Fast foward to 2024, you get carl’s answer in the second verse, and the band laughing, the dog barking in the outro, and somehow this IS the happily ever after they deserve.

I will simply invite you to appreiate the lyrics:

(pete)

Songs they never play on the radio As the cobwebs fall on the old shipping wrecker The needle skips a groove I hate to say how I told you so, but I told you so And I'm coming by in the sweetest by and by

To claim the claims I'm owed Though I know I'm owed Just about half of nothing at all

Oh, what was that song they played And what about the pact we made Ah, you know, ah, you should've stayed The day you went away

(carl)

The A&R man's head rests on his desk, you know Since 45s were digitised, his heart's bereft and his left ear's deaf The songs that they never play on your radio You can stream them now for free and save your soul

What was that song they played What about the pact we made? What was that song they played The day I went away?

(pete)

They are crashing down the boulevard of broken dreams Men of my class, we live too fast, and we can't be arsed And we batten down the hatches Hear, everywhere I go Old football against the wall The tires fall off the Civic hall

Songs they never play on your radio As the cobwebs fall and needle skips a groove Songs they never play on the radio As the cobwebs fall and the Pigman busts a move Cobwebs fall and your needle skips a groove

David Bowie – Magic Dance

I developed a strange condition that I call the Labyrinth syndrome ever since I saw Labyrinth (1983) in a hotel room on late night hbo movie channel lying on the ground eating a piece of bread as a teenager. The symptoms include but are limited to doing the opening bit of Magic Dance as a party trick (sorry to inform you that it doesn’t work very well), coming up with a whole dance routine for the song and doing it on the street unprovoked, setting at least one email password as “slime and snails puppy dog tails”, thinking about Jeremy the Goblin King at least once a day. I am fairly good at karaoke, but recently I’ve come to the realization that you need an ironic joke number at any given karaoke situation, and I’m happy to announce that whoever’s present at the next karaoke session featuring me, you’re really in it for a treat.

David Bowie – As the World Falls Down

I might never get married (because fundamentally I don’t believe in the institution of marriage), but in any case, if I ever do (maybe to myself someday), this HAS to be one of the songs at the ceremony. I love the scene in the movie (symbolically, the deceitful, confusing nature of Love, and the effort it takes to find The One, et cetera et cetera) and also that the production sounds conspicuously 80s and some might say “dated” but it’s the sound I am all about.

Kanye West – We Don’t Care

I was never a rap lover, but in my college years I took a creative writing class for which you have to write some terrible poems. This was back when I thought I loved writing and contemporary avant garde fiction and deemed rhyming and all sorts of literary formalism outmoded, and in fact didn’t know all that much about literature, culture, or rhyming schemes. But the thing about assignments at school is that you have to follow the instructions to a certain point, so for the purpose of producing these poems later proven to be certifiably total disasters, I decided to investigate the music genre of rap, whatever’s gotten into me. (I know that it sounds entitled, the way that a middle age white media professor built his entire career on The Wire, with extensive academic theories trying to explain the show.) I quickly realized that the effort was futile, as my poetry was probably less gangster than your average 90s, 00s commercially successful rap music (I was very interested in 50 cent and co.), as these things go. I never wanted to listen to Kanye as it was the heyday of his trump endorsement (whatever was Kanye doing this election cycle anyway?), and it was against my principle at the time to listen to whatever everybody’s listening to.

I think I saw a Kanye meme clip and I was instantly hooked, and I started listening, of course from the very beginning, and imagine my surprise when I found out that Kanye was unbelievably liberal in the first two albums (I quickly lost interest in his music after that, just not my jam). Anybody who is critical of the political correctness discourses, or think that people on the left are going too far on identity politics or overcompensating, you clearly don’t care about real people struggles. Love the song. Love the album. Rap in the car now. Miss the George-Bush-doesn’t-care-about-black-people Kanye. But people can complicated.

Chopin – Ballade No. 2 in F Major, Op. 38

As we’ve established, I’m a pretty bad keyboardist. I have basically no advanced training, no flexible fingers, no real talent. This year, I don’t know what came over me and I decided to take on one of the Chopin ballades (probably my favorite; tho am very split in between nos.1 and 2). I started it in May, and a month later I was at the 95% speed excluding the coda, which I simply didn’t touch. But it doesn’t sound clean enough and I quickly aborted the mission, feeling somewhat content that I could do even just the first five pages. I started trying again a week ago, this time the coda. I guess it must be the festivities and the new year resolution and everything that’s gotten to me. I think I’ll come out at the other end somewhere in Jan or Feb not quite satisfied with the results but I shall think of this as a lifelong effort.

Talking Heads – This Must be the Place (Live)

90% of the reason why I even went to the film festival this year is that they were showing Stop Making Sense. I just had to see it on the big screen. I remember the first time I saw it, the sudden cut from the long take of David Byrne singing Once in a Lifetime on the stage to the wide shot of the rest of the band made my soul temporarily leave my body. I genuinely love this song (also one of my wedding numbers), especially this live version. My pal who was interning in the valley in the summer bought me two tshirts (merch of the A24 Stop Making Sense release) and I shall forever feeling grateful wearing them.

The Blow Monkeys – Digging Your Scene

This is THE song of the year. I must’ve listened to it hundreds of time. It was a bit like when I first discovered “Heart” by Pet Shop Boys. I think it took me a lot of detours and a surprisingly long time to arrive at the exact moment that is the 80s uk sophisti-pop. I have loved the Blue Nile since high school but I didn’t know that there was a time when people seemed to genuinely like this kind of stuff and then people now obsessed with and capitalized on music journalism and streaming services would give it a name retrospectively, whatever the name really means. I very much enjoy, shame free, the debonair saxophone – passé, of course, signature 80s, not Kenny G, but Spandau Ballet. (“True” also happens to be one of my wedding numbers, even though I’m 90% sure that it’s a song about having an extramarital affair. But then isn’t that also what monogamy is about? And yes, I might’ve thought too much of weddings for someone who’s probably never going to have one.) In fact, I think that is precisely the point, that music needs to bear some kind of mark of the time and the culture it was in.

Suave, smooth, stylish, it’s the kind of music on the intersection of jazz, soul and synth. Doctor Robert (not gay) said that he wrote the song because he heard Donna Summers call AIDS “god’s revenge on homosexuality” on television, so I think the uber flowery, refined, brazenly maximalist production is rather fitting for the context. Today, I also find myself in an active silent resistance of the minimalist aesthetics, considering that it’s been long associated with razor-sharp masculinity. Plus, I just genuinely enjoy the chaotic nature of sophistication.

On another note, the song has a killer video, very much up there with Edwyn Collins’s elvis satire “The Magic Piper” in my mind. I tried my absolute best to learn the dance routines. Alas, not blessed with slender, flexble limbs, nor the groove. I’ve always wanted to be in a cover band, doing weddings, birthdays, proms and bar mitzvas, and I want to be exactly like the guy in these videos. Imagine the damage I’d do.

Prefab Sprout – Cruel

I think this might be my number two song of the year, and potentially my number one most listened album not released in 2024. Delectably produced, with unusual chords and shifts, and lyricism described as “Fred Alistair with words”, Prefab Sprout’s music is something I fixated on this year. The perfect and perhaps most successful specimen coming out of sophisti-pop, their 1984 “Swoon” (“songs written out of necessity” – an acronym I’m pretty impressed with, which just about describes the dizzy feeling I get from listening to the album) and 1985 “Steve McQueen” are two stellar albums top to bottom. I prefer “Swoon” as I appreciate irregular tempo shifts, imaginative, difficult guitar chords, and beautiful chord changes not according to the general circle of fifths music theory that sound too neat, for me at least. But most importantly, I find myself sometimes thinking about these lyrics point blank:

The front man Paddy McAloon was in the 80s an English literature student who turned away from priesthood, and into the glamorous world of pop music. He now looks like a white bearded wizard. So, something for the lit students to ponder on.

Ryuichi Sakamoto – Risky

I’m not a fan, but I have been very very interested in his late 80s to 90s fledging effort in doing synth and electro. I don’t particularly enjoy his minimalist piano stuff, something about it that feels simultaneously pretentious (the minimalism I suspect) and cheesy (the piano pop ballads are one of my least favorite forms of music). Back in 2023, I loved 1997’s “Smoochy”, which I still enjoy on a good day. And somehow in 2024, Spotify decided to recommend this album. I like this in the kind of way that you might like a hard-boiled detective fiction or 50s film noir – often misogynistic – that you think is about Love but is really about, gratuitously, social critiques, or homoeroticism, as these things go. I especially appreciate the whiff of debauchery and decadence in the music, because it’s just something that I like personally, but also because it’s a song about the depravity of capitalism, cleverly titled as risky.

Pulp – Common People

Near the end of the year, I received this beautiful tote bag I had somebody bring back from the UK.

And I started doing some due revisions. I had a dark past with britpop, in that I was THAT girl once. I refuse to believe in the social construction of “taste” and its innate classist rhetoric, and as a rule I don’t feel ashamed of listening to stuff considered “uncool”, but my god I will never NEVER admit that I used to be a britpop fanatic. That being said, I found that I still enjoy Pulp on any given day. My theory is that they’re not necessarily a britpop band like O*sis or Bl*r, but essentially an 80s Gainsbourgian synth band preoccupied with all things sex, wit and class critiques (which happen to be my three favorite things). conveniently rode the 90s britpop wave. For a month I’ve been listening to “Different Class” in car, and imagining myself doing the entire album medley at a karaoke setting, with dance routines and all, and my friends knowing it’s home time by the time I get to “Live Bed Show”. Jokes aside, I was surprised to find last year during an unexpected karaoke sesh with pals that these songs hugged my voice and singing style a bit too perfectly and also that they happened to have this song in the system in that particular karaoke place, with the correct corresponding music video and everything! Imagining me, shining on that stage like a gold star on the Christmas tree, Rachel Berry style, except that I wasn’t doing musical theater but a sexy, breathy, 30 year old britpop number about the deep rooted class structure. I am also acutely aware of the fact that it might look to an untrained eye that I was making myself the butt of the joke by doing a song taking the piss out of Rich Girl TM, since I obviously live the kind of life of financial safety-nestism that I usually dub as the bourgeois bohemian lifestyle that affords me the time to write stuff like this. But then I also think that a song, or album, in this case, with a populist format (that is, britpop) and a populist narrative (for the lack of a better word, classism), it seems perhaps unwittingly ironic that it chose to do the class revenge vis-à-vis sex, which is prominently a French bourgeois idea.

Momus – Shaftesbury Avenue

Speaking of Gainsbourg, sexiness, synth, britpop, and petit bourgeois, Momus in the late 80s and early 90s made some seedy, seductive, morally apprehensive, deliberately transgressively and sometimes truly appalling music that feels like a godsend to me. Jarvis Cocker tried to accomplish this, but he was prettier and less cultured, so he ended up becoming a star for the crowd, while our pubic intellectual Momus remained unapologetically perverted in his music, refined, and unappreciated.

This year, under my self-interested advice, my dear pal who went on a trip to Japan made a stop at Tower Records and brought back this record for me that I’ll forever grateful of.

So I did due revisions, as per usual. Among the albums he made in the first decade of his music career, this didn’t stand out to me, compared to my absolute favorite, the 1987 “The Poison Boyfriend”. (I even made a tshirt out it.) Now I am completely in love. (I do think, however, that everything he did in the last century is a shoo-in for my preferences. It just couldn’t go wrong.)

It was his most British album, mostly about Tory politics, sex, and the type of bubble culture embodied in disco. You can hear the hunger, and you can hear the want, you can see that he really wanted to achieve the commercial success that his friends (Brett Anderson, Justine Fischmann, and Jarvis Cocker, most notably), one by one, all gained. I find it a cautionary tale, that you can try however hard to assimilate into the mainstream culture, but you can never really fit in if that’s not what you are. (Ironically, Jarvis Cocker who wrote “misfits” rose to fame precisely because of it ... )

I particularly enjoy this song. It sounds like a starving indie artist’s desperate attempt at doing a sophisticated “West End Girls”, destined for the fate of oblivion.

Momus – Microworlds

Revisions underway... this is by the time that he A) had gone through a starred crossed lovers episode of interracial relationship with an underaged girl who was kidnapped by her own family for arranged marriage in Bangladesh (for which he wrote one of my favorite albums of all time), and B) had pretty much given up on fame and success, C) got married and relocated to Paris, and D) made it into the Japanese mainstream market (obviously more susceptible to western, especially French music) writing songs for local stars like the poison girlfriend (who owed him her stage name, to say the least) and kahimi karie.

I have always loved this album, but as I’m getting increasingly emotionally unavailable on the daily basis, I find this song particularly endearing.

Milky – Emperor of Oranges

In a recent youtube video (the song starting at 6:30), Momus did what I thought was an unreleased number and I was instantly hooked. I later found the demo buried deep in the dusty digital archive on his personal website. It’s a song called “The Explicit” and it never made it into any of his albums but was later rewritten into “Emperor of Oranges” for his band with his ex wife shazna (the Juliet mentioned in the previous context) with completely different lyrics. It’s not listed on spotify so I had to swap for a cover version, though I am surprised that anybody with a shred of clout (the fact that they could even be on an album) actually knows the song. I quite like the bossa nova Milky version, also the demo, but not as much as the acoustic guitar version in the video. I love it so much that I made it into a piano ballad (ugh, the only instrument I can play at relative ease) after painstakingly transcribing the somewhat unintelligible lyrics and the chords. The chords alone took me about 2 hours to do. I’m happy with the end result but I wish there was a Momus album version of the song.

Poison Girl Friend – Quoi

Since last year, through her ties to Momus, I have been briefly interested in poison girl friend, who did shows in China in the recent two years. At first I wanted to see her I also conveniently conned my friend into buying the ticket but neither of us ended up going) but I quickly discovered that somehow she was subsumed into the mainstreaming indie y2k scene at shanghai and I lost interest. I do, however, really like her cover of Jane Birkin’s Quoi, which doesn’t even sound very much like the original song anymore. In the 90s Shibuya-kei scene, it was fashionable to do the Gainsbourg/Birkin thing, thanks primarily to Momus and Kahimi Karie, but I think poison girl friend did the palimpsestual cover best, to pay homage to the classic yet remain indelibly and unambiguously herself. I thoroughly enjoy this.

Just Like a Woman – Charlotte Gainsbourg, Bob Dylan

I am not a Dylan fan. It’s just not the kind of music that I like. It’s not even the kind of music that I pretend to like, Nobel or not. I have, however, a life-long devotion for the Gainsbourg-Birkin family. I could never be as ephemeral and effortless as Charlotte Gainsbourg however hard I try, which is something I have come to terms with. I think people need to find their own je ne sais quoi.

After Birkin passed away at the beginning of the year, I got even more retrospectively and compensatorily obsessed with all things Gainsbourg-Birkin. There are two live music films that I Big L Love this year, which are, obviously, “stop making sense” and then it’s the live show in honor of Jane Birkin. I got really emotional watching it, and it quickly spiraled into a full-on investigation of everything they’ve done. And I mean EVERYTHING.

I really like the way that this song is performed, the style, the fact that it’s a woman singing delicately about the life of another woman’s vulnerability.

Être ou ne pas naître – Jane Birkin

This could be my favorite Jane Birkin song written by Gainsbourg, and I know them all. It’s a love song with the 80s Love-on-the-Beat era Gainsbourg quality to it. I love the lyrics, which boiled down to the basics is essentially a trite narrative of how love gives you a purpose to live, et cetera, et cetera. But then again, I think this is the Gainsbourg magic. He managed to transform everything ordinary into bizarrely beautiful, dazzling, moving tapestry of melody and words. Birkin, true to her style, has done an amazing job of making it sincere, vulnerable without sounding sentimental or tawdry, which is quite something in a decade known for disco. It reminds me a little bit of my obsession with Leonard Cohen’s “Be For Real” last year. They have similar qualities of being sincere but not sentimental.

Purple Mountains – That’s Just the Way that I Feel

I’ve always love David Berman’s lyricism, to the point that he made indie country tolerable for me. There are various moments in this song that I felt struck by the lyric mastery but I found myself sometimes in the shower or in the car repeating “the end of wanting is all I’ve been wanting” thrice like a mantra. Probably not a good sign. Ever since I turned 27, the shadow of the song haunts me. Near the end of the year, I got sucked into the album again, as I get every now and then. Just how life goes, you know.

濱田金吾 - 真夜中のテニスコート

This was actually the first song added to the list, early January. I forgot how and why but I was on the interstate highway alone, and it was dark out, and I was playing the very first Discover Weekly playlist datamined by Spotify. There was a quiet and lonely quality to the song and the setting of the story, I remembering hearing the lyrics, not understanding everything, and thinking that it was all very Proustian. I guess the nature of all this – my remembering an instance of remembering a song about remembering, the fuzzy, dreamy quality of blending fiction and fact, is what I enjoy the most.

Happy new year and I’ll see you next year, hopefully.