2023 AOTY: The Journey Begins!!

The first of six posts detailing the music I loved in 2023.

My 2023 Spotify Wrapped described my listening habits to a tee: “You like to play albums all the way through, from the opening track to the final note.” Absolutely spot on. There’s no denying that I’m a lover of albums and I’m looking to share that love with you over the next six posts to close out the year.

In my day job I’m a risk management professional in the financial services sector. I’m a very structured thinker, I build and implement policy frameworks, I develop efficient and focused processes, I work with data (acquiring it, restructuring it, transforming it), and I love a good spreadsheet!

My structured way of thinking carries over to the ways in which I organize, track, and document my musical journey over the course of each year. Based on my Spotify Wrapped stats and my last.fm scrobbles, along with my Bandcamp activity, and my personal music server, I reckon (“reckon”? who even talks like that?) that I probably listened to about 100,000 minutes of music this year.

That’s an awful lot of music. Without some way of keeping track of what I loved, what I liked, what I hated, what I want to hear more of, etc., I wouldn’t stand a chance in hell of being able to compile a top 50 album list. For me that compilation task (I use that word loosely, it’s very much a labor of love) requires a well-structured process that guides me from the moment a track first hits my ears all the way through to when its parent album hits my Album of the Year (“AOTY”) list.

In today’s post I’ll briefly pull back the curtain on that tracking process before wrapping up with the first list of albums from the 2023 AOTY season.

Note: If you want to skip my rather involved music tracking process and get straight to the music, feel free to jump down to the 2023 AOTY: 2022 Misses section of this entry.

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It’s All About The Process

Although I do my best to not be driven by the algorithm, it’s undeniable that nowadays Spotify holds an important place in my music discovery universe. But I’m also an avid user of Bandcamp and I do my best to regularly get onto some of my favorite music sites (Consequence of Sound, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Line of Best Fit, etc.), but to be honest that’s dropped off a lot in recent years.

And then, in the summer of 2023, I landed on the shores of the wonderful and mystical island that is Substack, a veritable New World of musical discovery! I’ve come to know some of the locals here and have been welcomed with open arms and open hearts. And, after a few months of exploring and enjoying, I decided to hang up my own shingle and become a more active participant in the community. Not only has reading and writing here become one of my life’s joys, but in six short months, Substack has become a meaningful component of my music discovery toolkit.

But let’s get to that process…

Throughout the year I usually start off every Friday morning on Spotify with a couple new music playlists (primarily my Release Radar playlist and the NPR Music’s New Music Friday playlist). That equates to about 60 tracks and 4 hours of listening (if I listen to every track all the way through, which I don’t). If I hear a song I like, I click through on the “Go to album” context menu and see whether I’m looking at a single track, an EP or an album. If it’s a single track, it gets added to my 2023 Singles waiting for albums playlist. If it belongs to an EP or an album, it gets added to my 2023 Music playlist. Having one track from each new album in one playlist easily allows me to get to all new albums from the same place (using that handy “Go to album” context menu again).

Over the course of the week, regardless of the source (Spotify, Bandcamp, music sites, etc.), individual songs that interest or intrigue me make their way onto one of these tracking playlists. I also maintain a playlist for albums from the prior year that I “missed out” on, for this year the imaginatively titled 2022 Misses. These are albums that just never made their way to my ears in the prior year - they would have made it to my 2022 Music playlist if I’d heard them early enough. Over the course of the year, I try to winnow that playlist down to the handful of albums that I legitimately believe would have made my AOTY List if I’d been aware of them in the prior year. You’ll find my 2022 Misses at the bottom of this post.

For those albums that make my 2023 Music playlist I try my best to give them a few full listens over the course of the week. I guess you could consider this my first threshing, the initial separation of the wheat from the chaff. At this point, albums that I know I’m really not connecting with get pulled out of the playlist. But if there’s even a couple songs that I like I’d prefer to leave my judgment open, and I’ll continue to come back over the course of the year to re-evaluate the album again. Sometimes I need some time and space away from an album to allow myself to come back with a fresh ear and see what stands out, what resonates, and what I’m starting to really dig.

Each month I “harvest” the 2023 Singles waiting for albums playlist: I’ll check whether the artist has released an EP or album containing that track and if so, a track from the album itself will be added to the 2023 Music playlist and the original single will be pulled out of the singles playlist.

As the days begin turning to weeks, and January turns to February, I kick off the spreadsheet process. Albums that have been evaluated and found sufficiently worthy to remain on the 2023 Music playlist are added to the 2023 Music Tracking Excel file comprising columns for Date Added, Artist name, Album title, and Top 50 Status (plus some notes columns). As albums begin to emerge (or not) as favorites, they get classified into one of six categories (Definite, Very Likely, Likely, Possible, Not Likely, or Out). Every month I’ll select several albums in the “Out” category for further re-evaluation to ensure they weren’t prematurely dismissed. I’ll do the same for other categories - as the Definite, Very Likely and Likely categories begin to fill up I’ll re-evaluate albums in those buckets with some albums getting downgraded over the year as “better” (for me) albums emerge and/or bubble to the top.

I’ve hidden the column for Top 50 Status because . . . hello?!? Spoiler alert!!

I don’t want you seeing which albums made the top 50 list yet!

The iterative re-evaluation and reclassification process continues over the course of the year and by mid-November I’m usually at the point where I can begin compiling the AOTY List. I won’t go into the details but getting there often provokes much angst for me as getting from 80 to 70 to 60 to the top 50 can be painful. The process of ranking albums within each of the top 30 buckets (30 to 21, 20 to 11 and the top 10) is also challenging. But I do that hard work! I do it for you!! Well, actually, yeah, I really do it for me . . . and for the dozen or so friends that read my AOTY posts on Facebook.

So there you have it! That’s the insane somewhat over-the-top process that takes me from the first notes of the earliest tracks of the year to the fully compiled top 50 AOTY list!

Do you follow a process? How do you keep track of the albums you love over the year? How do you get to your top 10, top 20, top 50? Any thoughts on my process you’d like to share?

Please leave a comment below, I’d love to hear about what you’re doing every year!!

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2023 AOTY: 2022 Misses

In previous years I’ve had anywhere from half a dozen to 15 or 20 albums that felt like “misses” from the prior year. This year I have only four. That’s not an accident. I decided earlier this year that, with all the current music I listen to, I needed to tighten up the filter on what would make its way onto my 2022 Misses playlist, to raise the musical bar so to speak.

This became even more important after joining Substack over the summer as the volume of new (or new to me) music I found myself exposed to seemed to increase exponentially. I decided that I’d rather spend time exploring amazing music from the last 70 years than myopically focusing on albums I may have missed out on last year. I’ve been introduced to an incredibly diverse array of music over the last six months on Substack and I now have a new tracking Playlist - Substack Discoveries - that holds a track from each of the albums that I loved enough at first listen to want to diginto further. Some of my favorite albums from this year are non-2023 releases (two of my faves are from 1963 and 1975) and I’ll be looking to share some of these in a later post, probably next year.

But let’s get into the music! Below are the four albums that made my 2022 Misses playlist this year, sorted by release date. In terms of what might’ve made my top 50 list in 2022, there’s one possible and three definites, one of which would’ve been a contender for the top 10.

Reptaliens - Multiverse

Released 21-Jan-2022

Selected Track: In Your Backyard

I first heard about this band from Stygi who writes the wonderful Substack Midweek Crisis, one of my must reads every week. She posted the video to the track Listening from their 2020 EP Wrestling in her November 25 entry.

I started doing a little digging into the band’s catalog and came across last year’s full-length Multiverse, which I thoroughly enjoyed. After a couple weeks it was apparent that the album would have been a contender for my top 50 in 2022 so onto the list it went!

Believe it or not, Stygi actually accounts for two of my four 2022 “misses” as you’ll see below. Perhaps even more amazingly, both albums came from the same November 25 entry!!

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Samana - All One Breath

Released 11-Mar-2022

Selected Track: Melancholy Heat

No idea how this album came onto my radar, but it’s absolutely lovely and would have definitely made my Top 50 of 2022, likely in the top 30.

Kieran Macadie’s review in the Line of Best Fit, which rated that album a 9/10 had this to say:

“The outstanding instrumentation on this record are enough to transcend the listener into a state of melancholy bliss. The sliding and hammering guitar parts beautifully accompany Harris’ low and dreamy vocals that create raw, soulful and hypnotic music. Considering most of the tracks were improvised, it’s astonishingly structured and consistent.”

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Debbie Parker iNC. - Tears (Love Ain’t That Way)

Released 1-Apr-2022

Selected Track: Your Eyes

Not sure where or how I even came across this album, but it most certainly would have made my top 30 list in 2022. I haven’t been successful at finding out anything about this artist. There’s no useful information online; she has a couple albums and one single on Spotify, where her “About” page tells me nothing other than that she has 12,319 monthly listeners. The location of her top 5 Spotify listeners (Berlin, Sydney, Amsterdam, LA, Paris) doesn’t even hint at where she might be based. Her YouTube videos are very sparsely viewed, and comments are turned off. All very mysterious. If anyone knows anything about this artist, please feel free to fill me in . . .

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Danielle Ponder - Some Of Us Are Brave

Released 16-Sep-2022

Selected Track: The Only Way Out

Another artist discovered through Stygi’s November 25 post on Midweek Crisis, this album immediately rocketed its way onto my 2023 Music playlist and was instantly a contender for the top 20 of the year. Upon further review I found that the 2023 album was the “Deluxe” version of the 2022 release of Some Of Us Are Brave. I have a rule about stuff like this (well of course I do; if you’ve read this entire entry, it shouldn’t surprise you that I have rules for lots of things!) so this album firmly belongs in the 2022 release bucket.

This is a powerful debut album, one that may never have been made if Danielle Ponder hadn’t left her job as a public defender in Rochester, NY to follow her musical dreams. From her “about” page on Spotify":

“Bravery can take many forms. For Danielle Ponder it took the shape of a leap of faith: leaving her successful day job working as an attorney in the public defender’s office in her hometown of Rochester, NY to devote herself full-time to sharing her powerful voice with the world. The singer-songwriter’s mesmerizing eight-song debut reinforces that her faith was not misplaced, and her leap has been rewarded with a safe landing. Written and recorded over three years, the album is a refreshingly original, shiver-inducing mix of pop, R&B, blues, rock, and moody trip-hop topped by Ponder’s celestial voice— an instrument that can plumb melancholy depths with a heartsick murmur and scrape the sky with hurricane force wails.”

Without a doubt this would have been a top 20 album of 2022 and would have garnered strong consideration for a top 10 entry.

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Did any of these albums grab you? Did any of them make your list last year?

The next post in the 2023 AOTY series is Singles Without Albums. There are some absolutely amazing tracks coming and I’m excited to share them with you and hear your thoughts!

That’s it for today, thanks for reading. Until next time, be kind to each other . . .

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Thank you for reading Joy in the Journey, I appreciate you being here! If there’s someone in your life you think may enjoy this post, feel free to share it.