It’s that time of year, when people who write about music attempt to sum the year up in list form. And who am I to buck that trend?<\/p>\n
The advent of iTunes makes it much easier than it used to be for me to compile a “best of 2006” list, as it keeps records of when I added various songs to the collection, and also what I rated them. This isn’t a foolproof method– I bought some old albums and greatest hits packages, so the really basic algorithm would claim that “I Can’t Hardly Wait” was among the best songs of 2006– but it’s better than relying solely on my memory.<\/p>\n
I tend to rate songs on iTunes such that a decent but unremarkable tune gets three stars, a song I’d like to hear more often gets four, and a song I’m tempted to hit the “back” button and listen to again immediately after it finishes gets five. On those standards, 317 songs got four stars in 2006, and 27 got five. Editing out the songs that were obviously old, the five-star songs of 2006 were (with occasional commentary):<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
(These are listed in the order in which they were added to the music library. I’m not entirely sure that all of these were really 2006 albums, but I’m too lazy to check.)<\/p>\n
There’s a good amount of overlap between this list and other best-of lists I’ve seen, at the artist level. My tastes in music are a little more pop-oriented than some, though, so I frequently picked different tracks, and I generally went for more middlebrow stuff than professional critics. The most obvious deviation probably being “Hands Open” by Snow Patrol, which was the big, anthemic, we-want-to-be-U2-circa-1983 single that most critics deride as a sell-out. But, hey, I like 1983-era U2. “Here’s Your Future” is also the more common pick off the Thermals record, but I find it a little too strident to really be a five-star song, and “St. Rosa and the Swallows” is the song (heard on KEXP) that got me to check out the album.<\/p>\n
So there’s my attempt at a best-music-of-2006 list. What’s yours?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s that time of year, when people who write about music attempt to sum the year up in list form. And who am I to buck that trend? The advent of iTunes makes it much easier than it used to be for me to compile a “best of 2006” list, as it keeps records of… Continue reading 2006: The Best Music<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/962\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}