Apple's 2024 Year in Review
I will say at the outset, I don’t think these things say much about you. Even the report on who else listened to my music is only the most basic of barometers. There’s so many platforms, most of which don’t offer the statistics that Apple, Spotify or YouTube does, and for those of us outside SoundScan, it doesn’t include any CD or LP spins. But, the report on what I listened to in 2024, it’s cute. It’s something to share on social media at a time when I don’t have much to say. I’m researching a lot for my book and writing music. Nothing sexy going on at the moment.
That having been said, I do have a few thoughts about what I saw on the little video they give you.
I listened to 39 hours of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. This feels low. Of course, Apple separates Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Nick Cave and Nick Cave & Warren Ellis, but it still feels low. I listen to Nick almost every single day. To be fair though, I don’t listen to a lot of music these days. I play music when I’m picking up my daughter from school and taking her to hockey, but otherwise, in the car, I’m on the phone or listening to podcasts or audiobooks and if I have my ear pods in, I’m probably listening to me. If I’m at home and not working on the house, I’m listening to me.
Breach by the Wallflowers was my #1 record. I love this record and I think it’s insanely under-appreciated (future blog post?) but this is a little surprising in relation to Let Love In or Push the Sky Away.
I’m always listening to Lucero, The Gaslight Anthem and The Cure, so the only surprise here is that The Smiths aren’t higher on the list, but I did go on a Turnpike Troubadours tear in the Spring. I’d kinda avoided them mostly before, but really got into them this year.
I love Paganini, but it's hard to believe I spent more time listening to him than Liszt, who is my all-time favorite composer.
I still get excited when I hear something new, the same way I got excited when I first heard Never Mind the Bollocks or Blood on the Tracks but the thing about getting older is, I’ve heard almost everything before. As I recently heard Paul Mahern say on a podcast, it’s hard not to be summing up an artist’s influences half-way through the first song. Not to pat myself on the back, but Matt Pinfield and Mark McGrath are the only two people I’d be afraid to face in Rock n’ Roll Jeopardy, so I have a huge catalog in my head from which to analyze these things. Yeah, I got into Turnpike this year, but it’s not like I hadn’t heard them or didn’t know they existed, it just didn’t click for me until now. That’s a much more mellow experience than the time I bought Never Mind the Bollocks, and never having heard it before at 12-years-old, put it on my stereo and had my mind blown. Still good, but it’s more cute than sexy.