My top 10 albums: 2022

In what’s now nearly become an annual tradition – here are my favourite 10 albums of 2022, compiled on this blog for the third year in a row, along with accompanying Spotify playlist below too. 

My top 10 albums: 2021

Well 2021 was at least a bit better than 2020 overall, wasn’t it?  After my marathon blogging efforts in 2020 I was much quieter over the last 12 months, but here are my top 10 albums of 2021 with accompanying Spotify playlist too (and you can see my corresponding list for 2020 here).

There’s definitely a bias towards old favourite artists of mine this year – but also some fresh selections including my number 1 pick, 36 minutes of jangly pop perfection that deserved much more attention than it received.   So, let’s count down from 10 to 1…

Tape It Up: 26@17.06.95

Here’s the second of my recently rediscovered compilation tapes, the rather prosaically named 26@17.06.95 which does at least date it to being basically 26 years ago.  And there are some suitably breezy summer tunes included from favourites such as Teenage Fanclub, Mercury Rev, Stereolab and the Beach Boys. 

Tape It Up: Smiley Smile Tunes

Having recently come across a stash of old compilation tapes, mainly from the 90s, I thought I’d start posting details about them here on my blog from time to time along with an accompanying Spotify playlist.  It’s fun to look back on these mini time capsules and see personal favourites to this day mixed together with other tunes that I may listen to more infrequently but are old friends nonetheless.

My top 10 albums: 2020

As the worst of all years in living memory nears its end – and to prove that I didn’t exclusively listen to older music this year despite my project blogging about my 100 favourite songs – here are my top 10 albums of 2020 and a Spotify playlist with favourite tracks from the records in question, plus a few honourable mentions of LPs that didn’t quite make my list.

Jumping Fences to Wichita: my 100 favourite songs

“It started with a playlist…I never thought it would come to this…” (with apologies to Hot Chocolate).

Well yes, I went quite a bit further with an early lockdown challenge amongst some friends to each compile a Spotify playlist of our 50 favourite songs (with only one selection by any single artist).  From an initial longlist of 379 such tunes – leading to various accompanying playlists in addition to my standard top 50 – I then started blogging about each choice.  Initially this involved pretty much one post every day throughout April and May for my favourite 50, before broadening this out to cover my top 100 songs and then blogging roughly twice a week from June to November.  And so a project that began near the start of the first lockdown comes to a conclusion towards the end of the second lockdown…

379: The Playlists

Starting with a friends challenge in early April to produce a Spotify playlist of my top 50 songs (with just one track per artist), I initially came up with a longlist of 379 tunes, all of which were then compiled into various Spotify playlists – so this page pulls all these playlists together into one place…

B100: #100 “Jumping Fences” by The Olivia Tremor Control

Rounding out the list of my 100 favourite songs, it’s the psych pop confection of “Jumping Fences” by The Olivia Tremor Control from 1996, also the shortest of all 100 tunes at just under two minutes.

B100: #99 “My Sharona” by The Knack

Rounding out the nineties in my B100 favourite songs rundown, it’s “My Sharona” from 1979 by The Knack.

B100: #98 “I Wanna Be Sedated” by Ramones

“Twenty-twenty-twenty four hours to go…” – “I Wanna Be Sedated” sees the Ramones crash into my B100 top tunes list.