Well folks, welcome to my most indulgent, most confessional, most self-referential and truly most vain post on the blog. This is probably playing it up, but I’ve written a lot about myself on here. The dang header image is literally just pictures of me from the last 10 years layered on top of one another. There is nothing else except for pictures of me up there. What the hell. This post is by far the most personal writing I’ve ever done, so be warned that you’re gonna catch some of my real feelings getting through this, some of which are very dark, dealing with anxiety and depression. Watch out.
In short, this is a 2010s Retrospective. 500 songs that impacted my life as it happened in the 2010s, organized in chronological order. The first song that made a crater in my brain on Jan. 1, 2010 to the last song that left me spinning on Dec. 31, 2019.
Since 2014, I’ve accumulated playlists of songs throughout the year that made an impact on me. I then publish them at the top of the following year and include listening statistics and all that stuff. Real nerd things. The reason I do this is for one I’m obsessed with cataloging everything I do, and for two it’s fun to look back and definitively see when I discovered a favorite artist, when I was obsessed with a certain song or when something soundtracked a pivotal life moment. I’m constantly listening to music. The days where I don’t listen to a single song are rare. Life moments will easily overlap with a song I happen to be listening to. So if I wanted to immerse myself in how I was feeling at a particular time in a certain year, I could do that in a way by listening to the playlists. I’m also afraid to forget about things. Music comes out at such a fast rate these days I’ll just completely forget about a record I loved a few months after its release.
Because I started this in 2014, I had to go back and piece together playlists for 2010 – 2013. Once that was done, I decided to try and stitch together some kind of virtual quilt out of the 10 years of playlists, tracing a lineage of not only the development of my musical taste, but my personal growth as well. That’s what you’re reading here. The decade was a snapshot of some pivotal moments in my life: two graduations, two big moves, one rock-solid relationship, many friendships, getting hired, getting laid off, deaths in the family, political turmoil, personal anguish, celebration, euphoria, humor, pain, anxiety, love and more. For each of these songs, I tried my best to paint a picture of why that song is one of the 500 that impacted my decade. Some are just “this song is good, I listened to it a lot”, whereas others are much, much deeper and specific. This is very on-brand for me. Always oversharing and hyper-analyzing my own life.
For example, putting on one song will remind me of a time I went to Washington Square Park to read, but got interrupted suddenly by a sun shower causing myself and other park-goers to gather under trees while a jazz band played on a few feet away, unbothered. Another song will remind me of a specific bus ride I took from Philadelphia to NYC where my seat was broken. One will illuminate that I was reading Our Band Could Be Your Life during that season. A few demonstrate that I was very depressed. A few will show that I got better. A few will show how obsessed I was with Prefab Sprout at the end of the decade. It’s the theater of it all and unfortunately I’m the main character for the whole thing.
Unless I do a favorite live shows of the 2010s post, this will be my final collective post about the decade. The 20s have already given us enough impactful moments that it makes the 10s feel like a speck of dust. But it was fun to relive some of the “olden days”, especially now. Kind of like watching myself grow up. You can even click the individual header images for each year to bring you to that year’s individualized Retrospective post. That’s a lot of words though. Thanks for reading regardless.
Lastly, I made a Spotify playlist which unfortunately only has 470 of the 500 songs I listed here, but it’s something you can listen along to if you’re interested – find it after the jump. If the song is not on the playlist, it likely exists somewhere else on the internet.
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