If you’re familiar with this blog, you’ll know (or recollect) that starting in 2014, I’ve posted “Retrospectives” at the end of every year wrapping up all the music that made the year memorable or special in chronological order. Knowing me, most of the music is of that year, but occasionally will feature a record I got into heavily or went into for the first time. I thought, why not try and accomplish this for other years where I’ve been a voracious musical omnivore, aka, the whole of the 2010s. I’ve set off to do just that, starting with the beginning of course.
2010 was when I began Warm Visions and really started paying attention to blogs and other music sites for new music, as well as trawling their older lists and finding musicians from the 80s, 90s and 00s to listen to. I was also teaching violin lessons and making income, which immediately went to either iTunes purchases or discount CDs at FYE or Encore Records. This was truly the tipping point where I fell off the deep end in terms of music digestion. It would only accelerate from here.
Now here’s where this 2010 Retrospective gets a bit interesting, or mostly just reveals my madness. Usually when I make these Retrospective posts, I have a playlist that builds throughout the year and fill in the gaps at the end by combing back through my iTunes library. In the case of this post, I had to improvise and research to find what I was listening to and when. This is because my music library until mid-2011 existed on my family’s desktop computer and when I migrated all my tunes over my current laptop I lost the playlists and other metadata that had accumulated.
I pieced together this playlist thanks to a lot of help from my Best Songs of 2010 list, but also by going through old blog posts and even old Facebook statuses and photo albums to see what song lyrics or music videos I shared, along with seeing pictures of where I was physically in the year to see if that jogged my memory any. It was a stupid process that revealed to me that even in 2010 I was being dramatic and dumb online, but it worked. This really does feel like a month-by-month retread through 2010, hitting major points with CDs I got for Christmas the year prior, to what music videos were free downloads at the time (videos play a BIG part in my remembrance of the music here, I must have spent a lot of time on YouTube watching them), to what teaser singles were released and when. It’s a silly, self-indulgent thing, but I feel like in 2020, we need to think about times that may have been better for ourselves when we’re feeling lost. Hopefully some songs here will jog some happy, decade-old memories.
Listen along and read my 2010 journey with this Spotify Playlist
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