The first rule of playlist is you don't talk about... Wait, that was a different set of rules.
Ever since 2012, I have put together a playlist for the year. The premise is simple enough: chuck a bunch of songs into a growing (and evolving in real time) Spotify playlist made up of songs that moved me in some way at some point between January 1 and December 31 of any given year.1 After a couple of trial runs, the rules for assembling said playlists were largely solidified in probably 2014 when I set out with the goal of listening to one new (or new to me) album a day (or at least averaging an album a day over the course of the year).
[I mean, if that isn't a New Years resolution you can get behind, then I don't know what to tell you.]
Like any set of rules, there is a healthy mix of permissive and restrictive structures that guide inclusion.
On the permissive side, I don't have to like the whole record, most of a record or really the whole song for that matter for a tune to make the cut. There are always a handful of songs every year where there is an element in an otherwise nondescript song that does something for me. Take Barrie's song "Clovers" from 2019, for example. There's a part of me that will always say that that one is a bit too far out on the poppy end of the spectrum to fit neatly into even my broad musical sensibilities. That said, that bouncy synth line about three-quarters of the way in that runs through the end clouds my judgment of the song in its entirety. I fall for it every time. Usually it is something on the low end of the register (read: bass) that draws me in or some other snaps and farts.
There are also low barriers to entry elsewhere. A song does not have to be new, new to me or released in the year of aggregation to be included in the yearly playlist. Again, the main criterion is that a song -- or element of it -- moves me in some way. It can be an older song. Often one will drift back onto my radar through film or TV. Year after year, television gets better and better at augmenting the final product with (what I'll call popular) music. And hey, sometimes nostalgia just brings a song back up into your memory bank and it serves as a sort of mile marker in the year in question.
Yet, there are some restrictions in place that limit what passes muster. Music from one artist or group can appear in the playlist more than once but only if they are songs from different albums or EPs. Just from a listening (back) perspective, you don't want artists to dominate even the shuffle of a playlist. That can mean some Sophie's choice situations if there are two or more tunes on a record that you're torn over including. [There are work-arounds to this. That's why it can be good to have a summer playlist you can dump good but +1 songs into.]
Generally, in recent years I have also had a one song a day for the year goal as well. But I'm less strict about that. There has to be some quality threshold. I'm not going to include a song just to include it and get to 365 songs as New Years approaches. Covid helps in this one area. The pandemic has had me listening to a LOT more music these last two years.
[As an aside, if you follow along with the Musical interludes I do in my Instagram stories and on Twitter most days, then these playlists might look like an aggregation of those. But just because a song is a musical interlude, does not mean that it will make the playlist. Most interludes do, but some of those are drawn from past playlists as well. And I try not to add a song to multiple yearly playlists. It happens. Hey, music moves us all in different ways at different times. But it happens rarely.]
The 2021 playlist includes 390 tracks and clocks in at a little more than 25 and a half hours. Enjoy.
1 Playlists cannot (or should not in my mind) be listened to before the end of the first quarter of the year in which they are being curated. The reasoning is twofold. First, it allows for the accumulation of enough songs to actually be a real playlist and not just some weirdly small collection of songs. But second, that rule is in place to give tunes added late in the year to the previous year's playlist a chance to sink in a bit more. Otherwise, they can get lost, ahem, in the shuffle. Regardless, having a contemporaneous playlist always -- ALWAYS -- skews my Spotify Wrapped at the end of November each year. These playlists offer a bit of a "Re-wrapped" for me at the end of the first quarter. ...that includes December music/listens!
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