My top 12 tracks from 2024

I have long given up any pretence of keeping up with which music artists are popular, in the charts (if that's still a thing) or even appearing on Jools Holland. For a time after I had passed the age for following these things I still subconsciously the information by hearing what my stepchildren were listening to and even trading recommendations with them. Even after they left home I still read the music press, for example the late lamented Word magazine, which catered for older people who took popular music seriously. But I haven't found a good substitute for that publication.

Yet I've never grown out of obsessiveness about music. It's just that now, as I have hinted at in other posts about books, I'm catching up with things I've missed over the years rather than identifying new artists to follow. This year I have even overlooked new releases by artists I do like, and am now belatedly catching up on latest offerings from the Decemberists, Sleater-Kinney, Cassandra Jenkins and Nick Cave. I also tend to listen to music more when working at my computer - not like the old days when one bought vinyl or a CD, took it home and pored over the lyric sheet and other credits. So I don't pay as close attention to songs as I once did.

At the same time my nerdiness seems to have increased, as I have started using the LastFM website, with its Scrobbler function, which keeps a record of which songs you have listened to, and unlike Apple Music, lets this be applied to specific time periods. This has become my new toy, enabling me to compile my personal listening chart for 2024.

To confirm my above observations, pretty much none of the tracks that I've played the most this year have been released in the last 12 months, but with the help of Youtube suggestions and the like I have still found what for me have been new discoveries, as well as rediscovering other things. In the remaining 12 days before Christmas, I will roll out my top 12. 

For reasons set out above this is without any detailed lyrical exegesis or commentary on the musical arrangement, but at least sets me a challenge of keeping up the blogposts for a time.