Welcome to The Sound, a new music newsletter! I’ve wanted to write this newsletter for a long time so this is all very exciting to me. It’s going to be primarily about new indie rock/alternative releases, but I do listen to some pop, hip hop, and country/Americana from time to time so hopefully those will interest you as well. (Genres are a construct anyway)
Also you know how sometimes you scroll through a festival roster or a best of music list and the only thought in your head is…
Rest assured that won’t be the case here.
Please take a look at the About page if you want more information (or to look at the cute fruit banner I made)! Tell your friends! Sign up below if you don’t want to miss the first issue, which I hope to put out sometime early tomorrow.
In the meantime, I thought it would be helpful to introduce some updates to some of my playlists…
1) 2020 top of the bops
This is the main playlist I use to keep track of new releases. I update this one the most often so this would be the one to follow! I also try not to exceed two songs from the same artist per release so always save your favorites.
2) 2019 top of the bops archive
This one is an archive of the older songs that were on the playlist last year. Just in case you have been following my playlist all this time (thank you)! I had to move them because the playlist was getting too unwieldy aka 20 hours long…
3) Songs I Loved 2019
Is 20 hours too much for you? This one is a compilation of my personal top 50 songs from 2019. My favorite was Andromeda by Weyes Blood (shocking I know). I think it’s a good mix of songs that you may have heard and songs you probably haven’t!
I would also really like to take this opportunity to encourage you to seek out personal “top songs” playlists, even though you have probably read a lot of lists from publications who source from a panel of contributors. Not that those lists are not good, sometimes they are! They are fun to read and we all like to complain about the rankings on Twitter. But actually listening to these crowdsourced lists is a chore because the choices are just all over the place. There’s never any cohesion. It’s difficult to find anything you like.
This is all a long way of saying I put a lot of thought into the way my playlists sound…My favorite transition on this is probably the one from Tomb by Angelo de Augustine to Hope by (Sandy) Alex G. Those two songs were a staple on my fall rotation, and I always preceded it with Funeral Pyre by Julien Baker. Those three songs about death are just perfect together. I can’t even explain it.
Wow, this got emo super fast… Thanks for reading and see you tomorrow.
xoxo Wendy
P.S. If you were following my wendy’s recent favs playlist, I’m planning to update it tomorrow so be sure to save anything you liked. (P.P.S. you should save BASQUIAT by Jamila Woods)