As I write this, it’s the first day of the summer school holidays and boy, am I glad to be able to say that. It’s been a gruelling year. 2020 and 2021 were challenging enough, but even without the disruption of COVID lockdowns, 2022 has provided its own special brand of crazy.
To put the cherry on top, the silly season is now in full swing at our house. I enjoy Christmas, but I prefer the celebrations to start at about 7:00 pm on December 24th and finish approximately 24 hours later. My wife, on the other hand, goes a little bit nutty at this time of year. I arrived home from work on December 1st to find our kids putting the final touches on the tree and Wham!’s Last Christmas blasting from the stereo (and yes, the exclamation mark is part of their band name, which makes punctuation a challenge).
“Oh, God,” I groaned, “please don’t tell me we have to listen to this every day for the next month.”
“What’s that, Grinchy?” she replied. “I can’t hear you over the music.”
The next morning, I woke up to discover these three naughty boys had been up all night playing video games. I’m pretty sure the one in the middle is the ringleader; he’s the silliest of all!
The other thing I discovered this week was the songs I’ve listened to the most throughout 2022. It’s the season of ‘Spotify Wrapped’ and this year, I’ve somehow managed to avoid having the algorithm contaminated by my children’s penchant for songs about bodily functions and video games and the resulting playlist is pretty good. I do have reservations about a big tech company knowing such intimate details about my personal listening habits, but I also find the information fascinating. According to Spotify, I’ve listened to 6,286 minutes of music this year, which is more than 43% of Spotify users in Aotearoa. The artist I listened to most was LCD Sound System and my most popular song was their release, Someone Great, which I played 11 times.
This pales in comparison to my wife, who has spent an incredible 72,928 minutes (more than fifty days) listening to Spotify this year, putting her in the top 4% of Kiwi listeners. Her musical taste is poppier than mine and so her most popular artist was Kylie Minogue. The song she listened to the most was not, amazingly enough, Last Christmas, but rather Kylie Minogue’s A Second to Midnight, which she played a whopping 150 times! Typically, she did NOT manage to avoid having her algorithm contaminated by the musical selections of our children, so amongst all the love songs from pop icons in her top 100 playlist, there’s a generous serving of tracks about video games and bodily functions.
Musical taste is highly subjective and I won’t flatter myself by imagining there’s anyone on the planet who’d want to listen to my 2022 Spotify Wrapped playlist more than me, but if you’re a fan of indie rock, there could well be some tunes on it you’d enjoy. If you’re curious, here it is:
If you’re a Spotify subscriber, let me know in the comments what your top artists and tracks for 2022 were.
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A gritty and engaging story of human faults, fears, and frailty, What Friends Are For is the prequel short story to my tragicomic novel, Taking the Plunge. Introduce yourself to the characters from the novel and find out where it all begins for Kate, Tracy, Evan and Lawrence.
