The season for reminiscing is here. In years past, I’ve both dove deep and barely dipped my toes into the nostalgia of the preceding 11+ months via my annual Remember December fete, sharing an array of “best of” lists that cover my top albums, archival releases, concerts, songs and blog posts of the year. This December, however, the navel-gazing revelry will be kept to a minimum. Aside from this teaser, I’ll wait until the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve to reveal everything.
Between now and then, I’ll be mulling over my picks—and, like yesterday, spotlighting a few releases that I missed earlier this year. I’ll also be finalizing a few tweaks to correct the creaky review treadmill I found myself on in 2023.
One might think that my year-end Apple Music stats would make choosing my top albums and songs relatively easy—in theory, they should be one and the same. As shown in the accompanying images, for example, my most-played album was Mikaela Davis’ And Southern Star, with the next ranked new release being the Nanci Griffith tribute set, More Than a Whisper. The two-CD version of Stone Foundation’s career-summary, Standing in the Light, comes in fifth, which should make it my top archival/best-of collection.
But there’s more to the picture than meets the eye. Apple Music counts albums and songs streamed from its great library in the sky, not files acquired elsewhere and loaded into the app. Too, and these next points are obvious, it doesn’t count anything played in the Vox app, which is how I often listen to acquired files on my MacBook; the Bandcamp and Soundcloud apps; and the Neil Young Archives. Physical media is an additional loophole. I rarely play CDs, mind you, as I rip them to ALAC files, but vinyl… yeah, you can’t upload that. For many music lovers, Apple Music’s or Spotify’s annual recaps are the be-all, end-all of their listening experience. For me and others, however, it’s just one slice of a rather large pie.
Still, I find the results interesting for what they show. It’ll be interesting to see if these results are one and the same with my top picks for the year…
The Old Grey Cat 
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