Chris’s Top 50 Listened to Songs on Spotify in 2018 (PartOne)

by Chris McGinty of AccordingToWhim.com

I have a Spotify account, because the playlist feature makes it easier for me to control the frequency that I hear songs. I have a method of creating somewhat randomized playlists that are each 15 songs, play at roughly an hour in length, and allow me to listen to some songs in heavy rotation. It’s not a perfect method. It’s gotten a little unruly the more songs I’m rotating in and out of the mix.

I signed into Spotify in January of 2019, and I found a pretty interesting playlist created by Spotify. It was called “Your Top Songs 2018.” All I can figure is that these are the songs I listened to the most times on Spotify during 2018. I think there may be a few issues with tracks that didn’t get rotated out as quickly as I might have wanted, and some that got rotated back in sooner than I might have wanted. I was trying to work out the method, and I had a number of issues early on. Mostly, I think this is a good representation of what I was listening to in late 2018.

The major exception is that Duran Duran was probably the most consistently listened to band, because I put a Duran Duran song on every playlist. I call it Durandatory Duran. But since I listened to every Duran Duran song I could find on Spotify, none of their songs were in the most played tracks because repetition wasn’t high.

I originally started writing for these blog posts in January of 2019, but put the writing away for a while to get my job situation stabilized. Otherwise, I would have done this as a start of year feature. I figure I should do them before 2020 in case Spotify does another.

There were 50 songs on the list and I have no idea if there was a reason for the order, so I’m just going to go from the top to the bottom, probably five songs per blog post. I can clarify as I go if I feel the song was listened to as much as Spotify seems to think.

Massive Attack – “Teardrop”

I’m a huge fan of the TV show “House MD.” It took a while before I discovered that there was a full length song that the theme was created from. The fact is that I didn’t often think to play the song, but every so often I would think about it and go to YouTube. Adding it to my Spotify rotation allowed me to hear the song with a greater frequency, because of the way I’m doing things. I didn’t rotate it out for a long time.

It’s interesting that sometimes people read something into a song that isn’t really there, or that I’m not seeing as being there. I read someone’s take on “Teardrop” at some point and I thought, “This is personal experience superimposed onto these lyrics.” That’s fine though. It makes a song more personal when it evokes personal memories. Here’s what I didn’t know. There may be a reason her thought process went there. She felt the song was about having an abortion, and the video is a baby in a womb.

According to the lyricist and singer, Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins, the song was inspired by the works of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. She said that the song may have elements of learning that her longtime friend Jeff Buckley had drowned, as she received the news while working on the song.

For me it’s just the “House M.D.” theme. That may not be as lame as it sounds though, as the show has been a great influence on my view of critical thought, writing, and interpersonal relationships. It really was a great show.

John Lennon – “Watching the Wheels”

I became aware of John Lennon because of this album, just after he was shot and killed. I was aware of The Beatles, but I didn’t know that the guy on MTV with all the home movies was part of The Beatles. I didn’t know he was part of this crazy cultural revolution. I was only around 9 or 10 years old when I first heard him.

“Watching the Wheels” got back on my radar when it was used in the trailer for the movie “Wonder Boys.” The movie is another great influence on my writing. “Wonder Boys” caused me to start considering a flatter style of narration that doesn’t rely on everything being taken to extremes to try to keep it interesting.

Now “Watching the Wheels” represents something bigger to me than just a song that I liked as a kid, and a song used for in a trailer for a movie I liked. I see something in the lyrics about defaulting to a life of personal fulfillment free from the expectations of others. I have not removed this song from the regular rotation on my Spotify playlists since it first was put on there in late 2018. There’s only one other song that I can say that about, which I’ll get to later in this post.

Shiny Toy Guns – “Chemistry of a Car Crash”

I have a dark side to my personality, and the name of this band may be part of the reason why I eventually got into them. They were playing at a local Dallas gothic club, and I was going to go see them just based on the club and the name of the band. I must have gotten the night wrong, or the show was cancelled, because they weren’t there the night I went. I eventually got hold of the CD, and was immediately taken in by their sound. The trading of male and female vocals, along with a semi-new wave instrumentation, made me think of what the 80s band Berlin might sound like if they’d released an album in 2006 with their 80s lineup.

All of this was during the post-separation/pre-signed-papers era of my second divorce, so the album “We Are Pilots” has a lot of crazy memories of the time. Three different songs from the album hold emotional strings for three different lovers during that couple of years. “Chemistry of a Car Crash” is, not surprisingly, my point of view of my then soon to be ex-wife, since we couldn’t seem to just stop this odd ritual that may or may not have been trying to work things out.

Airiel – “In Your Room”

This song was released in 2004, but I didn’t hear it until 2018. It came up as a suggested track in one of Spotify’s playlists. My Spotify seemed to be a lot of the shoegaze music I’ve grown fond of over the years (My Bloody Valentine, Cocteau Twins) and bands I’d wanted to get into (Slowdive, Ride). “In Your Room” reminds me of a mixture between The Cure and The Blue Nile. It quickly became one of what I call “my current favourite songs,” meaning that in that moment it’s the song or songs I’m most enamored with. I wish I had more to say about it, but it’s only really been part of my life for about a year now.

Steely Dan – “Do It Again”

This is the other track that hasn’t left regular rotation from my Spotify playlists since late 2018. This is just one of those songs that I always liked, but didn’t hear very much. I had no idea that it was “Steely Dan” until sometime in the last decade. It sounds like so many songs from the 70s that it never occurred to me to wonder who it was. It could have been the same guy who sang for Santana for all I knew. It wasn’t.

Miguel and I got into a discussion about Steely Dan at some point after I knew “Do It Again” was their song, and Miguel declared that it was from before Steely Dan grew into the sound that he liked. But what does Miguel know?

Chris McGinty is a blogger who knows which side Steely Dan’s toast is buttered on. Um, I might be still thinking of some random word prompts from last night. Sorry.