Spotify Wrapped 2023

I Don't Think the App Really Understands Me

I just clicked on me Spotify Wrapped, the music streaming app from which I get value, even if the musicians, songwriters, and artists don’t. You don’t think they collect data much, do ya? Wrapped is the summary of a subscribers listening habits.

My top genre was “Classic Rock.” Though I am a multiformat kind of guy, as I settle into late middle age, formerly perceived as oldish-age, I tend to dance with the one that brung me. Also, I use Spotify to research the music I write about, because I write on my upstairs desktop computer, and though surrounded by records, the Victrola is downstairs.

I played 523 songs on Spotify in 2023. I don’t think that’s a lot, because there are many days that go by without listening to any music at all except when I’m in the car, which is not for long and not that often. For a one-time professional critic, it’s meager. Instead, I carry around earworms all day, especially the last song I heard on the radio. I wonder if this is part of the process of aging, or hearing damage (modified by hearing aids in both ears: my current brand is Phonak, and I think they ought to hire me for an ad campaign. “I was nearly deaf from a lifetime of live music. Now I can hear the high end of songs inaudible to me without them, even understand conversations sometimes if I’m paying attention.”

Easy to explain. I am much more Neil Young than Stephen Stills. I had a year-long gift subscription to Neil’s archives (t/h Barbara Heinsohn of Houston), so I didn’t need Spotify for Young. The over-listening to Stills (239 minutes) was because I was doing an article for the online magazine Copper, published by PS Audio of Boulder, CO, and edited in the New York area by my friend Frank Doris. Frank inviting me to write for Copper about four years ago rebooted my career after a period of dormancy, years that were not wasted because I focused more intensely on my adjunct professor job at St. John’s University. Since 2013 I have been teaching courses in both the Journalism and English departments in the Collins College of Professional Studies. I was named outstanding adjunct in the CCPS in 2017; promoted to professor rank in 2018, and was the only faculty member on the entire campus to win the Values and Inclusion Program award in 2020, presented at a ceremony in May 2022.

But I had a vision in early 2023 that I should do a piece for Copper on Stephen Stills’ Manassas album, so I had to spend a lot of time listening to it on Spotify to come to the conclusion that it wasn’t as good as I hoped it would be. Stills is a fine guitar player, and with David Crosby and Graham Nash (and sometimes Young), made the harmonies that made us seek our noble selves in our boomer college years. My conclusion was that Stills worked best with collaborators, which Manassas (the band, and the title of the first album) was supposed to be. My closing argument was that he should have joined The Eagles, before Joe Walsh.

By the way, did you see the Ted Lasso episode (season three, episode nine) in which Coach Beard holds the press conference with the antagonistic sports writers covering AFC Richmond, and hell breaks loose as Beard tells the Brits that Joe Walsh was and is a vastly superior guitarist to Jimmy Page. “Joe Walsh is a poet! Jimmy Page is a fuckin’ court stenographer.” Early this morning, I dreamed my family had moved to a badly damaged version of my first New York apartment. The phone rang and it was Jason Sudeikus, asking me if I finished writing the bio for his new age album.

The three songs from the Easy Star All-Stars were for both work and pleasure, tracks from the album Ziggy Stardub, “a complete reimagining” of David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars. The Easy Star All-Stars musical collective, led by producer/musician Michael Goldwasser, did one of its great reggae theme albums, in which they “Rastafi” (loosely speaking) a well-known classic rock album, with special attention paid to the precise structure of the original. (Acclaimed predecessors included Radiodread and Dub Side of the Moon.) The three songs from my Spotify top five list are from Ziggy Stardub , which I posted May 27, 2023, containing a kind of review and interview with Goldwasser. Michael’s father, Rabbi Bruce Goldwasser, was leader of the congregation we joined when my family decided to move from posh Great Neck, L.I. to Queens, NY. My wife and I made this decision because we counter-intuitively believed (and we were right) that the public schools in our Queens neighborhood were just as good (if not better) than Great Neck’s lauded system, and we wanted our daughters to be city kids rather than suburbanites. People ask me what my top 10 albums of the year are (I no longer make such lists) but Spotify did manage to remind me that Ziggy Stardub is likely my number one.

In order of time spent on artists, Spotify says my top five were:

Wait, I can explain. It’s only Spotify.

Steely Dan is kind of obvious, because in addition to vinyl and CD, I also listened at my desk. And I wrote a lot about Steely Dan this year. I write a lot about Steely Dan every year. I think there are seven pieces in the Critical Conditions archives since 2021. This one appeared April 16, 2023.

I think I’m most proud of tracing the “squonk’s tears,” a most oblique lyric from “Any Major Dude Will Tell You,” to the 1971 Italian horror film by Mario Bava, Bay of Blood. Come on, Dan Stans: You read it here first.

Just recently I posted an attempt at comprehensive understanding of the writing and recording of Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy. On my Spotify Wrapped, there is a video thank you from Tweedy. Hey, Jeff, what’s happening? Do you mind if I post this, or the article about your books, as a comment on your Substack? No quid pro quo, man. Just asking.

And Billy Joel was my top listen in March 2023, according to Spotify. There’s a good reason for that: I was prepping for an interview for a major cable documentary set to appear in 2024. I had to go back and do my homework.

One final note from the algorithm:

This one they got right. Thanks for noticing, Mr. Spotify! Now my holiday wish: share the wealth with your “content providers”: the songwriters, musicians, artists, producers, all the creative people that make your existence possible. They could do with more; you, Mr. Spotify, could do with less.