My Spotify Wrapped: A narrative history
My Spotify Wrapped is more a reflection of how I use Spotify – or how Spotify enables and encourages some of my counterproductive listening habits – than it is of my overall musical tastes. Like, my Wrapped is not so much a document of what I listened to this year so much as it is of what I listen to in all years.
Given the size of the Spotify library, I am often overwhelmed by choice. When I can't think of anything to listen to, I default to the auto-generated On Repeat playlist. This is often a bunch of pop music spanning different eras that has some minor connection to some period of my life. Not even a significant period, necessarily. Just, like, hey, remember that? When some new obsession pops up, I like to watch as it makes its way up the On Repeat playlist, unseating whatever incumbent has the top spot.
The Carly Mystery
My number one artist this year, as last year, was Carly Rae Jepsen. And, like, I love Carly. An icon and a true scholar of yearning. But I'm not some obsessive fan. And "Call Me Maybe" has been in On Repeat for a long time, though I can't say I remember listening to it with any great intensity this past year. It's a song that me and my friend, Beckett, liked to sing along to when I would come pick him up from school. (He turned 12 this year.) That and "A Thousand Miles" by Vanessa Carlton, which he refers to as "Making My Way Downtown." (Picture me, in the front seat, trying to stay engaged in the moment but almost crying at "If I could fall into the sky/do you think time/would pass us by?" cause I'm like "Soon he will be a teen and won't even want to sing 'A Thousand Miles' with me!" (In case you're wondering how a tween boy discovered a song released more than a decade before his birth, the answer is YouTube content about Grand Theft Auto. At one point, you could drive a piano? Or some guy rigged it so you could drive a piano? And got kicked off a server or something. The whole situation was explained to me but the details are fuzzy.)
However, I don't think "Call Me Maybe" is what put Carly over the top. I go through periods – as I assume many people do, but I think neurodivergent people probably a little more – where I just listen to the same song on a loop, and for a time that was "I'll Be Your Girl" from her fourth album, Dedicated. It's the CD that's in my car stereo and thus what plays whenever I forget my phone, my phone dies, or my phone refuses to connect to the car. (And thus, its play count is much higher than what's in Spotify.) I had started pressing replay on this song in the car, and then had to google the lyrics to find out its title, which is pretty obvious but not totally obvious from the lyrics. I think I particularly like the relatively uncharacteristic desperation and restlessness for a CRJ tune, who tends towards dreamy and wistful, which this song very much is not.
But I also had a lot of listens to the title track from her most recent album, The Loneliest Time, a duet with Rufus Wainwright.
This song has, frankly, a lot of sensory stimuli, most of it good and most of it coming from CRJ's somewhat outré phrasing. When this song/album was released, much was made of the "You know what? I'm coming back for you, baby – I'm coming back for you!" and it is indeed magical and also, for me, a little squirmy. I also have a vaguely "TikTok of that girl drinking kombucha for the first time" reaction to her phrasing on "I still need to unpack it." But I have no such qualms about the harmonies that start around the 3:20 mark with "And in the morning/sun hits the water/is this nirvana?" and pretty much repeat until the music begins to fade out. It's very "cold drink of water on a hot day" for my brain.
This song made its way into On Repeat because I included it on a mix I made for my nephew following a trip to the beach in the summer of 2023. We had been in the car and my sister was taking requests for songs they wanted played, and my nephew requested "Memories" by Maroon 5.
"This song is kind of sad, [Name of Nephew]," I said. I'm not really a Maroon 5 hater, and I wasn't intending on admitting to it here, but "Moves Like Jagger" (the version from The Voice with Christina Aguilera – the only version that matters!) is in my Top 10 listens of 2024 and comes in just ahead of "The Loneliest Time." To me, MLJ is the epitome of a Maroon 5 song. If banal vulgarity is an art, then Adam Levine is its Pablo Picasso and "Moves Like Jagger" is his Guernica. ("Take me by the tongue and I'll know you"? It takes a certain genius, a real élan, to commit that first to paper and then to wax and to go ahead and release it widely for other people to hear.) I'm less enthused by sentimental stuff like "Memories."
"It's not sad, it's calm," he replied. (One can never predict the children one will get, as, the previous evening, his father, my brother-in-law, said to me, regarding "Alone" by Heart: "You cannot play this song loud enough.")
"Would you like for me to make you a mix of calm songs?"
He nodded. Now I take mix-making very serious, but had been out of the game for a while. The final mix is here – it's responsible for other songs that made my Top 100, including "Linger" by the Cranberries, which is the opener – and I had considered that both Rufus and CRJ would probably be good candidates. But while the vibes of their respective solo work did meet the criteria of "calmish," the content of those songs was not so much inappropriate (like, kids listen to pop songs all the time) but just kind of...adult? I was already pushing it with a lot of my selections – many of which probably fall on the "sad" end of the "calm/sad" continuum, but I figured that a boy is never too young to learn that sadness is not only an emotion you sometimes feel but also can be, under the right circumstances, a very satisfying aesthetic experience – and I didn't think a deep cut from Want Two would make things more accessible to an admittedly idiosyncratic 9-year-old. (Under my the tutelage of my younger sister, he's now a Swiftie.)
(Rufus will also always take me back to college, as my friends and I went through a very intense Rufus phase around the release of Want One and Want Two. Some of us later saw him – and Ben Folds for some reason? – at what was then known as the Bank of America Pavilion in Boston, where a huge phalanx of Ben Folds fans left as soon as his set was over, and one woman in front of us stayed for Rufus but was so drunk and disruptive my friend Steven eventually had to intervene. Years later, I saw a double bill of Death Cab for Cutie and Franz Ferdinand at the Agganis Arena and it's hard to say which was the weirder combination.)
But "The Loneliest Time" had calm vibes – especially my beloved "in the morning/sun hits the water/is this nirvana" crescendo – and seemed more standard pop fare than "Natasha" (written for Natasha Lyonne!) and less intense than "Warm Blood."
I don't think the playlist has gotten much play from my nephew – and, like, that was my expectation – but I ended up playing it a lot. It was Calm Songs for Lauren.
The Disco Biscuit
Barry White's "You're the First, The Last, My Everything" entered the chat because one day, a propos of almost nothing, I was like "Remember Ally McBeal?" I can't explain it, but the smell of freshly mown grass makes me think of both Ally McBeal and Sex and the City. I think it's something to do with watching re-runs in the summer when I was in high school. There was a deeply horrifying time when my mother decided she wanted to take part in the zeitgeist or something and thus wanted to watch Sex and the City, which aired on Sunday nights. (And many other times.) I obviously did not want to watch Sex and the City with my mother and thus hoped she'd get caught up in whatever she was doing (like mowing the grass) and forget about it. She did not forget and, in my memory, somehow, whenever we went to watch it, it was always the "funky tasting spunk" episode with Bobby Cannavale. (I saw There's Something About Mary in the theaters with my mother, so this wasn't even the worst viewing experience with her I ever had.)
I had sort of relegated this song to the level of a novelty act, mostly because of its association with a TV show that is very hard to explain to a person who was not actually alive to experience it. Like, there's this very inappropriate law firm (in...Boston)? And they dance to Barry White in the co-ed (not gender neutral) bathroom? And there's this vaguely autistic character who's totally sexless and referred to as The Biscuit? And he's the reason they dance in the bathroom to Barry White? It's how he psychs himself up? And there's an Asian character (played by Lucy Liu) and whenever she enters, they play the Wicked Witch of the West's music from the Wizard of Oz? And no one really thought that was weird or inappropriate? Oh, and the women sometimes engage in erotic play with...cappuccinos? There's a therapist played by Tracy Ullman (maybe the best character) who makes all her clients pick theme songs? (And Ally's is "Tell Him"?! Because Ally is obsessed with men, including her childhood sweetheart, who works at this law firm alongside his beautiful wife and a recurring plot point is how he is maybe going to leave his beautiful wife for the girlfriend he had when he was 15.)
I haven't even mentioned the imaginary baby that dances to "Hooked On a Feeling"? And the man who came up with all of this bagged the hottest woman alive? (And kept her!) And had several other shows that were not quite as out of pocket but were, uh, very special. (I cannot imagine re-watching Picket Fences these days.) But I watched both this and The Practice (I watched basically all shows) and owned both of the soundtracks featuring Vonda Shepherd. How to explain Vonda Shepherd? The 90s were a wild time.
The music vibes on this show are very strange because Ally is supposed to be TWENTY-SEVEN years old but the music is all Boomer and pre-Boomer standards (aside from "Tell Him," the first season – and the first soundtrack – has covers of Skeeter Davis's "The End of the World" and Jo Stafford's "You Belong to Me," a song from 1952 that Christopher Walken and Sissy Spacek's characters in Blast from the Past would have danced to in their bunker – and maybe actually did?), the majority of it sung by a middle-aged woman who prior to this show was largely unknown to the broader public. Similar to how the Scooby Gang was always at the Bronze on Buffy, the characters all hang out together at this very rowdy piano bar in downtown Boston – the vibes are very Government Center/Faneuil Hall – and sometimes take a turn at the microphone with Vonda on the piano, alongside many (soon-to-be-famous) guest stars, including a very, very young Josh Groban. (Last personal anecdote, I swear: When I lived in Boston during the Obama years, my friend Steven had a friend, Wade, who was very handsome and who had this boss (older, gay) who would take him, Steven, and our friend Elton out to a piano bar not dissimilar to this one and run up these truly enormous tabs. The rest of us – who were uh, ya know, girls – got invited once and the thing I remember most about it was that a shot of Bailey's was, like, $22 in 2012.)
Ally's best onscreen love interest was the doctor played by Rent's Jesse L. Martin, but, like many of 90s TV's healthiest relationships (see Paget Brewster as Kathy on Friends), it was obviously doomed because he was Jesse L. Martin and wasn't going to just hang around as a guest star on Ally McBeal:
(And, like, yeah, a guy in his early 30s is definitely gonna know the lyrics to "Love Me" off the top of his head. Like, I probably knew them when I was in my early 30s, but I'm special.) I cannot find the video of it – I swear it existed, even in a low-quality Vimeo, relatively recently – but in one episode Courtney Thorne-Smith, who cannot sing at all, does an excruciating rendition of Dusty Springfield's "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me," (Springfield died in 1996 and was in the midst of a resurgence – her second, following her feature on the Pet Shop Boys' 1987 single "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" – after Quentin Tarantino used "Son of a Preacher Man" in Pulp Fiction, which is where I first heard of her) which has been burned into my brain. It's probably best that it's not available, as it's unpleasant in a number of different ways. Thorne-Smith – and her character, Georgia – were subject to just a lot of humiliation, mostly as punishment for not being Ally. (And Ally was herself subject to a great deal of humiliation. That was the vibe.)
Anyway, a truly wild show that was nonetheless weirdly foundational to my musical tastes. It's the first place I ever heard Jennifer Holliday, who was a recurring guest star. I don't know how weird middle school and high school students who live in relatively remote areas find out about, like, random music these days, but for me it was mostly movies and TV. I owned a lot of soundtracks. Napster came along in 1999 and opened things up further.
(I just took a quick spin through this "Best of Ally McBeal" compilation video someone uploaded to YouTube 13 years ago and I was like, "Oh, yeah, the episode where Ally and Georgia have a boxing match to settle all the weird tension between them about Billy while all their coworkers look on was a good one." It also includes a scene – that I'm not totally remembering, but it might have precipitated the actual boxing match – where all the main female characters in the show – Ally, Georgia, Nell (Portia di Rossi), Ling (Liu) and Elaine (Jane Krakowski, a national treasure ) – have a WWF-level brawl in the co-ed bathroom. In 1997, this was considered feminism! It was on the cover of Time Magazine, back when Time Magazine was actually a big deal!
"You're The First, The Last, My Everything" is a very rich text for me. Also just very catchy.
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