For the last three years, I’ve been undertaking a musical project designed to find new music that I would have probably never found otherwise. It’s a project that I started first with my girlfriend back in the latter half of 2015.
Every month, I create a playlist that I title INTM (It’s New To Me). Over the course of the month, I listen to an assortment of playlists across Spotify in search of my new favorite songs that I’ve never heard before. There is no set source for these songs. I’ve heard snippets of songs in movie trailers, playing over the promo reel in department stores, and Shazam-ing speakers in restaurants, adding them all to different playlists over the years as contenders for the best of the best. These lists have vacillated between fifteen songs to almost a hundred in a single month. At the end of the year, I cull through what has historically been close to three hundred songs in order to choose the top 80, and over a rigorous deliberation phase, splitting that into two playlists, my top 40 and 40 honorable mentions.
This has been extremely rewarding for me, allowing me to find hours of new music and artists, some with mainstream recognition, and others with barely any following, but these songs have become some of my favorites, earning serious replay time in my home and car stereos. My tastes generally sway to wall-of-sound pop songs, but some denser material finds its way in as well.
Either way, these songs (in no particular order) are the soundtracks to my year, earworms and artsy-fartsy gems alike. Give them a listen and see if any of them move you the way they moved me.
Matt