150 Favorite Songs

Years ago, I had a project (on Tumblr, if that tells you how long ago) called 150 Favorite Songs. It was basically just an exercise where I’d write a little bit, every day or so, about one of a list of 150 songs I’d made that I declared were my favorite songs ever.

For me, writing like that is mostly a frame for writing about something else, whether it’s a memory or a feeling or something else. I’ve joked that the social media I miss most isn’t Facebook or Twitter, both of which I’ve left, but LiveJournal, where I got to write about myself for years. And music, for me, is a way to understand my feelings. It always has been—I’ve never been great at knowing exactly what I was thinking or feeling until I have a way to focus it, and most of my life, that’s been music. Am I sad? Hard to say, but The Cure sounds really good right now.

I kept up with the project avidly for a while, and then I got hired for two jobs at once, and the posts dwindled from daily to weekly to, like, once every few months. I just looked and the last one was in 2014, which is somehow almost ten years ago now. That one was #65, which means that counting down from 150, I wrote 85 of them.

These days, though, I’m often looking for a short something to write in the morning to wake up my fingers before I get to work, and I miss this project. I thought about resuming it on Tumblr, but A) nobody I know reads Tumblr anymore, and B) my perspective has changed a lot over those ten years. Some songs I loved then aren’t as meaningful to me now; new songs have worked their way into my heart in that time; some songs I used to love were written by people who turned out to be abusive or predatory or to be prone to going on InfoWars to praise Hitler, and while their songs theoretically exist independently of that, I just don’t like listening to them much anymore.

So I’ll be moving that project over here, and starting from the beginning. Feel free to unsubscribe if you’re not interested in that, but it’ll mostly be the sort of thing I’ve been using this (sporadic) mailing list for over the past few years—personal writing, through the lens of the songs that I love most. I’ll start with #150, and this will be a mix of new writing and, in some cases, the things I wrote in the first incarnation of this project, edited and updated with whatever feels appropriate now. It’s not exactly a remix of the original, think of it more like “150 Favorite Songs (Taylor’s Version)” or something.

And in order to make sure that I don’t lose track of this one like I did the initial attempt, I’ll stick to a publishing schedule: These will go out three times a week, which means that this should wrap in about a year. The first one will go out today, and then every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday after that, till we’ve hit 150.

Thank you for subscribing to my LiveJournal.

Current Mood: eager

Current Music: “Everyday,” Buddy Holly