Holiday traditions I love:
Grandma’s Christmas Day lunch party
Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve
Drinking black and white peppermint mochas from Starbucks
Compiling and sharing a steaming playlist based on the NPR’s Best Albums of 20—insert year here !!!
The time is here. Below you will find a link to the playlist. Its Apple Music again this year. Sorry Spotify folks. This takes way too long to do twice and all of my “convert Apple Music to Spotify” workflows are broken.
Consensus wasn't easy in 2017. Maybe that's because the news this year kept us on edge, our eyes and ears pointed in many directions. Maybe it's due to the growth of streaming as the dominant listening platform, one whose rules have not yet fully been written. Whatever the cause, with the exception of our No. 1 album, it felt like there were few pieces of music this year that captured our attention instantly and simultaneously. Instead, we spent our year tracking down new sounds that gave voice to our struggles and breakthroughs, our search for joy and our need for release. When it was time for our staff and member station partners to come together at the year's end, we found there was plenty to celebrate. Here is NPR Music's list of the best albums of 2017.
There are a few albums on this list that are some of my favorites of the year. Thundercats’s Drunk and Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. made up a sizable portion of my listening while on runs and in the kitchen at evening.
Many others on the list excite me. I am always down for an escapist pop album to carry me into the new year (Paramore). Vijay Iyer continues to be one of a few spiritual successors to Esbjörn Svensson Trio but I missed listening to the latest record this year. Same for Sylvan Esso. Everything they do is gold but I am just behind on listening.
A few reflections on the process from this year…
Only one album was not on Apple Music. And it was Marc-André Hamelin’s For Bunita Marcus (Feldman) . Which bums me out because I was really looking forward to it.
Apple Music has become considerably better at search, speed, and user interface. This was the easiest NPR best-of playlist I have built.
Anyway, here is the playlist: NPR’s The 50 Best Albums of 2017
And here are links to all of my other playlists… (2013 and 2015 are personal favorites)
NPR Best 50 Albums of 2016 (Apple Music)
NPR Music’s 50 Favorite Albums of 2015 (Spotify)
NPR Music’s 50 Favorite Albums of 2014 (Spotify)
NPR Music’s 50 Favorite Albums of 2013 (Spotify)