So on a challenge from a friend and the desire to document my favorite music, here it goes. 365 playlists, one for every day of the year, with added reflection and analysis. Let's see what's here at the end of 2025.
Music is my first love. It's always been there for me. It always will be, I hope. I still buy CDs, vinyl records, and I also still buy downloads. I still see occasional shows, though not as many as I used to see (the prices haven't become unfair). But I listen to music everyday at home or in the car. Not a day goes by. That makes it difficult for others to live with at times. I can't help it. I have loved music for as long as I remember being alive.
While emotional or poetical lyrics are essential to me, it's melody that lures me in. Melody is the spine of music. If it has weak melody it's not a very good song in my opinion. If it has no melody it's not a song.
Music is subjective, but of course there are different ways of listening. Some just hear music in the background an they're not really listening. I wouldn't say they're not feeling the music, because they might be, but they're keeping it on a more physical level. I listen in three ways- an emotional experience, a spiritual way that hits me with self-reflection and nostalgia, and an intellectual way that makes me think about the elements of the music which often involves a comparison to the large catalogue of music in my mind. The more music you have experienced in your life, the more you'll think about new music on this plain. If you haven't heard that much music in this way, then you don't have the knowledge base to compare new music to. The more you listen to, the more the experience grows.
When I was a kid I made mixes on cassette tapes. I made my own greatest hits tapes for artists I loved. I got to be my own radio DJ. I spent hours planning and recording these tapes. And later did the same with mixed CDs I would burn on my computer. As the digital world evolved I went to digital mixes as we now call "playlists" on both iTunes and more recently Spotify.
Why bother with all of this? For one, I like to compile my favorite artists and shake them all up and put them in different settings out of their regular album sequence. I still value the album and the sequence of an album, which should be an experience in itself for the listener. It's actually a bummer when bands don't think carefully enough about the sequence and I've even resequenced some of my favorite albums and made playlists I'll share throughout the year. However, it's nice to hear the songs in a different order. By making your own playlists, you're creating a new experience, all worth my time even if I'm the only one listening!
Here on day one, I figured I'd share a playlist that takes people through the life of my character Jack in my first novel The Punk and the Professor (2017). Of course, it's my life too. These are songs that have been the soundtrack of my life. It was difficult to narrow this down to 22 songs, but anything less would have felt incomplete for the story. If they ever make a movie of this book, this is the essential soundtrack.
Other than Green Day, you won't find punk songs on this playlist. Even though the book title has punk in it, my usage of punk is to define a "no good kid" who is usually in trouble, and not punk music. I picked great songs that were there for major events of my adolescence, excluding 1 and 22, which I discovered later but I felt really fit into the soundtrack as the opening and closing tracks of this story.
The only artist to repeat twice is the band Candlebox. I wrote a short essay here about the influence of their debut 1993 album on my rise out of teenage homelessness and despair. Every time I listen to any of these songs, but especially in this order, I'm taken right back to the time, with all the good and bad.
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