Songs I Listened To On Repeat In 2024
Spotify can steal my playlist ideas, but they can never steal my swagger.
I listen to a lot of music. You know this; I know this. Of the thousands of unique tracks I listen to during the year, I’ll land on a handful of fixations. You’ll notice I didn’t call them “songs I really like,” because it’s not just that. The songs in today’s playlist were obsessions in the year 2024. I didn’t just love them; I needed to suck every remaining ounce of juice out of them. I needed to live inside them. These are songs that would play all the way through — the last chord struck, the final note sung — and I’d still feel like the world was so small. So I’d play them again.
I don’t know how else to describe it, other than to liken it to exploring in the strategy video game series Civilization.
When you start a game of Civilization, you begin with a map. You can only see the parts of the map that you yourself have explored; the rest is enshrouded in an overlay. The more you explore, the more the overlay disappears, and your world, literally, grows.
The songs behind the paywall in this week’s playlist aren’t just good. They are songs that now all live inside of me, next to my kidneys and behind my larynx. I could talk about each of them for 5 minutes straight. While only some of them were actually released in 2024, every single one defined my year. I hope you like them!
To read the rest of today’s newsletter (including an angry rant directed at Spotify) and get a playlist of all 46 songs in “Songs I Listened To On Repeat in 2024,” subscribe to Grace Spelman Music Project for just $5/month!