49 - 🎩

top shelf new year stuff

ok i know i know it’s hardly new year now. been on a bit of vacation from all things social but i’m back baby. the start of a new calendar is always a good time to be reflective, so a couple of meta notes before the tasting notes:

• up til now, all of my album art has been created with love and care by my daughter. since she’s an active high schooler, it can take a long time from when i finish a thing to actually getting art for it. so for a bit, i’m gonna play with AI art stuffs. it’s not as nice as paying my daughter for her art, but i’ve been happy enough with the results.

• i don’t know what the format of these ‘tasting notes’ is, so i guess i’m still kind of playing around. i also don’t know why i’m doing this. am i sharing music with friends? sure. am i making playlists for myself to linger on a vibe for a bit? yeah. but i have no idea how much people actually listen to these things, or read this stuff, or want more music to listen to, or really even like any of this music. feedback would help me with this thing. comments, messages, whatever. i guess i do wish i had a bigger audience because doing digits makes a nice feeling in metrics-concerned brains, but i don’t know quite how to grow that. would love some tips on that too.

• trying to be a little more vibe-y on playlists, whatever that means. these end up being soundtracks to both real life and my daydreams, and so they accompany mind movies and shopping trips. do these mind movies have plots? sometimes they are just scenes: walking down a snow-lit alley, chasing, being chased, stopping for respite in a bar with a corner fireplace and a broken television, a grand heist disrupted and all its conspirators going to ground until the heat dies down. sometimes these things end up consistent, either thematically or genre-wise. sometimes being consistent bores me. i don’t know which side to lean, but i’m going to try for consistency in theme.

• i’ve been doing playlists on the regular since 2019… five years now! that seems big. so i’ve been reaching back on some of these old ones and generally feeling a bit nostalgic. i felt that creeping up at the end of last year: nostalgia nostalgia nostalgia. get ready for more of that, i guess.

• this is my last bullet point. tasting notes to follow.

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somehow ‘post-disco’ ended up on top of the stack and it seems like such a strong vibe to begin on that i stuck here. swagger music. something with some strut. something that makes you feel like you fell through time and ended in up in some hedonistic nightmare you’re happy to stay in for a spell. refuge for the scoundrels and overworked alike.

keep an ear out for:

• swagger, strut, and swank balanced by some afterparty introspection: post-disco, neo-soul, chill-hop/lo-fi, yacht rock revival.

• the most stripped down but still bangin MJ rendition you’ll ever hear

• motivation and meditation

• Benny Sings, probably a couple times

• 3 ‘sides’:

  • A: Magic Hour - Off the Wall

  • B: Propaganda - attention

  • C: Red is the Rose - Let Your Love

let me know if you like it, maybe even share it with your frenemies,