A few years ago, I was sorting through some older music, and came across old Mix Tapes and CD-Rs. It’s really fun because unlike digital music, these are essentially static playlists. This is a window into what I was listening to at that time. And no, you didn’t misread that, Mix Tapes. and they were mostly from the 90s era. My first car didn’t have a CD player, it just had a cassette deck. Teenage me would regularly visit the local library and check out a variety of CDs, then spend the week picking out my favorite tracks and recording them to tapes. I also recorded some from the radio. I had a stereo with a dual cassette deck so I could easily copy some back and forth among my tapes.
Here is a fun blast from the past for ya. I had a thing for a while where I would make little custom art for my tapes too, most of them had Gunsmith Cats artwork but I also did some for Dance Dance Revolution as well.
Something really amusing I noticed here is that “Car Tape 3” includes 2 Alanis Morrisette songs, both of which are on my 2023 playlist (below).
Digital playlists aren’t quite as robust. They are honestly kind of a pain to deal with over time, because the files can move around and then the playlists essentially just break. But I did try to sort of replicate the experience of an annual playlist after the nostalgia trip of these tapes and CDs. Basically, usually sometimes in January, I make a new playlist for the year, simply named, for example, “2023 Playlist.” For the first few I would star with the previous year and seriously trim it down. More recently I just start from scratch. The idea is, it can evolve over the year though. Essentially, i start with a “best of” from previous years, music I want to listen to “now” in January, then over the course of the year, I might remove some songs, and I might add some songs.
The bigger point is, I have the old lists, if I wanted to go back and listen to things, though, that would also still have the digital music problem of, “The music was moved/removed and the list is broken.”
But at least I do still have the list.
More recently though I have been thinking of sticking these in a more meaningful file for future nostalgia (Ironically, a song that I debated adding to this year’s list but decided not to in favor of other Dua Lipa tracks). Probably some sort of simple Excel file or something, then I can eventually manipulate the listings in 5 year when I decided to do some sort of retrospective blog post and list out “This song was on 8 out of 12 Playlists!” sort of nonsense.
For now, I wanted to just, post the list, for the start of this year. I’ll alphabetize it by artist, but the order doesn’t matter, these are always just played on shuffle.
Alanis Morissette - All I Really Want
Alanis Morissette - Ironic
Alice Merton - No Roots
Alice Merton - 2 Kids
Alice Merton - Funny Business
Alice Merton - Easy
Alice Merton - Lash Out
Aurora - The Woman I Am (Vevo Live)
Aurora - Giving In To The Love
Aurora - Cure For Me
Aurora - A Temporary High
Aurora - Blood In The Wine
Aurora - Animal
Aurora - Hunger
Aurora - The Seed
Aurora - I Went Too Far
Aurora - Murder Song (5, 4, 3, 2, 1)
Aurora - Gentle Earthquakes
Aurora - All Is Soft Inside
Aurora - Churchyard
Avril Lavigne - Here's To Never Growing Up
Avril Lavigne - Things I'll Never Say
Bt - Never Gonna Come Back Down
Bt - Movement in Still Life
Bt - Satellite
Bt - Smartbomb
CHVRCHES - The Killing Moon (Amazon Original)
CHVRCHES - The Mother We Share
CHVRCHES - Gun
CHVRCHES - Recover
CHVRCHES - Killer
CHVRCHES - Screaming
CHVRCHES - Bitter End
CHVRCHES - Violent Delights
CHVRCHES - Good Girls Explicit
CHVRCHES - Death Stranding
CHVRCHES - Never Ending Circles
CHVRCHES - Clearest Blue
CHVRCHES - Graffiti
CHVRCHES - Forever
CHVRCHES - Graves
dodie - Monster (Vevo Live)
dodie - Hate Myself
dodie - Cool Girl
dodie - Monster
Dua Lipa - Physical
Dua Lipa - Good In Bed Explicit
Dua Lipa - Cool
Fred V & Grafix ft. Ruth Royall - Sunrise (Season Mix)
Griff ft Sigrid - Head on Fire
Juno Reactor - Guardian Angel
Juno Reactor - Samurai
Katy Perry - Electric
Kim Petras - Icey (Vevo Live)
King Princess - PAIN
M83 - Midnight City
Magdalena Bay - Killshot
Magdalena Bay - Mercurial World
Metallica - Enter Sandman
Metallica - The Unforgiven
Neil Frances - On the Lookout (feat. Raffaella)
Nigel Stanford - Automatica
Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit
Nirvana - Come as You Are
Nirvana - On a Plain
Orla Gartland - Things That I've Learned
Orla Gartland - You're Not Special, Babe [Explicit]
Orla Gartland - Pretending [Explicit]
Orla Gartland - Flatline
Paramore - Misery Business
Radiohead - Everything In Its Right Place
Raffaella - Grown Up (Vevo Live)
Raffaella - Blonde (Vevo Live)
Raffaella - Hell Yeah
Raffaella - Sororicide
Raffaella - Bardot
Raffaella - BUICK
Sigrid - A Driver Saved My Night (Vevo Live)
Sigrid - It Gets Dark (VevoLive)
Sigrid - Deep
Sigrid - Dip My Heart in Confetti
Sigrid - Dancer
Sigrid - Mistake Like You
Sigrid - A Driver Saved My Night
Sofi Tukker - Hey Lion
Sofi Tukker - Awoo (feat. Betta Lemme)
Taylor Swift - Getaway Car
Taylor Swift - This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
Taylor Swift - New Romantics
Taylor Swift - Fearless (Taylor’s Version)
Taylor Swift - Love Story (Taylor’s Version)
Taylor Swift - You Need to Calm Down
Taylor Swift - Lavender Haze
Taylor Swift - Anti‐Hero
Taylor Swift - Vigilante Shit
Taylor Swift - Mastermind
Tessa Violet - Bad Ideas
Tessa Violet - Games
The Cranberries - Dreams
The Cranberries - Zombie
Wolf Alice - Smile
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.