Liner Notes (December 14th, 2024)
A quick one this week, but I had a few things to share.
A Few Things
It’s the slow part of the music year, but I still wanted to write a quick note to share a few things for the week.
I added a new feature to the website this week: Bluesky embeds. You can read the details at the link, but it was nice to be able to sit down and tackle a coding project this week. (Hopefully a few more to come!) These seem to be working great so far and it’s made me want to go back and re-visit how we handle a few of the other auto-embeds.
I’ve written about the app Soro before, it’s an awesome app that lets you do all sorts of cool automation/Shortcut stuff with Sonos. When we moved I used that as an excuse to buy some more Sonos gear, and one of the automations I recently setup was a “reset” each night where at 1 AM the volume on all the Sonos devices gets reset to a comfortable “default” level.
In Case You Missed It
Music Thoughts
Paul Meany released an acoustic EP that’s co-branded with himself and Mutemath. It’s, unsurprisingly, fantastic. I hope we get the long awaited solo album at some point soon.
Dua Lipa’s live album is pretty damn awesome. As is The Cure’s. Beside’s that, I spent most of my week listening to holiday music. Next couple weeks I’ll start the process of looking at everything I listened to over the last year and trying to figure out what my end of the year list will look like. Unlike years past, I don’t think I have a runaway favorite for my album of the year. There’s a handful of like three or four that I really liked, so we’ll see how that all shakes out.
The Stats: Over the past week, I listened to 86 different artists, 109 different albums, and 420 different tracks (540 scrobbles). Here is my Top 9 from last week, and you can follow me on Apple Music and/or Last.fm.
Entertainment Thoughts
The Venom movies are ridiculously stupid but Hannah and I have had fun with every single one of them. The third was no exception. Dumb, very dumb, but I also had a stupid smile on my face drinking beer and eating popcorn and watching it.
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever was touching and heartfelt. Unsure if it’s something I’d return to in future holiday seasons, but a nice little safe family holiday film.
Juror #2 is the kind of movie they just don’t make much of any more. A tight simple idea, executed well, with good performances. Not the best courtroom drama I’ve seen, but totally passable and a genre I’ll always enjoy.
Random and Personal Stuff
As I said, not a lot to write about this week. I have a few more days off and I plan to use them to work on a few other website projects I’ve wanted to tackle for a while.
Ten Songs
Here are ten songs that I listened to and loved this week. Some may be new, some may be old, but they all found their way into my life during the past seven days.
The Damnwells - Xmas Eve
Julien Baker & Torres - Sugar in the Tank
Fickle Friends - Dream
The Cure - A Fragile Thing (Live)
Lost Stars - Don't Look Down
Mutemath - Prodigal
Dua Lipa - These Walls (Live)
Saosin - Mookies Last Christmas
Rose - Number One Girl
Daphne Loves Derby - Have Yourself a Merry Christmas
This playlist is available on Spotify and Apple Music.
Community Watch
The trending and popular threads in our community this week include:
The most liked post in our forums last week was this one by Aaron Mook in the "Accountability in Music" thread.
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Previous editions of Liner Notes can be found here.