Liner Notes (January 11th, 2025)
Welcome to the first newsletter of 2025.
This week's supporter Q&A post can be found here.
A Few Things
We launched our Best of 2024 feature this week, and I'm super happy with how it turned out. It highlights the diversity of musical tastes across our contributors, and I love that it doesn't look like all the other music publications' end-of-the-year lists. If you haven't checked it out yet, there is some excellent stuff on there.
My list (that also goes through movies, TV shows, and books I enjoyed in 2024) is also posted on my blog. I really enjoyed 2024 as a music year, and it's one with quite a few albums that that will stay in permanent rotation.
I am always on the lookout for cool new iPhone or desktop wallpapers, and I recently came across this website. It's one of the better collections online I've found for nerdy (Star Wars, superhero) wallpapers. I grabbed quite a few for my rotating collection.
Since this is is the first newsletter of the new year, I hope everyone had a nice holiday season. Ours was relatively calm. Lots of family time, and it was nice to get to experience the first holidays in our new home.
Hannah got me (along with new band hoodies and records) a hot air popcorn maker this year, and I'm a big fan. This, plus some coconut oil and sea salt, has made the best homemade popcorn I've ever had—big shoutout to whoever recommended the coconut oil to me. I'm sorry I forgot who it was, but it's a real game-changer for home-popped popcorn.
I updated My Archive to link to new pages that automatically update each week with my favorite albums, movies, and TV shows. This was a holiday week coding project that I had on my list to want to do for a while. My next "for fun" project has gotten, admittedly, a little out of hand. What started as wanting to build a companion app for my Now Playing device to make it respond immediately to changes in songs has now become a full-on Mac app that also scrobbles to Last.fm. It's my first attempt at Mac programming, and it's been a fun little evening project I've been experimenting with. I want something that can work with my Now Playing device, but I also want something that I have more control over for how it scrobbles and interacts with Last.fm. Neptunes is great, but it's also overkill for what I need and doesn't scrobble how I prefer. (I like how Marvis queues a track and then scrobbles and how it handles paused tracks, I've found far fewer duplicates with Marvis than with Neptunes, so I want to mimic that.) I also want to build in a few features I've wanted for myself: the ability to immediately scrobble a track and skip to the next one, better sync loved/favorited tracks between Last.fm and Apple Music, and the big one, the ability to keep a local backup of scrobbled/played tracks in text files. I love Last.fm, but I'm also terrified of it one day going away. I want to have a way to recreate my Last.fm history if I need it, and I want to be prepared with something that can keep my music listening history going forward as well. It's ridiculously overkill. But, it's a fun project to work on and it lets me play with some programming muscles that I don't get to stretch much these days. And I've never actually built an app before. So that's fun to learn too. I have no idea if it will ever get to a place where I'll share this, but for myself, I'm having a blast learning.
In Case You Missed It
Music Thoughts
One of my favorite parts of publishing our end-of-the-year feature is diving into everyone else's and seeing what I missed over the last year. So this week had me spending a lot of time with the stuff recommended on other people's lists. The big one I missed? Donovan Woods's [Things Were Never Good If They're Not Good Now](https://chorus.fm/share/album/donovan+woods/things+were+never+good+if+they' re+not+good+now). It's a stunner. It's fantastic for late winter evenings. It's a nice mix of soft-spoken folk with just a tinge of country. Great songwriting. Some authentic tug at the heartstrings moments.
And then I also really enjoyed discovering Midfield's self-titled album. It is an easy-core pop-punk album -- extremely solid.
The rest of my week was exploring some old favorites like the highly underrated Let Go album (holds up well!) and doing a dive back through the also underrated House of Heroes catalog. That three albums run from The End is Not the End through Cold Hard Want is awesome, and I had forgotten how many cool little things they would do in their songs.
The Stats: Over the past week, I listened to 29 different artists, 43 different albums, and 421 different tracks (501 scrobbles). Here is my Top 9 from last week, and you can follow me on Apple Music and/or Last.fm.
Entertainment Thoughts
We watched the new french version of The Count of Monte Cristo last night and it was excellent. It has gorgeous cinematography, a nice score, and is a truly epic rendition of the classic tale.
I put it on my best-of list but also want to give Flow a shoutout here. One of my favorite things I saw last year and a true delight of a film. (You can rent it on Amazon for six bucks.)
Sweethearts was cute, and I would probably watch it again. Seems like a decent Thanksgiving rom-com. Civil War was a tough watch; hard to say I liked it. Saturday Night worked for me and led to an evening of watching old SNL sketches on YouTube.
We’re currently watching Star Wars: Skeleton Crew and the Star Wars meets Goonies vibe is very much in my wheelhouse. We'll see how they finish this one up, but so far, it's been one of the best things in the Star Wars universe in a minute.
Shrinking season two was perfect.
Random and Personal Stuff
Not much here this week. I have a few more adult errands to run, and I want to work on getting my little garage "gym" put together more. Hannah and her mother teamed up to get me a set of weights for Christmas, and I've been itching to get back into the workout routine. Our old condo had a gym in the building, but the stress/timesuck of moving got me way out of practice for the past few months. (You can see exactly when we start getting ready to move.) It's my priority to get back into a workout routine again because I can see, physically and mentally, how much it impacts me when I don't.
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.
Donovan Woods - Back for the Funeral
Thursday - Taking Inventory of a Frozen Lake
Limbeck - In Ohio on Some Steps
Midfield - Fishtown and Down
Coheed and Cambria - Searching for Tomorrow
House of Heroes - Love is for the Middle Class
Let Go - Bombs Away
Kelsea Ballerini - Half of My Hometown (Ballerini)
PUP - Paranoid
Donovan Woods - Grew Apart
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 Nyquist in the "General Politics XII" thread.
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Previous editions of Liner Notes can be found here.