Thoughts on my year in media, including 600 new albums, 63 books, and 67 new movies.

10 min readJan 1, 2016

In 2015, I wrote down all of the media I consumed. Or, rather, I tried. I followed the methods of Steven Soderbergh (you can see a sample of his here). Here is the full list. What follows is my analysis of this ridiculous endeavor.

First, I should say that the list is incomplete in that it doesn’t do justice to news articles. My friend Rex Sorgatz is doing that for this year with his project The Ledger. I am not sure how to pull that off. I would like to take it up a notch because news articles and JSTOR research articles were BY FAR the bulk of my reading this year, and I hate that I didn’t capture them. I have an Instapaper Queue (which, curiously, doesn’t seem shareable), but it’s only partial. Ditto for my JSTOR history. This whole project is labor intensive as it is, so I’d like to find a way to do that part without being unduly burdonsome.

I’m also curious if doing this weekly, as Rex does, is more productive than this giant monolithic thing, but, god, I just love year long ridiculous tasks, so I think I might keep it up this way. TBD. I figure I have a week or two to decide.

Media-specific thoughts. I’ll start with music since that was the weirdest.

Music

I listened to 600 new albums in 2015. To clarify, these were new to me. Some were older. Any time someone mentioned a band or an album I hadn’t heard before, I listened to it. I routinely asked throughout the year for suggestions of new music on Facebook, and I would listen to all of those. I would routinely check Pitchfork and other music journalism sites for good new music suggestions, and I would listen to them. In truth it was a challenge to keep the playlist full all the time, but I managed. BY FAR the best source of new music suggestions was asking on Facebook. Even by the end of the year, when I would ask for new music suggestions, I would get great new suggestions from Facebook. I am just finshing up the 600th new album, now, and it was a Facebook suggestion from this week from Grant Shellen.
It is *REALLY HARD* to listen to new music all the time. At all times, I had my phone with my trust favorite app ever Captio at the ready and every time anyone mentioned anything, I would send a memo to myself. When I got back to the computer, I’d add it to the “To Investigate” playlist. I’d always default to playing that playlist in almost all situations.
Some exceptions: I didn’t always listen to new music when writing. When writing, I would start with my “to investigate” playlist on Spotify, but as soon as I got to a song that was too distracting, I would switch over to my instrumental “writing” playlist. (If you’re a writer, here is my instrumental writing playlist on Spotify. Caveat: there are some pretty noisy and metal songs on there. It’s not for everyone).
Another exception was when I was doing construction & loud chores. I couldn’t often hear over power tools, shop vacs, etc., so I’d stick to music I already knew. It was my one time of year I listened to oldies, and, god, I came to adore those moments.
The final exception was when I was walking, or in a car, in which cases I often (though not always) listened to Podcasts instead. Earlier in the year I’d listen to music more often in these situations, but as the year went on, I got more and more into podcasts
What did I learn and find? Discovering new music is still a pain. Friends are good but not great. Everything else is iffy. Automated algorithms are, for me at least, still terrible.
Even your closest friends probably don’t like the music you like. Music is becoming an increasingly personal experience.
There’s a reason why older people listen to less and less new music and it’s not because they’re lazy, uncool, or old. It’s because the older you are, and the longer you’ve been listening to music, the more new music sounds like something older. Sometimes this is cool, sometimes it’s boring, but it’s very, very rare that the new version is better than the old. I can still only think of 5–10 times in my life where this has been the case. The new CHVVCHES album is fine but I like the bands they ripped off better. I first learned this with Teenage Fanclub when an older friend of mine was like “they’re great and all but why not just listen to Big Star?” He was so right. I find myself thinking that all the time. BUT…
When you love a genre, it’s okay if things are derivative. I have an unabashed love for fuzzy guitars on shoegaze. And yeah, Black Ryder, Toy, Caspian, Car Seat Headrest and The Fauns are derivative of My Bloody Valentine, Ride and (especially) Slowdive, but so what? I love that style. Also….
Occasionally the new is better than the old. I am specifically thinking of Fuck Buttons, Blanck Mass and Ben Frost who are so much better to me than Merzbow and Masonna.
I don’t remember the vast majority of it. All year people have been asking me, upon hearing about this project, “Oh great! What’s been good?” And I’ve rarely been able to tell them. Eventually I had a couple standby answers, but it was just a made up thing to have something to say. Looking at the list in Alphabetical order instead of chronological, I don’t recognize half the albums, and another quarter I only have a vague memory of (liked it, didn’t like it).
But the songs that stuck, STUCK. Phosphorescent, “Song for Zula,” Rachel Zeffina, “Star”, Marina and the Diamonds, “Blue,” Pete Yorn & Scarlett Johansson, “Blackie’sz Dead” (I don’t even LOVE that one), Metric, “The Shade,” Mercury Rev, “Central Park East,” Quarterflash, “All Diamonds,” MS MR, “Hurricane,” Papernut Cambridge, “Rock and Roll Afternoon City Lights,” Toy, “Join the Dots,” and, most prominently Now Now, “School Friends,” I swear that song’s been in my head for a year.
(The full list of new albums I listened to, numbering 600, is listed here. The spotify playlist of the best 500 tracks is here. A *really long* Spotify playlist of whole good new albums can be found here.)

Live Music

I used to see HUNDREDS of bands a year. Some years I’d see more bands than there were days of the year. Here, for example, is my 2007 list with 281 separate bands. By no means my highest.
I chalk up the MUCH lower number to getting older, and moving to Chapel Hill. Honestly, it started going down when I moved to New York. Boston is still a much better town for live music. I also went to fewer festivals this year owing to moving, buying a house, and whatnot.
At any rate, here’s the whole list (not worth a separate entry since it’s too small): NO CHIEF, HIS NAME IS ALIVE, HTRK, WILL BUTLER, FREEZEPOP, SOME AWESOME BAND FROM GREENPOINT ACOUSTIC IN EAST TEXAS, OCTOPUS PROJECT, MOB DEEP, DAN DEACON, NULLSLEEP, SEBADOH, QUI, SOME BAND WITH “FISHERMEN” IN THEIR NAME, ANOTHER BAND WHOSE NAME I DID NOT CATCH BUT WERE REALLY GOOD, BRIGHT LIGHT BRIGHT LIGHT, MINI MANSIONS, DIIV, SPIRITUALIZED, INDIAN JEWELRY, LIGHTNING BOLT, THE SWORD, VAADAT CHAGRIM, FEVER THE GHOST, NIGHT BEATS, MYSTIC BRAVES, SPINDRIFT, THE BLACK RYDER, THIS WILL DESTROY YOU, THE OH SEES, PRIMAL SCREAM, THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN, THE BOTH (TED LEO AND AIMEE MANN), GRAND MASTER FLASH, A$AP FERG, ASH, RIDE, CUJO, FRANCINE, PARLOUR BELLS, AD FRANK AND THE FAST EAST WOMEN, LIGHTS OUT, ORBIT, VIC FIRECRACKER, EMERGENCY MUSIC, HARRIS, GODSPEED YOU BLACK EMPEROR!, MERCURY REV, TAYLOR SWIFT, VANCE JOY, GARBAGE, DINOSAUR JR 30TH ANNIVERSARY NIGHT 8 WITH KEVIN SHIELDS, KIM GORDON, LEE RENALDO, KURT VILE, EVAN DANDO, NEGATIVE APPROACH, IMPERIAL TEEN AND BLACK MOUNTAIN AT BOWERY BALLROOM, KINSGLY FLOOD, BOMBADIL

Books

Read a total of 64 books this year WHICH IS AMAZING. I was shocked. I had no idea I was going to crack my traditional goal of 1 a week for 52. The short ones at the beginning of the year saved my ass at the end of the year, where the last couple of books (The Brothers, A Consumer’s Republic) took me SO LONG to read. Like weeks each.
Note: I am being generous this year and counting any supreme court decision I read over 100 pages as a book. There were four. I would have made it to 52 without them. I am NOT counting the many re-reads of the two books I am writing. Nor am I counting the HUNDREDS of JSTOR articles I read — sometimes quite long — in research for my third book (which is SO CLOSE to being done with a first draft).
The full list is here.

Movies

I watched 57 new movies this year. This, again, is new to me. The full list is here.
I re-watched about the same number of films.
I am psyched that I managed one new movie a week. I averaged just over one every two weeks in the theater. I would like to beat that next year.
In the theater, I re-watched Avengers: Age of Ultron (twice, not worth it), Mad Max Fury Road (twice, SO worth it), Inside Out (three times) and Star Wars (three times)
Still have to see Carol, Revenant and a couple others — stuff comes late to North Carolina.
I fucking LOVE movies, so much more than TV. I like starts and ends.
I love our new local theater, The Lumina. It’s one of the joys of living down here. Small, cheap, friendly, nearby, serves beer and wine. Big screen is big. Stadium Style. We also have the Silverspot, which is a posher, even bigger beer and wine cinema, but it’s expensive and it starts late.

TV. Man. TV. I gotta say. I watch WAAAAY too much TV now. I mean, we all do, I suppose. Or, rather, we all watch a lot of TV now. Becuase TV is good now, right? Golden age and all that? It’s very weird for me, as a gen X-er arty farty type. For like 5 years I didn’t have a TV, didn’t watch TV. Now I end almost every night (when at home) watching some TV. To be fair, this is because my wife works primarily on TV shows, and she is into it too, and it’s a good communal activity. Netflix and chill and all that, right?
And, you know, they say “TV is a Writer’s Medium,” and I’m trying to be a writer, and in, like, 5 years I want to go conquer Hollywood and all, so, I guess I should learn and watch TV and figure out what showrunners do, and how to write a TV show, etc. etc. And I try and do that when I’m watching TV. Make it more productive. But I still can’t shape that feeling that it’s rotting my brain. Old dogs, new tricks.
One reason I don’t like TV is the endless plot arcs. I was traveling a lot and Emma was watching Gilmore Girls and every time I’d watch an episode it was the same shit — relationship dramas, comedic misunderstandings. Then shows just sort of become parodies of themselves as they try to stay on the air — most annoyingly they always seem to put pointless obstacles in front of people who obviously should be together. A couple seasons of that? Fine. Life has obstacles. But when Mulder and Sculley still haven’t kissed after, like, six years, it’s getting preposterous. This is getting better with shows that end (Spotnitz has said Man in the High Castle will end — that will be interesting). And that is promising. I like things that end. Miniseries, then, maybe. I quite enjoyed The Casual Vacancy and am looking forward to the Childhood’s End miniseries. Something like The Leftovers seems like it should end. People will adjust, or something big will happen. The purgatory can’t go on forever. It’s one of the reasons I’ve not watched it yet. Great stories end.
Not only do they end, they go in fits and starts. This is why films have motages. Montages are hard in TV. You can go in real time and do some cool non-exciting episode (Data’s Day being the all time great in this regard). But TV needs to sort its relationship to down time. Too many shows simply skip to the next action bit — Marvel shows suffer especially in this regard. My god, Daredevil. Take a day off. Seriously. Let me see you water your plants. Otherwise why am I taking up so much time with this? Make it a movie if you’re gonna rush it all.
TV Series we watched all of, (or all of the new stuff) this year: Adventure Time, X-Files, Game of Thrones, Star Wars Rebels, Agent Carter, True Detective (season 1 only, ugh, god, you guys fooled me on that one, pretty though), Portlandia, Mythbusters, The Fall, Marvel’s Agents of Shield, Marvel’s Jessica Jones, Marvel’s Daredevil, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Silicon Valley, Mad Men, Other Space, Freaks and Geeks, The Casual Vacancy, Dr. Who, Master of None, Mr. Robot, Man in the High Castle.
Emma also did all of Parks and Recreation, Fresh off the Boat, and Gilmore Girls without me, and I’d pop in for a few of those.
If you’r an X-Files fan, the last couple seasons are way better than you remember them.
I’ve kind of given up on the Daily Show, Nightly Show, and even Colbert. The one thing that has stuck at night? @MIDNIGHT. Love it. We watch almost every episode. It’s a great 20 minute laugh fest for after watching some depressing as hell episode of Mr. Robot or Daredevil. Go to bed aon a high note. I’m not sure why Colbert or the Daily Show/Nightly Shows aren’t doing it for me. We still watch them occasionally, but rarely. I’m thinking Colbert suffers from being too balanced, and Trevor’s good but he hasn’t hit it yet on the Daily Show. It’s getting better, though.
I watch too much Marvel shit and I gotta stop but the TV is good. The movies seem to be spottier and spottier though.

Podcasting

This was my first year taking podcasts seriously. It was the confluence of events — being interviewed late last year for Dan Maccarone’s Story in a Bottle and then later in the year for Jenna Matecki’s Notes on Doing was a big part of it. Plus the president getting interviewed by Marc Maron. And my friend Ben Gold hipped me to a few podcasts.
It’s funny because I think I MADE my first podcast for a brand in, like, 2000 and it was SUCH a running joke, brands and podcasts, during my Barbarian days, all through the early 2000’s, but now? Now we have shit like GE Podcast Theater and the A16Z podcast and, man, podcasts + native advertising equals manna. Though every time I hear Marc Maron promoting Squarespace or Simply Safe I am immediately trasnported back to my childhood in the 70’s sitting next to my Dad in the Dodge Dart listening to freakin’ Paul Harvey. La Plus Ça Change.
Podcasts I’ve been listening to: Story in a Bottle, Notes on Doing, Marc Maron, Nedist, 99% Invisible, A16Z. Maybe a couple others. That’s about all I can digest. I am not a fan of True Crime so I won’t be listening to that one everyone loves whatever its called.