Hello my music-loving friends. I hope this annual message finds you well. I am writing to you from Colorado, the first stop on our Winter Family Tour. We'll fly on Christmas Day to Kansas to hang with my family through New Year's. This year has been one of the most energizing and amazing years of my life. I'll share a bit more about that below, but if you just want to enjoy this year's playlist, you can find it on Apple Music or Spotify. If you don't use one of those two services, reply back and I'll make a more accessible playlist on YouTube or just send you the tracklisting to compile yourself. I can never fit everything on these playlists. Constraints are good! In addition to what you'll find on the playlist, here are some albums I've enjoyed this year. With all the access we have to a seemingly infinite number of playlists, it's sometimes nice to just listen to a complete album.
Jaimie Branch - Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war))
Hania Rani - Ghosts
boygenius - the rest EP
DJ Shadow - Action Adventure
Slowdive - everything is alive
Yves Tumor - Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)
Keith Jarrett - Solo-Concerts Bremen / Lausanne
Luisine - Long Light
Horace Silver - The Stylings Of Silver (The Rudy Van Gelder Edition)
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - The Silver Cord
Emeralds - Does It Look Like I'm Here? (Expanded Remaster)
Julie Byrne - The Greater Wings
Charles Bradley - No Time For Dreaming
Labi Siffre - The Singer & The Song
David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars
Panda Bear - Reset in Dub
Andre 3000 - New Blue Sun
So, what made my year so awesome? I played. Since the end of April, after leaving Oura after 2.5 years, I've been spending most of what would be my working hours doing a lot of different things. I've been playing with artificial intelligence, hiking, exercising (but not enough), seeing friends, making new friends both online and IRL, doing school drop-off and pick-up, enjoying summer, spending quality time with my kids and other family, a bit of traveling, a lot of reading, listening to music, helping people, researching, writing and enjoying large blocks of time for thinking. As a result, I feel more full of energy, more creative and more ready to... Well, I'll have more to say about that soon.
While none of this has much to do with music, this email list, which has been going strong in some form or another for over 25 years, has allowed me to connect directly with many of you. It has meant a lot to me. Connection — real connection — is lacking in our daily lives. In fact, it's so urgent that the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory and declared loneliness an epidemic in America.
While there is a complex web of factors that brought us to this point, one thing is for certain — the attention economy is not serving us. It's consuming us. Vast amounts of our attention are wasted on our mobile devices, much of it on apps encouraging and rewarding living our best, most performative lives. It creates a false perception that we are connected and keeping up with one another, but it's a mirage. We have never been more disconnected, isolated and lonely.
Let this email serve as a nudge for you to not only enjoy some music, but also to reach out and truly connect with someone. And if you're so inclined, reply and let me know how you're doing and what's going on in your life. It's always nice to hear from you. Thanks for reading all the way down here.
Feel free to forward this email to someone you think might enjoy it.
✌ + ❤
Brad