Said the Gramophone's best music of 2022 is out!

Said the Gramophone is one of my favorite old school blogs that's focused on music. I wouldn't say music is absolutely vital in my life, but I do like to hear new bands and go to shows occasionally, but ever since I left college I basically have no time to keep up on new music. So for my own selfish reasons, I always loved checking in on music blogs like StG and Glorious Noise and Jay Smooth's Ill Doctrine back in those early days of blogging to see which new bands and records they said were worth tracking down.

My favorite thing about StG was back in the mid-2000s every year around December I'd stumble on their best-of-the-year list and in those early days, it used to mean significant work to even hear their list of music. You'd plumb the depths of music sharing apps and jump on torrents split into multiple parts that often would take hours to days to fully track down, as 100 songs can approach a gigabyte in size.

But every year I knew it was worth the effort so I'd download the songs, unzip and add to iTunes as a Said the Gramophone (year) playlist and to this day I still have tons of them in the Apple Music app as custom playlists.

The best thing about StG's annual list is the eclectic taste. Maybe a third of the songs are from bands I've heard of, or songs I've actually heard playing somewhere during the year.

But that means the majority is stuff I've never heard and would never find on my own. Even though much of the playlist is unfamiliar, I listen to it non-stop on shuffle for a several weeks and inevitably after all those listens I end up with a new favorite Nigerian band or Russian hip-hop track, in addition to any big pop songs I missed.

This is a long-winded way of saying THE 2022 LIST IS OUT NOW AT THIS LINK and you should grab a copy of everything, listen to it on shuffle/repeat for a few weeks and I guarantee you will find tons of new songs and bands to love.

Also, a fun thing about living in the future like we do now is that it no longer takes hours or days to track down all the songs. You can just follow a Spotify playlist to hear 99 of the selected 100 best songs (damn you music licensing for not letting it be all 100) of the year according to Sean and the gang at Said the Gramophone.