Curated Music
Power Pop Playlists Created By An Obsessive Human
I listen therefore I am.
Some of my earliest memories are tied to songs. It started with the pop radio hits of my childhood but became an obsession when my cool older brothers gave me a crash course in heavy metal and hard rock as a tween.
Music soon became my identity. The discovery of punk—and the acquisition of a drum set—led to deep dives on every guitar-driven genre I could find on the radio dial and in the record store aisles. I studied album liner notes, read about my favorite bands (and their favorite bands) in magazines, tuned into staticky college stations and Sunday night speciality programs, watched countless music videos, and went to shows.
I also traded carefully curated mix tapes with friends and girlfriends. We’d spend days scouring our collections for the perfect combination of songs, supplementing them with borrowed vinyl and cassettes from other music lovers when necessary.
Putting those tapes together (or mixed CDs in the ‘90s) often felt like the most important thing in my small but growing world at the time. That intensity had mostly diminished in the streaming era, but I managed to recapture some of the old magic this past year by making a series of themed power pop playlists.
The seed for the idea was planted by this Lame-O Records collaboration I did in 2023.
The Power Pop Name Game
This essay/curated Spotify playlist were originally published earlier this year in the Lame-O Records newsletter. It’s my entry in a series based on Mo Troper’s excellent “Power Pop Is Camp” article published by Talkhouse in 2021. I’m sharing my full “The Power Pop Name Game” essay and embedded playlist here for those of you who missed it the first tim…
Creating random themes somehow turned the endless choice on streaming platforms into a fun game.
I wasn’t just putting together playlists, but looking for songs with specific words in the titles. My faulty memory usually gets me to 10-15 tracks before I have to start doing some research which ends up being a great way to (re)discover music.
Then, just to keep things interesting, I arbitrarily cap my playlists at 40 songs which means paring the track list down. From there I execute multiple, minute tweaks to the song order before making them public on Spotify and YouTube.
Power pop is an overarching theme, but my definition of the genre remains loose—especially as it relates to these playlists. If a song has the right energy and hooks, and sounds good between the tracks before and after it, that’s good enough for me.
If you’re new around here or if you missed any of the playlist I created this year, I thought I’d close out 2024 by putting them all together in one place.
Happy New Year from one music obsessive to another. See you in 2025!
Thanks for all the great playlists this year!