Matt's Books and Music

My mom often says that my brother was born with a motor and I was born with a song. I can’t remember a time in my life that wasn’t defined by the music I was listening to. But the extent to which I’ve been actively up on what’s been happening in the world of popular music has swung wildly over the decades. Some years I’ve gone deep in the weeds, while others I’ve barely paid attention. (I don’t think I could even name a Taylor Swift song until 2014.)

Over the past year, I’ve taken big steps to fill in the gaps in my knowledge: I’ve started going through each year systematically, listening to as much music that was released in the year as I can (for all their problems, unlimited music streaming services are very useful in this respect!) and curating playlists of my favourite songs of the year.

I thought it would be a fun exercise to bring some of my reflections on this exercise to this long-dormant book blog, now recast as a books and music blog.

Because I’ll be sharing these here, I feel in the interest of transparency, I have to talk a bit about my (totally subjective and unscientific) methodology. Basically, every song I listen to (depending on the year, this ends up being somewhere between 600 and 1000 songs) gets a score of between 0-10 points. Scores of 0-3 are awarded immediately, but if I think a song deserves more than 3, it goes into a ranking round. There’s no limit for songs given 0-5 points, ratings of 6-10 go only to the top 60 songs that my best-of-the-year playlist. These are divided as follows:

• 6 points: songs 60-39
• 7 points: songs 38-25
• 8 points: songs 24-11
• 9 points: songs 10-6
• 10 points: songs 5-1

The album rankings are obtained by tallying up the songs’ points for each album and then taking an average of rankings based on the following criteria:

• total points
• total songs getting points
• average points/song
• number of songs in the top 60
• number of songs in the top 10

The average points/song criterion was added to counteract what I’ve ungraciously called the Olly Murs phenomenon. This is where an artist releases a flood of music that’s enjoyable but doesn’t leave a mark. I added it after Olly Murs ended up with the third highest number of points one year despite having no song I have more than a 3.

So that in a nutshell, is my super nerdy, bespoke, completely arbitrary ranking system.

I’ll start with weekly posts about the current decade so far, leading up to a best of 2025 post at the end of the year. And, if I’m still enjoying writing these up, continue with the 2010s in the new year.

I hope you enjoy!