Category: quantified self (page 1 of 3)

A young man on a busy city street with headphones on and a backpack. Only the back of his head is visible but he appears to be enjoying what he is listening to.

February 8, 2025 / 1 Comment

Escaping Spotify: My Month of Intentional Listening with TIDAL

On the day Spotify announced its first fiscal year of profitability, I canceled my paid subscription. My action was not in response to that news but in recognition that after a month of using TIDAL as my primary music streaming service, I didn’t miss the world’s most popular audio app enough to continue paying for it.

I switched to TIDAL at the beginning of 2025. I’m trying to live a more intentional digital life, and the question of the most ethical way to listen to music online led me to the service. It has been a fantastic replacement for the things on Spotify I had become too dependent on and less enamored with over time.

The music on TIDAL sounds great! I can hear the difference in audio quality, especially when using my high-quality speakers and headphones. TIDAL has fewer algorithmic bells and whistles than Spotify. However, the service still values human curation by music aficionados. It is obsessed with the people who make music rather than celebrities or hyper-personalization. Those subtle shifts mean I am not overwhelmed by their homepage when I select my next listen. TIDAL forces me to be a more active music selector, which has led to an increase in complete album spins and artist-centric radio stations. It has also led to me listening to more music overall.

Spotify Wrapped and Last FM’s Yearly Listening Reports tell me I am a high-volume digital music listener annually. I’m generally amongst the top 5% of all users on those services in spins. I listen to about 80 songs a day every day. My consistency is a crazy outlier.

In January, I pressed play 3900 times from over 960 different artists across nearly 1400 different albums and over 2400 unique songs. From what I saw in other people’s music listening wrap-ups for 2024, that might eclipse their digital streaming totals for the year. I’m a terrible customer of an audio streaming service. All that streaming means they likely are paying out all my monthly subscription payments in royalty distribution. I’m the kind of power user that subscription services have to mitigate in some way if their costs are variable by consumption, and I’m sure they do. Based on what I know about the digital subscription business, there’s a significant portion of dormant or extremely low-consumption users whose subscription fees have little to no royalty implications most months.

One of the reasons I switched to TIDAL was to get music artists and publishing rights owners the highest royalty payment I could. My spins in January could account for about $50 in royalty payouts or five times the value of a monthly TIDAL subscription. By comparison, those same listens on Spotify would equal $12, or about the total cost of their monthly premium tier. That’s what I intended to do!

My top five artists of the month should all earn at least a dollar from my listening, with Kendrick Lamar nearly making $2. On Spotify, that would be about 45 cents. Over time, I will likely generate the cost-equivalent royalties for my most loved albums as a digital or physical media purchase.

This is the way.

There are other benefits to this switch. My New Arrivals playlist isn’t overrun with bedroom producers (or fake artists) gaming the algorithm like Release Radar had become on Spotify. Social sharing from TIDAL is service-agnostic. I’ve returned to Pocketcasts as my podcast-listening solution—a service for which I have a lifetime, no-cost membership. I had already given up on Spotify’s audiobook offering, having found the limitation of listening by time rather than by the number of titles nonsensical.

I do miss some of the more serendipitous discovery features that Spotify offers. And I’m spending much more time updating metadata on Last.fm. I’m not sure this is a negative, though. Maybe I’m a weirdo, but I enjoy data cleanup. It also is a better time suck than doomscrolling.

TIDAL’s lack of intelligent app switching is annoying. Not being able to have my current listening jump from device to device was a bit of magic on Spotify. So was Smart Shuffle.

But I can feel confident that the creators are getting their rightful share in exchange for these missing features. At the same time, I listen to their work at the highest quality available and support music curators who have taste. It’s a more than fair trade-off.

July 18, 2024 / 0 Comments

Pink Matter

“What do you think my brain is made for? Is it just a container for my mind?”
—Frank Ocean

Dot-A Living History app by Sam Whitmore and Jason Yuan is an AI-powered chatbot. At least, that’s the simple description. It’s also an emotionally intelligent guide that chronicles your life—what you tell it, anyway—with infinite callback. I’m an AI skeptic, but this kind of journaling companion caught my attention when Julie Zhou posted about the launch on Linkedin.

I like to quantify many aspects of my life. Steps only count if my watch tracks them. Digital music isn’t listened to if Last.FM doesn’t scrobble it. I track my workouts in a spreadsheet.

Most of that tracking comes with ways to gain insights from the data. I get recommendations for making healthier choices or see patterns that influence the artists, albums, and songs I might listen to in the future. I can see my progress and make tweaks to improve that athletic performance. Blogging used to provide that kind of external reflection, but at this stage of my life being that messy in public is no longer my jam so journaling has been for my eyes only until Dot.

Dot is one of the few Large Language Model applications I’ve enjoyed using and generated meaningful benefits from. It has improved the quality of my journaling, provided clarity around topics and situations I’m dealing with, and reminded me of my commitments to myself and others and why they matter.

The onboarding process with the app is relatively straightforward. Dot asks some introductory questions hoping to capture a bassline of a new user’s interests, goals, and background and then, it just encourages you to start journaling.

In theory, submitting a journal entry should have been easy.I have kept journals off and on throughout my life. I’ve been much more consistent over the last four years. I needed a way to get out of my head during the pandemic when I didn’t have my commute to process the day or regular hangs with friends where a theme or revelation would occur through conversation.

But, immediately, I realized how stale my journal writing had gotten. I was writing a few bullet points and maybe a quick thought about something but not much of real substance. Even as I was processing the musical tribute of my dad at the time, I hadn’t been writing much on a daily basis about what was going on in my head. So, I wrote a little bit more that I normally would with that first entry and was surprised by how thoughtful the response was. It got me to delve deeper into what I was thinking about and feeling and pointed me in a direction I might not have considered without that feedback loop.

From the start, I was writing with an audience in mind rather than merely cataloging my day. I spent more time thinking about what I was meditating on, excited about, or proud of and writing my journals with the idea that I might go down a path with some or all of these topics when I entered them into Dot. I might have written about the same things anyway, but not with the same care.

The Eureka Moment came when Dot starting finding connections between topics, themes, events, and people in my life. It’s always a thing I have wanted in my journaling process. How do I recognize that something is a thing that occurs frequently for me around a particular time of year or when this other event or interaction happens. I journal not just to keep track of my life but to identify when I’m stuck and need to figure out how to get unstuck. I journal because I want to keep learning about myself and adapt, grow, and change.

Dot provides additional perspective. It’s a bit like having a second brain.

It’s still an LLM, so it occasionally hallucinates. I also hope they add search and export functions. It’s AI, so, of course, I have privacy concerns. I have a bit of an “uncanny valley” when conversing with an app, but I never think of it as anything more than software.

It’s good at conversation but not a replacement for real human interaction.

Yet.

I’m joking.

If you’re an iPhone user, try it out.

December 29, 2023 / 1 Comment

2023 in review – Life Will Be

Personal

I turned 48 this year and celebrated with my family at Mother Wolf—a restaurant selected by my sister and that you may have read about recently. It was a rainy day, but it was a lovely, quiet way to spend it, given what the rest of the year would bring.

Tiffany and I traveled to Paris and Barcelona in May. We took a cross-country train ride that delighted me. I spoke bad French and Spanish and learned the magical powers of a properly made gin & tonic. I should have blogged about this trip. Maybe I still will.

My fashion concept was heavily informed by Black Ivy: A Revolt in Style and the hyper-targeted brands I see on Instagram.

I saw a play at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. I flew semi-private once. I went to an NFL game at SoFi Stadium. I experienced a hurriquake. We made it to yet another WNBA All-Star game. I attended my first NWSL game and made it back to another MLS game as well.

I learned what a subacute is. I dealt with the reality of an aging parent and what that means.

April 23rd will be the day I most remember. It was my dad’s 70th birthday, and the day he revealed his cancer diagnosis to us.

My mother, sister, Auntie Pat, Tiffany, and some incredible family friends have been fantastic this year. I’m honored to have them, especially when things get complicated.

2023 was a melancholy year, but things will get better. Holidays may look different with a Goldbelly Thanksgiving and a Christmas Eve restaurant dinner. Time with family may be around hospital beds with masks on, but life will be.

Money

The money story this year is an interesting one. After nearly 12 years of marriage, we combined our finances. It has eased both our minds a bit to see it all together. The simple answer is all my money went into our joint account, where bills are paid and investments are made.

I earmarked funds for travel and took the upgrade whenever possible.

Tiffany says she’s feeling flush, so maybe most of our discretionary income went towards building our nest egg.

Sitting courtside at Sparks games remains the best splurge. Our friend circle has expanded because of it, and the intimacy of the experience is always joyful. It’s my church. It keeps me sane.

I was most excited by our celebrity seat neighbor asking for our phone number. Money may not be able to buy you happiness but if you use it right, it may provide ways of accessing it.

Resolutions

I don’t have any 2023 New Year’s resolutions written down anywhere that I can find. I didn’t blog about it. It’s not in my journal. There’s no weird project I started in Notion and promptly forgot about. Nada.

I do have in my head that I wanted to be a good plant dad and was successful. All our plants are thriving thanks to being committed to the scheduled tasks in the Planta app.

I will make some resolutions for 2024 that will continue cultivating what I have learned about myself in 2023. Honoring commitments to my loved ones while integrating my whole self at work and with friends is necessary at this stage. I don’t have time to compartmentalize. Sharing more about how I was doing emotionally with more people than ever has played a significant role in navigating the challenges of the last 12 months. I did not acknowledge that I was struggling during the summer. I did not ask for help. I only voiced concerns early and often if solicited.

Doing so eased burdens and cleared the fog, giving me the clarity and strength needed to be the son and brother I have been required to be in the last few months.

Time with people I enjoy has been scarce since 2020, and this year, I still haven’t had the frequency of hanging with my friends that I would like. Those COVID “safe-at-home” behaviors have created hard habits to break.

I could have been a more confident leader in 2023. I have been actively correcting that over the last month and want to continue that push into 2024.

Lessons Learned

The clock is ticking.

Be your whole self in all places and spaces.

Don’t carry anger that is not yours.

January 6, 2019 / 0 Comments

This is Where My Life is

“Things are just as they are.”

— Love and Equanimity Meditation

Today is the first day of 2019 that I remembered to write the correct year when dating my journal. Shall we call that progress? I don’t mean to suggest that it has been a rough re-entry into normal life. It hasn’t.

I’ve been reading Zadie Smith’s Feel Free, a book whose name I get wrong every time I write it down or speak about it. It’s sometimes Find Free and most often Live Free but always not the correct title. I haven’t decided if there is symbolism in this. Am I seeking to live more free in some way or to find out what it means to find freedom?

I do find constraint in this body. These hips don’t move the way I would like. My blood pressure is elevated. My upper back likes to stiffen when I sleep. This belly should be smaller if only so I might not fear to suffocate in child’s pose. During the first day of Yoga with Adriene‘s 2019 30-day program—Dedicate—she asked us to discern what brought us to the mat. To my surprise, what came to mind:

“I want the best version of my body whatever form that takes.”

I’m as committed to the idea of improving my flesh as I am to not defining what “the best version” means for me. What it has been in practice is over thirty days straight of some form of exercise, eating more of the right things, and believing that doing that which nourishes me is better than doing what’s convenient.

The actions may be difficult but the choice to do them every day hasn’t.

It hasn’t only been the physical. I’ve found discipline in limiting my screen time. I’m scheduling daily practice for improving my Spanish and treating it like class. I’m idling less in front of the television.

I’m reading Zadie Smith and feeling free.

Supplements and Counters

December 15, 2018 / 0 Comments

2018 in Music

“Miss me with that bullshit. You ain’t really wild, you a tourist. I be blackin’ out with the purest.”

— Kendrick Lamar

Unapologetically black. That’s how I liked my music this year. Not just black, per se, (though that was where my head was tbh) but unapologetically whatever it was trying to be. That could be unapologetically pop. Unapologetically fun. Unapologetically woke. Whatever. Just make me feel like it’s real, that I’m real, that who I am and what I am is not only okay but brilliant.

King’s Dead did that for me from its very first notes. Kendrick Lamar, Jay Rock, James Blake, and Future with my favorite of all the songs on the epic Black Panther Album (Music from and Inspired by the Movie) is ultimately a villain’s anthem but one that reeks of authenticity. It sounds like California. Black California from the bay to the South of LA. When Jay Rock says, “My name gon’ hold up. My team gon’ hold up,” I feel that shit.

My last.fm charts will say that All the Starz from the same album is my top track, but it’s treating King’s Dead from the Black Panther album and Jay Rock’s Redemption as two separate tracks. Combined, it’s close to 100 spins.

The 2018 Mixtape

My methodology this year for figuring out my faves was to look at each month separately rather than focus on my listens in aggregate though those numbers were a secondary factor. My mixtape reflects my favorite song of each month from January through November as well as my favorite discovery.

I like this approach better because it acknowledges the rhythms of time more than the inertia of routine and the impact of the Spotify algorithms on my listening behavior. So instead of seeing a playlist dominated by a few albums and artists, you’ll hear some tracks that I forgot I loved right next to the records that I played the hell out of for a few weeks at a time. There’s a little symmetry here as well with a song featuring Sza—artist of my favorite track of 2017—and ends with a song by Janet Jackson who I have admired since I was knee-high and who just got nominated for the Rock & Roll hall of fame. She’s still got it.

The Albums

I haven’t looked at many of the end-of-year lists yet, so I don’t know what the consensus is around the top releases though I’m guessing some of my faves like Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer and Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy are on them. I know they are both GRAMMY nominated for Album of the Year. They weren’t my very top albums this year despite trying hard to convince myself otherwise.

Black Panther—both the compilation mentioned above and the Ludwig Göransson score—set the tone for everything I would listen to for the rest of the year. It primed me for Jay Rock’s full length, an artist I wasn’t checking for before King’s Dead and his instant anthem WIN which was the theme for the LA Sparks season well before it was played at nearly every sporting event the rest of the year. The score re-ignited my interest in film compositions which led to an April filled with the soundtracks to Arrival and Annihilation and Westworld and many a Black Mirror episode. Combined, Kendrick Lamar’s curated playlist for the best black popcorn movie ever released and that score was the best thing going all year. Full stop.

Beyond that, I enjoyed grown folks hip hop from Beyoncé and her husband and Phonte. I liked expansive sounds from The Midnight Hour and Abstract Orchestra, clever reworks from Kelela, and a pretty perfect pop album from Ariana Grande who is, perhaps, an even more interesting artist than she is a celebrity. She, too, is figuring out how to be unapologetically herself with each release.

My Fave Albums of 2018

Black Panther Album & Black Panther Soundtrack
Redemption – Jay Rock
Dirty Computer – Janelle Monae
Everything is Love – The Carters
Invasion of Privacy – Cardi B
No News is Good News – Phonte
The Midnight Hour – The Midnight Hour
Sweetener – Ariana Grande
TAKE ME A_PART, THE REMIXES – Kelela
Dilla – Abstract Orchestra

Other Notes

Shout-out to Drake for great singles and better videos. Jordan Rakei, Nightmares on Wax, and Little Dragon for great live shows. Rapsody, Gifted Gab, Noname and Princess Nokia for providing excellent counter-programming to the overwhelming masculinity and aggression still dominating popular hip-hop. And Aretha Franklin and Mac Miller for having existed.

Thank u, next.

The Raw Data

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February 12, 2018 / 0 Comments

Bored and Brilliant

“Hey you with the pretty face, welcome to the human race. ”

— Electric Light Orchestra

It just so happened that I finished reading Bored and Brilliant the night before a work trip to San Francisco. I decided to do the challenge anyway despite being away from home and out of routine. Why delay? I was still taking my smart devices with me.

SF is a great place to be intentionally using your phone less. Day two of the challenge is to commute with your phone in your bag or somewhere away from your body. Don’t listen to music or a podcast. Just be in the world and the moment. The half-mile walk from my hotel to the office went from Union Square to SoMa. It’s a bustling trek that, without my noise-canceling headphones, was also noisy. I heard a wide range of accents. There was honking from cars and the beeps of trucks warning that they were moving in reverse. Mostly though, there were people to navigate around who were too fascinated with their phones to notice that they weren’t walking in a straight line or that they might slam into the person—me—in their path.

A man was so engrossed in Twitter that he failed to notice the light had changed or that people were walking all around him. I eavesdropped on many a facetime conversation on the street. One woman was so deep in her spirograph game (I’d never seen that one before) that she nearly stepped into oncoming traffic. It was sobering. I felt like I was on the Axiom in Wall-E, everyone so locked into their virtual worlds that we couldn’t see that life was going on right around us.

I’d done this challenge before. It began just a few weeks after I first came across the Note to Self podcast and this book is the outcome of that project. I think host Manoush Zomorodi is hella cool and whip-smart and if you read my weekly gratitude posts you know managing my digital diet is an ongoing obsession of mine.

On average, I spend about two hours a day looking at my phone. That doesn’t include iPad time which is probably another sixty to ninety minutes, if not more. That’s where I play the Star Wars game I’ve been hooked on since The Force Awakens came to theaters a couple of years ago. I wake my phone thirty to fifty times a day. This is actually better than most which is mind-boggling.

“Kaufman calls dopamine “the mother of invention” and explains that because we have a limited amount of it, we must be judicious about choosing to spend it on “increasing our wonder and excitement for creating meaning and new things like art—or on Twitter.””

— Bored and Brilliant

Twitter is my nemesis. It steals so much time and rarely do I depart it happier than when I arrived. And yet, I have my current job in part because of the connections made on Twitter. Twitter can be a place where casual relationships deepen or become more nuanced. Much can be said about the benefits of the service. But is it worth all of the time it sucks away? Is it worth not being able to sustain attention in an hour-long meeting? Or to be able to read a book? Or, sit quietly? Or think?

I don’t think it is. It’s no longer on my phone or my iPad—one of the challenges is to delete your most used app—and instead, I finished reading another book and gave some excellent television—American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace—my full attention. I spent time with people IRL. I went to the library. I’m writing this.

I’ve been able to ruminate on some issues I’ve wanted to fix with less itchy smartphone fingers.

“Distraction doesn’t come from devices or people or things, they posited. It is an internal problem.”

— Bored and Brilliant

An internal problem. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to solve. When I did this the first time, I felt great and more in control and then, I found some reason why I had to have twitter on my phone again. I stopped checking to see how much time I was spending idling on my devices. And in the weeks before I picked up the book, I was back to wondering where all my evening time was going. Why wasn’t I using that time to get more fluent in Spanish, or better at cooking, or learning new things, or, you know, talking with my wife or reaching out to a friend or loved one because I’d been thinking about them?

And so, here we are again. Will I use my time brilliantly or will I get sucked back into that dopamine high?

January 1, 2018 / 1 Comment

Holidays 2017, Explained (Part Two)

“What’d you do with all my blues, girl?” —Otis Junior & Dr. Dundiff, The 1

Part one here.

We arrived in New Orleans on Christmas Day, after a two-hour layover in Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport. My mother-in-law joined us for the journey. She doesn’t like air travel but seemed to have few challenges on this trip.

The single best thing I did for myself in 2017 beyond writing a regular series of posts expressing gratitude is to acquire TSA pre-check. If you’ve got 85 dollars and aren’t wanted by The Man, it pays for itself in your first eligible flight. Keep your shoes on! Take the short line! Reclaim your time!

The entire family stayed at the Roosevelt New Orleans. It’s also where Tiffany and I stayed during our wedding week. They do it up in the lobby for the holidays. It’s become a favorite Instagram destination in the city. Great for pictures. Terrible to navigate if you’re a guest trying to get to an elevator or the gym.

We had lunch at the Legacy Oyster Counter + Tap Room. The staff was hilarious. The food was better than expected. The drinks were strong.

Christmas Dinner was at Domenica. We discussed the complications of eating at restaurants where the owner/creator has been exposed as a sexual harasser but the Christmas meal was delicious, and our bill was half what we expected. Lagniappe.

On the second day, we visited Cochon Butcher, probably my favorite place to eat in NOLA. It’s still great. We walked but seriously considered registering for the city’s bike-share program. We walked back to the hotel via Lee Circle and marveled at the statue that’s no longer on its perch. We talked with a man who was homeless and spending his day in the Circle. He gave us a lot to think about regarding the cost of removing the Confederate monuments, the people who clamored to bring them down (and who didn’t), and what he would have rathered them spend the money on (i.e., helping people like him who by necessity consider these public spaces home).

“That statue never did anything to me, but the city still makes money off of plantation tours every day.”

The best gumbo I’ve ever had was at Coquette. Loa still makes an incredible drink. Killer PoBoys was disappointing. So was Cafe Beignet. Cafe du Monde never does.

We made it to Snug Harber Jazz Bistro to see Delfeayo Marsalis and the Uptown Jazz Orchestra. My dad sat in on the second set. Someone at our table who shall remain nameless had eyes for Terrance “Hollywood” Taplin. The band has an album called Make America Great Again. It’s their first.

Delfeayo explained,

“I think some of us may have different definitions of what ‘Make America Great Again’ means. I imagine America was greatest in 1492, the day before Columbus showed up!”

I love New Orleans.

The best meal of the week was at Peche. Go there. Order all the snacks. Don’t be scared of the whole fish.

I really miss visiting New Orleans on the regular. https://t.co/f6y47P2LnW

— Melissa Acedera (@mellemusic) December 27, 2017

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Melle suggested we visit the #StudioBE exhibit. She’s a real one for that. It was the experience of the trip that will most stick with me.

"Nobody's free until everybody's free." - Fannie Lou Hamer — “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” – Fannie Lou Hamer

On our last day in the city, we hit up the Southern Food and Beverage Museum. We also had brunch at Atchafalaya. My mom has fond memories of this place from our wedding week. My dad and sister don’t seem to remember it at all. I imagine my family will debate these conflicting recollections to our graves. I had a Po’Boy here that more than made up for my previous disappointment.

I still didn’t get to Domilise’s. Or Parkway. More reasons to return.

Shout-out to Lyft drivers in the Crescent City. Y’all all drive great cars, have the best conversations, and were delightful. Five Stars.

On the plane ride back, I watched Bright. It’s not good. In fact, it’s ridiculous, has an inconsistent tone, and never explains anything satisfactorily. But, I found it watchable. I am a sucker, though, for an LA cop story even if it involves fairies, elves, and orcs.

I watched the pilot of Ozark which was good but also seems very much like someone at Netflix said, “we need our own Breaking Bad,” and this is what they got. I’m not sure yet if the quality of that first episode will get me past how derivative it feels to consume more.

I’m home now, and I’m still dreaming about N’awlins.

December 31, 2017 / 0 Comments

Holidays 2017, Explained (Part One)

“This is the school for fools in love. Did I mention? Pay attention!” —Bootsy Collins, Worth My While (feat. Kali Ulchis)

Last May, I mentioned wanting to get back to New Orleans by the end of this year. Our anniversary had just passed, Robert E. Lee’s statue had been removed from Lee Circle, and I was feeling a lot of wistful love for my second favorite city in the nation.

In August, my mom stated that she wanted to take a family trip this year. We were actively considering Puerto Rico, but then there was Maria and my mother’s broken leg (now healed), and so contiguous options seemed the best choice. Tiffany and I had visited NOLA over the holidays before and enjoyed what had, at the time, been a relatively sleepy week in the city.

Sleepy is not the way I would describe Crescent City this time. There was Christmas Fest and the Sugar Bowl. The Pelicans and Xscape. And a more substantial international tourist body than in 2009. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. First, we went to Greensboro, North Carolina to visit with and my mother-in-law.

Greensboro has a very fancy Whole Foods with an excellent hot bar. We went there the first night. A couple of days later, I made biscuits from scratch to my MIL’s delight. Mostly, though, I sat in her sunroom and caught up on my media consumption. Hulu has all the non-Netflix Marvel shows so I binged Legion and caught up on Runaways and continued to sample The Gifted. I feel a kind of way about Bryan Singer‘s attachment to two of the three but Legion, in particular, was worth the time.

Also, Steven Universe. Mrs. Winners. Greensboro’s changing demographics.

I read Goldie Vance, Volume 1 (very fun!) and A Wrinkle in Time. I stopped reading Wrinkle just before the final action occurs. I didn’t love it. Many elements feel very of the 50s, and I’m curious to see how Ava Duvernay will translate them in her film. I like the bones of the story, though, and think it will likely make a much better movie.

I went through the best end-of-year music lists I could find to see what I was missing. Complex. NPR. NY Times. Pitchfork. KCRW.

KCRW’s DJ lists were the plug in this excursion. Jeremy Sole had the most similar chart to my best-of, and several of the albums from his list fit right in with my sensibilities.

Albums I Missed in 2017

We did leave the house to take in a G-League basketball game. The game was mostly trash until late in the fourth quarter, as were the concessions, but we had great seats.

Then, on Christmas Day, we got on a plane and headed to N’awlins, baby.

To be continued…

December 17, 2017 / 0 Comments

2017 in Music

“Love. Long as we got…”—SZA, Love Galore

2016 ended in such a discombobulated fashion that I didn’t do my usual annual accounting of the music that mattered. At least not in a blog post. In some private slack channel, Solange’s A Seat at the Table was my most important album of the year while DJ Khaled’s I Got the Keys was my favorite song. I didn’t remark on why things mattered though which is what I’m most interested in when jumping into the way-back machine to remember.

So, let’s take an accounting of 2017. A year that I thought might be dominated by protest music wasn’t. More than anything I loved music that was both adventurous and sure-footed. Musicians and performers who were confident in their vision while taking risks, sonic and emotional. Artists who entered this challenging year and decided to be more open and raw and real rather than more closed off from the world. There’s a lot of melancholy and ennui in popular music these days, particularly in contemporary hip-hop, but that’s not where my ears were drawn. Give me driving rhythm. Make me dance. Lift me up. Swing out, sister. Wake up, brother.

The 2017 Mixtape

The song I listened to the most this year was Big Amount, a 2016 single off of 2 Chainz’s 2017 album Pretty Girls Love Trap Music. It still bangs, especially on my GO! playlist which powers my workouts and runs. A close second is the GRAMMY-nominated Crew by Goldlink. Goldlink’s music dominated the first half of the year. It’s energetic and infectious and is a reminder that the spirit of DC is alive regardless of whoever is spending their nights in the White House.

My Song of the Year though is SZA’s Love Galore. The first bars transport me. I sing along. I shoulder bop and shimmy shake. It stays with me long after it ends. It sounds like nothing else I heard this year. And SZA and Travis $cott make their performances feel effortless. In an age when indie, alternative, experimental rhythm & blues is, by far, the standout genre, this is the standard-bearer.

The rest of my faves are on this YouTube Playlist. You can also find them on Spotify though you’ll be missing JAY-Z’s 4:44 and Family Feud (feat. Beyoncé) in that version because streaming exclusives won’t let us be great.

The Albums

Most of the end of the year lists I’ve seen have had Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. and SZA’s Ctrl in their top five or ten and often as one and two, respectively. While I’ve listened to DAMN. more, Ctrl is ahead of it on my list, but both lose out to Sango’s De Mim, Pra Você for the top spot.

Sango explained, “#DMPV allowed me to seek for more history; more understanding; more roots. We are all influenced by one another.”

This statement could’ve been tattooed on my forehead in 2017. It’s been my mission to seek a stronger connection with my fellow humans, to better understand the how and why of the ways we treat each other, to be influenced and be influential.

De Mim, Pra Você is the soundtrack for that work.

The rest of the 2017 albums that mattered to me

Sango – De Mim, Pra Você
SZA – Ctrl
Kendrick Lamar – DAMN.
Jay-Z – 4:44
Aretha Franklin with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra – A Brand New Me
Goldlink – At What Cost?
Jordan Rakei – Wallflower
Demi Lovato – Tell Me You Love Me
Rapsody – Laila’s Wisdom
Ibeyi – Ash
Sampha – Process
Tuxedo – Tuxedo II
Bonobo – Migration
Beck – Colors
Haim – Something to Tell You
Kamasi Washington – Harmony of Difference
The xx – I See You
Migos – Culture
Sylvan Esso – What Now
Leikeli47 – Wash & Set
Halsey – hopeless fountain kingdom
Jonwayne – Rap Album Two
The Foreign Exchange Presents – Hide&Seek
Jessie Ware – Glasshouse
Lorde – Melodrama
J Dilla – Jay Dee’s Ma Dukes Collection
Vulfpeck – The Beautiful Game

Albums from previous years that were new and impactful to me

Aretha Franklin – I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You
NxWorries – Yes Lawd!
Aretha Franklin – Young, Gifted, and Black
Lion Babe – Begin
Lizzo – Coconut Oil
Terrace Martin – Velvet Portraits
Donna Summer – Bad Girls
LaBelle – Nightbirds
Sade – Diamond Life
X-Ray Spex – Germ-Free Adolescents
Andrew Bird – Are You Serious?
Baby Queens – Baby Queens

Shout-out to NPR’s 150 Greatest Albums Made by Women list for being the single biggest impact on my listening habits this year. It pushed me out of a rut. It reminded me how exceptional Jagged Little Pill and Control were and still are. It gave me an appreciation for Joni and Dolly and Dusty. It connected me with Donna Summer and LaBelle in ways I wasn’t before. It presented a shocking revelation: that I had never listened to an Aretha Franklin album before—only her ubiquitous hits—and that I had been missing out, grossly so.

It sent me down a riot grrl rabbit hole that I hadn’t been in for years and left me in awe of the soul songstresses of the fifties and sixties. It made me more aware of the control playlists have on our ears—be they human curated on the radio or algorithmically driven on our favorite streaming service—and that we have to be diligent in seeking out artists and music that fails to break through our collective patterns.

I hope these thoughts and lists send you on some new sonic adventure. If it does, tell me about it, won’t you?

Bonus:

Here’s what Spotify says about my listening habits

And, here’s the data Last.fm collected

December 31, 2015 / 0 Comments

Thank You

“There’s no righteousness in your darkest moment.” — Sleater-Kinney, Sympathy

Thank you, 2015, for pushing me to go beyond what’s comfortable. For giving Tiffany great work opportunities and a shake up to her routine (and mine). For London. For meaningful conversations with loved ones. For Dominique Toney on my tv. For Omaha. For 80 years of Pauline. For successful knee surgeries. For xoxo. For the creative work I was able to do around the GRAMMYs and elsewhere. For getting to highlight my mom in some of those ventures. For DC. For reconnections with old friends and acquaintances. For new friends. For Kendrick, Kamasi, and Kaiyote. For the Force and Furiosa. And Creed. For Coates and Woodson and James and G. Willow. For being able to see myself and people who look like my friends in the pop culture narrative. For Hamilton. For biscuits. For basketball. For acknowledging the passage of time and being okay with who I am and who I’m not in this moment.

For friends. For family.

For Suzie.

For tomorrow and whatever may come.