a brief journey through my spotify wrapped

by absolutely no means is this a best of list!!!!

Well, we’ve made it. A whole new year’s worth of data from our evil music streaming service to see just how broken our brains are is finally here. Thank god.

A disclaimer: Spotify is evil. I know! You don’t need to tell me that! Their max payout is $0.003 per stream and next year they plan to pay even less by implementing a threshold artists have to hit before they even make anything, penalizing smaller artists even more. Horrible system, obviously. “Well, okay then, Miss Righteous Girly, why do you still use it if it’s so bad?” you may ask. Because the system as a whole sucks. Are there lesser evils (Tidal, Apple—lol—Music, whatever the thing is that Neil Young made) out there? Yes. Do I particularly like their interfaces? No, I don’t. Spotify remains, unfortunately, my preferred platform to listen to every piece of music (minus Joni Mitchell) ever made. So, listen: I do my part. I buy physical media or purchase digitally through Bandcamp, I contribute to crowdsourcing and buy merch and pay for tickets and, when I can, give free press in this silly little Substack.

(Actually—I would love to do that more…let me interview more people for bed crumbs! I say “let me” as if I am not the editor in chief of bed crumbs and also the managing editor and director of content—the very person in charge of letting me do things here! There’s nothing stopping me other than perhaps opportunity on the booking end, but whatever! I am a 21st century media worker! I’m used to doing the work of like four other roles in addition to my own at the same time! So here we go, my first act as head of talent booking for bed crumbs: A call for interview pitches! We want to talk to YOU about your work! Or also just shoot the shit! Whatever you want to do!)

Okay, digression aside, this is all to say: There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, girls! I’m trying my best! And you should too! So, in that spirit, and the spirit of Spotify Wrapped season, here is a brief tour into some of my most-played highlights of the year.

Ghost World - Aimee Mann
Jimmy Iovine, I have lived another year to prove your unibrowed clown ass wrong.

Nothing is Good Enough - Aimee Mann
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times: Bachelor No. 2 is actually a concept album about working in media :)

Woke Up This Morning - Alabama 3
Very “tell me you watched The Sopranos for the first time this year without telling me you watched The Sopranos for the first time this year.” While I never skip the theme song when watching The Sopranos, I will say, I do often skip the overlong spoken word introduction here—unless I am in the mood to have a laugh when the guy is essentially like “I’m getting very old. So old I am on my deathbed. I’m an elderly man. I am almost 41.” But when it actually gets into it? “Woke up this morning, got yourself a gun”? Hello, it’s giving “West Coast” by Lana Del Rey; it’s giving “John Wayne” by Lady Gaga; it’s giving “Desperado” by Rihanna. In short, it’s serving cunt. How could you not listen to it on endless repeat?

Unfortunately, I stalled out on The Sopranos itself precisely after completing episode 11 of season five—I know what happens in episode 12, and I cannot bring myself to watch it. It will make me so scared and so sad! I think my biggest thing about it is that the back half of the series is exactly what I expected The Sopranos to be that prevented me from watching it for years, which is to say: good, of course, a relentless examination of the psyche of evil, obviously—but also scary and stressful! The earlier seasons rip—I wish someone had told me how funny it can be!—and I flew right through, but, oof. Once I hit the end of the fourth season, what seemed like a fun new project suddenly began to feel like eating beets: good for me, sure, but hard to swallow without feeling my gag reflex kicking in. I will finish the show eventually because I have a pathological aversion to quitting things. (No one tell me how it ends! I hope Tony lives a long long life and everyone is happy and the finale gives me a nice succinct conclusion to the saga with all my questions answered!) But it will take me some time. I have enough cortisol triggers in my life, and there is already so very much in this scary world that paralyzes me with panic! I do not need a twenty-five year old prestige cable drama adding to that! 

Song still fucking goes, though.

Dreaming - Blondie
This song is on my most-played because it absolutely rips and also because it absolutely is a cornerstone in my silly little Elaine May playlist. Sorry, folks, this is a stupid blurb-as-plug! Dumb, but so many of the songs on my Wrapped this year came directly from my music moodboard for Miss May Does Not Exist—a playlist that was inspiration while writing and can also be used as a sort of companion soundtrack while reading—that I can’t not include one.

Earlier this year, I had to fill out an extensive questionnaire for the marketing people and in my typical totally chill and absolutely normal fashion, I listed as just one bullet point in a sprawling, probably overly-detailed answer to a simple question about “inspiration” for the book: “music by women in punk scenes, from ‘70s downtown New York through the ‘90s riot grrrl/DIY movement. (Elaine would never call herself punk, let alone a feminist, but her involvement in an emerging comedy scene—even forgetting comedy’s inherent musicality, the community in and of itself was to Chicago and New York in the ‘50s what punk was to downtown New York in the ‘70s—and her actions and experiences through her career aligned with these cultural movements and many of the songs that came out of them!)” This is one of those songs on a playlist with many more like it! Like I said: totally chill and very normal! 

Tenth Avenue Freeze Out (Live at Meadowlands Arena, 1984) - Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band
This spring, I made the bold and brave decision to join a running team at work to participate in inter-NYC media company races. I say bold and brave because I do not like forced socialization and, as cool and personable and normal as I may seem here, I am actually a very shy person IRL! But bold and brave ALSO because I hadn’t raced in 10 years!! Running used to be my entire identity, which, yawn, you know? Get a life, babe! Expand your horizons! Well, I did, and became someone who keeps a varied fitness regime (hmm, this is still boring) where running is an incredibly picky Goldilocks for specific ideal conditions part of it.

I knew I wouldn’t be last, and I’d do just fine, so it wouldn’t be a total embarrassment. It would be just fun and casual! Lowkey! I thought I genuinely convinced myself of this until the moment I got to the starting line for the first race. I don’t know how to be chill!! Me? Not compete in a competitive setting? Impossible. Anyway, I know this banger ended up as one of my most-listened to songs of the year because for the duration of that three and a half mile race, and the rest that followed, I basically listened to it on repeat. It’s a good ~7 minute mile pace setter, what can I say! I finished in the top 3 each race and got a silly little medal, and I owe it all to this song about being a hooligan from New Jersey! Thanks, Bruce! You don’t have to do your horny grandpa band intro to it anymore, it’s fine! We’re good!

Gonna Be You (From the Major Motion Picture 80 For Brady) - Dolly Parton, Belinda Carlile, Cyndi Lauper, Gloria Estefan, and Debbie Harry 
Oh my god lmao oh my god. Just when I was scrolling through my playlist for the first time thinking “Shockingly not-deranged run of tracks this year……I’m disappointed,” this popped up. An objectively terrible song, with an objectively atrocious video, for an objectively appalling movie, all of which I had a blast consuming. Listening to this song feels like getting a lobotomy (complimentary). 

A Mistake - Fiona Apple
The only “red album” I recognize is Miss Fiona Apple’s 1999 When the Pawn (née When the pawn hits the conflicts he thinks like a king what he knows throws the blows when he goes to the fight and he’ll win the whole thing ‘fore he enters the ring there’s no body to batter when your mind is your might so when you go solo, you hold your own hand and remember the depth is the greatest of heights and if you know where you stand, then you know where to land and if you fall it won’t matter; cuz you’ll know that you’re right), and I suggest you all do the same.

Not one but two versions of Gypsy by Fleetwood Mac
I already wrote about it in this essay that is—dare I say—smart and better than this stupidity!!! Some of you are newer subscribers so go read that, I really like it!!!

Balcony - Jenny Lewis
Embarrassing that I (thoughtfully) talked shit about Joy’All only for three of its songs to end up on my Wrapped. But that’s what happens when you write about music (as I did about Joy’All here, also in a better essay that I would put in bed crumbs’ Miss Serious vertical and think is more worth your time than this nonsense). Sometimes you end up with a bunch of songs you don’t even like but had to listen to over and over and over again to figure out how you felt about them and then how to write about how you felt about them.

The album as a whole, I am sorry to say, has not grown on me any more in the months since I said I thought it was disappointingly mid. “Balcony,” though, remains the standout among misfires: a simple track about community and yearning, loss and reunion, memories of the not-so-good past and hopes for a better step forward into the future. It’s earnest and clever without being cloying, simple and straightforward with an arrangement and production that resist relying on kitschy crutches. It’s not that it’s the Jenny Lewis we expect—because to place expectations on any artist is to stifle them and to turn yourself off to future growth in whatever direction they desire and are entitled to—so much as it’s the kind of song that reminds you of the quality of work Lewis is capable of. The disappointment of Joy’All is that there aren’t more songs like it.

Closer I Get - Margo Price (ft. Ny Oh)
At least once an album, Margo Price has to come out with a song that feels like a direct attack! I mean that in the best way possible, but with a song that has a chorus like “I get the feeling I’m further away the closer I get”......girl, please, you did not have to come for me like that. Few songwriters today are able to write thoughtfully about not just how unjust the world feels on a macro level, but also on the micro level—the small, personal feelings of inadequacy, the ebbs and flows of self-perception, the ways it can feel like the goal post just keeps moving even when you’re on the up—without coming across as petty, ungrateful, or woe-is-me. Someone is always doing worse than you, of course, but someone is always doing better, no matter who you are; success—or the semblance of it on paper—doesn’t automatically cure us of insecurity. We’re all just people trying our best in this hellscape we’ve been relegated to live through, and Margo Price gets that.

all-american bitch - Olivia Rodrigo
Look, I am but a teenage 32 year old. I still think Olivia Rodrigo is an industry plant / psyop but, whatever, they got me with this one.

The Poet Acts - Philip Glass
Everyone say “Congrats Carrie on only one debilitatingly depressing track from Philip Glass’s score for the 2002 major motion picture The Hours making your Spotify Wrapped this year! You either didn’t have any seasonal depression this year (no) or found other music to write to (yes)! We are so proud of you!” 

Twisted - Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks
If you know me, you know that the long-standing on/off relationship and artistic collaboration between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham is my Roman Empire. A pivotal part of it? This truly insane (complimentary) duet that is, honestly, far too good and goes far too hard to be cast off on a movie soundtrack. I am not being hyperbolic when I say: I have probably listened it, at a minimum, one thousand times in my life, and still, every time, I think—or sometimes even say out loud to myself—“This is so fucked up. I love it.”

The girlies online have memed the 1997 live version of “Silver Springs”—at once a damnation and a seduction; what it looks like to hate someone so much even though you could never stop loving them; and also the height of performance art, if you ask me—into oblivion, as if loving it is a replacement for forming a personality, but they’re sleeping on its predecessor! Stevie and Lindsey’s voices have never been better—still with full range but marked with the grit of maturity—and their harmonies have never so seamlessly hit the perfect ratio of hatred and lust (and lust because of the hatred) since the Buckingham Nicks album, equal parts dueling and dueting. You don’t just hear the righteous fury in their voices; you hear the love and genuine concern and care they hold for each other, too. Even if you ignore all the melodrama, ignore the personas and just listen to the people, you can’t help but marvel: These are two voices that were meant to sing together. It is absolutely bewildering to me that Stevie would re-record this years later, claiming this version was not her ideal, and that she could do it better solo. I am very sorry to say this but: she does not do it better solo! (Imagine being so pissed at someone you take back a duet and re-record it like…that!??! Kind? Sweet? Pleasant? Where’s the FIRE, where’s the PASSION, where’s the IMMEDIACY!? Cutting an insanely good line like “I know you know watching you go is like dying…it’s like dying”? Come on!)

Of course, taking the melodrama and personas into the picture is part of the game that makes the music even more interesting, and here, it makes the “two voices meant for each other” component hit even harder. Here, decades before they’d split for what may be the final time, you still feel like they’re divorced parents you could Parent Trap back together again. I have never loved two emotionally dysfunctional people I do not personally know more. What gifts they’ve given us! And by gifts I mean truly incredible music and also truly incredible drama.  

Work Until I Die - S.G. Goodman
Life in late stage capitalism is a total drag, but S.G. Goodman’s sharply written, rip-roaring, riff-tastic, Americana by way of the Velvet Underground song about it is not. 

Quarry - Wednesday
Wednesday’s fifth album, Rat Saw God, plays like a collection of short stories about life in suburban sprawl, chock full of thoughtfully sketched out characters and detailed settings that feel at once familiar and novel. It’s easy, at times, to feel as if Karly Hartzman is singing about something that happened in your small town, or could have: Dudes playing Mortal Kombat at underwhelming New Year’s Eve parties; bored teens drinking too much and tripping on Benadryl; backseat business in SUVs parked on side streets; strangers OD’ing outside Planet Fitness; mean old neighbors whose wrath is the price you pay in exchange for a full-size candy bar on Halloween; seemingly normal couples whose homes get busted as drug fronts. Wednesday is not the first band to chronicle life in a pocket of America that could best be described as “middle,” regardless of its geographical location, at once disdainful of and fascinated by the place from which they come. But where their lyrics could steer songs into the territory of quiet tales of disillusionment and dissatisfaction, even at their most witty, the searing, explosive noise-rock sound—particularly the marriage of fuzzed-out guitar from MJ Lenderman with Xandy Chelmis’s lap steel and pedal steel, which can skew just as Americana-twang in one direction as they can Sonic Youth brash in the other—pushes them into grandeur, positing that even the most mundane parts of life are worth loud and dramatic songs, too.

Rat Saw God is perhaps my favorite album of the year; half of its tracks—“Bull Believer,” “Chosen to Deserve,” “Bath County,” “Quarry,” and “TV in the Gas Pump”—ended up on my Wrapped, and choosing just one for this list was near-impossible. I can never really land on a favorite, let alone a highlight I think would be both the best example of their thing and the most accessible one to attract new listeners. But I guess, because I have to, I’ll go with “Quarry,” with its melodic homage to The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” by way of dirtbag America. The juxtaposition of suburban malaise with love for a city in spite of its flaws is clearly not new, but it doesn’t need to be for it to be good.

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