At the start of 2024, hoping to inspire myself to listen to more music, I undertook a challenge to add one song every week to a playlist. Specifically, I was hoping to find a song that caught my ear each week — maybe I heard it out in the world, maybe I’d sought it out specifically and couldn’t get it out of my head. Ideally, the song would be new (or at least new to me), though I found that rule would sometimes need to bend in order to keep to the song-a-week pace. And I ultimately fell off that pace towards the end — it turns out the ever-growing playlist of songs I (mostly) like took up an ever-growing portion of my listening time, until the playlist mostly stalled out in October.

Even so, I consider the playlist a successful experiment, though not without some true clunkers in the mix. So, following the tradition of a friend (who largely inspired the playlist in the first place), I culled the 40-or-so songs down to a tight 15-song playlist of stuff I truly loved in 2024. For my own benefit, I thought I’d record some thoughts on why these songs made the cut. But first! The playlist:

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