Today is the day that I reset the play counts on all of the Smith Family iPods after a year of data gathering and consolidation. I used to wait right until December 31st, but I’ve found that Marcia and I almost always want something fresh through various holiday trips and hectic work season, so early December has become iPod playlist reprogramming time.

The most interesting playlist to clear is the collection of “most played songs” for the year. Since we synch all of our gadgets to one computer and one iTunes account, this “most played songs” list in our household represent the aggregated play counts from my car, my gym, Marcia’s car, Marcia’s gym, and the collaborative family iPod that stays in the house’s stereo dock and is played by Marcia, Katelin and I.

So the “most played songs” of the year are often interesting and unexpected, since they represent the points where our family’s musical tastes and listening habits most closely overlap, even though each of us individually may listen to very different things than the other family members. My love for Napalm Death, for example, will never likely result in any of their songs making this list, since Katelin and Marcia both immediately skip them anytime they come up on any iPod. And we all listen to music a lot, so that’s a lot of skips, offset by a lot of listens to the things that everybody actually does like.

I’ve got 12,000+ songs on my computer right now, and we only played about 5,000 of them at least once in 2014. So now is the point where I look at those other 7,000 songs and start making lists of things we haven’t heard in over 365 days, which is always a fun process. It’s like shopping my closet, only louder.

With all of that as preamble, here are the 40 most played songs in our household in 2014. I offer some links for exploration of some of the more obscure numbers, if you’re inclined to hear what it sounds like in our dining room at night, while Marcia beats our asses down at whatever game we’re playing:

1. “Midnight Sky” by Can

2. “Opiate the Masses” by Dälek

3. “Meliora Sequamur” by Ian Anderson

4. “Back in the Laundromat” by Wall of Voodoo

5. “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC

6. “Heavy Metals” by Ian Anderson

7. “Choir of Wolves” by Vulkano

8. “Bricks Crumble” by Dälek

9. “Law of the Bungle, Part One” by Jethro Tull

10. “Scavenger, Invader” by The Locust

11. “Lovely Anita” by The Gods

12. “A Head Bronco” by Japanther

13. “Time Loves a Hero” by Little Feat

14. “Cuyahoga” by R.E.M.

15. “Simpletons” by The Bats

16. “A Strange Day” by The Clay People

17. “Florentine Pogen” by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention

18. “Lullaby for a Sadist” by Korn

19. “For Pete’s Sake (Closing Theme)” by The Monkees

20. “Five Lions” by Japanther

21. “Love and Meth” by Korn

22. “Nothing Will Be The Same” by Renaldo and Michael Alan Alien

23. “Rock Man” by The Phones Sportsman Band

24. “Never Been to Spain” by Three Dog Night

25. “Misleading Colours” by The Gods

26. “Spratts Medium” by Renaldo and the Loaf

27. “Rock n’ Roll Train” by AC/DC

28. “Bands” by Andy Prieboy

29. “Sofa, No. 2” by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention

30. “Lime Jelly Grass” by Renaldo and the Loaf

31. “Somebody Somewhere” by Andy Prieboy

32. “Baby Blue” by Badfinger

33. “Sticking Wings on Flies” by The Gods

34. “Rock n’ Roll Dream” by AC/DC

35. “More Than the World” by FREEMAN

36. “War Machine” by AC/DC

37. “San Ber’dino” by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention

38. “The Turnpike Inn” by Ian Anderson

39. “Ever Somber” by Dälek

40. “Easy to Slip” by Little Feat