Last night I reset the play counts on all of  our family iPods after a year of continual music spinning, as I’ve been doing every twelve months or so since we got our first iPods in 2007. I used to wait until December 31 to reset the lists, but I’ve found that we usually want fresh mixes and tunes through the hectic holiday and year-end work seasons, so now I just reprogram everything soon after I complete my Best Albums report each year, and then push the magic button that resets play counts on all 15,000+ songs stored on my hard drive. Kaboom!! New musical year for all of the Smiths!!

We still have a lot of iPods in use at this point, and I’ve been scavenging online to build  a little treasure trove of replacements for models I like (old Shuffles and Nanos, mainly) to keep my current listening paradigm going as long as it can. But, as has been a recurring theme for me over a lifetime of listening, I do recognize that while I am fiddling with these little gadgets, I’m once again fighting a rear guard battle to keep using what most folks already see as antiquated devices, while playback technology makes another of its seismic shifts from a purchased (or stolen) media file model to streaming services, delivered over our phones or other smart devices, and designed so that we never actually own anything musical anymore, but just rent it. I won’t reiterate all the reasons why I hate this (they’re in the referenced article above, if you want to read them), but I do, and it sucks, and I’m going to keep raging against the dying of this particular light as long as I can, because that’s what I do. Harrumph.

As I note every year, since we synch all of our many fiddly widgets to one computer and one master iTunes account, the “Most Played Songs” list on that account represents the aggregated play counts from my daily train commutes, my business travel (two iPods, so I never run out of juice on a long flight), our shared car, Marcia’s gym, Marcia’s apartment in Des Moines, and the collaborative family iPod that stays in our Chicago apartment stereo dock and is played by whoever is home at the time.

So the “Most Played Songs” of the year are often unexpected, since they represent the heart of a musical Venn Diagram where our family’s tastes most closely overlap, even though each of us individually may like very different things. I listened to a ton of Napalm Death, HOGG and The Body in 2018, for example, but none of them show up on the “Most Played Songs” list because Marcia and Katelin immediately veto, skip or over-rule them anytime they happen to play in their presence. Not everybody in our household likes the grind, y’know?

So . . . here are the Smith Family Top 40 Most Played Songs for the past 12 months, with exhortations to explore any and all of them, since I can guarantee that all of us like them enough to play them regularly, and we’ve got good taste, by golly. Happy listening, and bring on the new music, now!

1. “Lost” by Vulkano

2. “500 Miles” by Peter, Paul and Mary

3. “God If I Saw Her Now” by Anthony Phillips

4. “Dust” by Fleetwood Mac

5. “Morning Fog” by Kate Bush

6. “See How We Are” by X

7. “Time Will Show The Wiser” by Fairport Convention

8. “The Silent Sun” by Genesis

9. “Kenny” by TC&I

10. “Sunday Candy” by Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment

11. “There Is A Mountain” by Donovan

12. “Life Goes On” by The Damned

13. “Eshet Eshet” by Ethio Stars (featuring Mulatu Astatke)

14. “The Belldog” by Eno, Moebius and Roedelius

15. “Portfolio” by Fairport Convention

16. “It’s a Shame” by First Aid Kit

17. “Nothing Has To Be True” by First Aid Kit

18. “Float On” by The Floaters

19. “Busy Doin’ Nothin'” by Jed Davis

20. “A Dream of Winter” by Sun Kil Moon & Jesu

21. “Old Marcus Garvey” by Burning Spear

22. “Sunny Side of Heaven” by Fleetwood Mac

23. “Lovely Anita” by The Gods

24. “Born Together” by Plush

25. “Hounds of Love” by Kate Bush

26. “Deliver Your Children” by Paul McCartney and Wings

27. “Be Thankful for What You Got” by William DeVaughn

28. “Afterglow” by Genesis

29. “I Don’t Know Where I Stand” by Fairport Convention

30. “Whither Goest the Waitress” by The Weasels

31. “three waves (xii, xiii, ix)” by Caroline McKenzie

32. “Hale-Bopp” by The Weasels

33. “For Michael Collins, Jeffrey and Me” by Jethro Tull

34. “Night of a Thousand Hours” by Judy Dyble and Andy Lewis

35. “We Are The Battery Human” by Stornoway

36. “The Wherefores and the Whys” by Toe Fat

37. “C’est Bon” by Vulkano

38. “I.O.I.O” by The Bee Gees

39. “One Day” by Genesis

40. “This Summer’s Been Good From The Start” by Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci