Welcome to Century Songs
An appreciation of the 21st Century through songs
Welcome to this Substack/newsletter/blog that I’m calling Century Songs. I’ve written on and off about music over the years, both on my own sites and for long defunct sites in a version of the internet that no longer exists. I’ve wanted to start something up again for a while, just to get into the habit and remind myself I could still string coherent thoughts together, so I appreciate you checking this out. Let’s break down what my plan is here and how this is (maybe) going to work.
Who Am I?
My name is Kevin, and I’m a 40-something dude in the Chicagoland area. I’m married, I have a 7-year-old, and despite the overall point of this newsletter, I mostly listen to music from… sigh… the 1900s, as the kids might say. Rock, pop, punk, rap, all that stuff. (I also watch a lot of movies, or try to, and you can follow me on Letterboxd here.) I also love basketball and baseball, cooking (and eating), and I try to get outside and run when it’s not 20 degrees. I don’t read as much as I wish I did, but I do listen to podcasts and while I recognize those are two different things, there are only so many hours in the day. I have a dog and two cats, and they’re all very old. If you ask nicely, I may share pictures of them.
Like I said, I’ve written about music before but never professionally, so let’s get that out of the way right now. This is purely a thing I’m doing for fun and my opinions should be taken as such. Obviously there are dozens of talented professional and semi-professional music writers on here and elsewhere doing fantastic work and approaching music from their informed perspectives. Century Songs is my way of joining that conversation, even as I would not consider myself among their peers.
Why 21st Century Songs?
Although I grew up listening to and still go back to music from the 60s-90s, I had been adding to a playlist over the last few years of songs specifically since 2000 that I loved. Part of this is just trying to keep up with new music, something that sometimes isn’t prioritized for people my age, and music has always been something I cared too much about to ever stop learning about.
I also anticipate a huge number of “Best Music of the Past 25 Years” pieces to hit publications next year, taking stock of the era and looking for trends, narratives, and seismic moments in pop music. I can’t say I’m going to be that ambitious, but 25 years is a lot of songs, and there are so many that mean a lot to me that I thought it was worth getting my thoughts down and maybe sharing them with anyone who was interested.
It also means a lot of these songs haven’t yet been written about to death. I love “Stairway to Heaven” and “Visions of Johanna” as much as the next person, but I don’t know that I’d have anything new to say about those songs or a million others. But something from the last five years, especially a song that many people might have missed? I’m excited about highlighting that and elevating it to the same status as other acknowledged classics. In this newsletter, there’s no such thing as recency bias. Or, maybe to be more precise, recency bias is the point.
What Songs Am I Writing About?
At this point, I don’t have an expected framing, although I do have some rules for myself (more on that later). I may not be writing about the biggest, most successful or important songs of all time. In fact, I may be writing about songs only I care about and that very few people have even heard.* The main criterion for choosing a song to write about is do I have something to say about it? If the answer is no, then it doesn’t matter how big it is or how much I like the song, it’s not worth including here.
*Which is not to say that my taste is so obscure or indie cool. I’ll definitely have some major artists and chart hits on here too. But if I write about something only a few people on Bandcamp have bought, it’s not because I’m trying to impress anybody—I just genuinely love that particular song.
Mostly it’s going to be a lot of rock and guitar-oriented songs, so if that’s not something that you tend to listen to, then you might not find much interesting here. I’ll have dance songs, pop songs, hip-hop, emo, electronic, and folk, and probably some other things I’m not sure I can categorize. But ultimately I appreciate guitars, riffs, solos, great songwriting, hooks, and maybe some fist-pumping and whoa-whoas. If that sounds like your thing, you’re very much in the right place.
About Those Rules You Mentioned…
So I wanted to give this a bit of structure, which is similar to how I built that playlist I mentioned. I have three fundamental rules—though I may tweak and maybe even outright break them as I go along—but this gives me a place to start from as I write.
This is not a ranking. I’ll save the rankings for the music sites and others who write about music for a living. Don’t get me wrong, I love a ranked list, and I could probably tell you my top 10-20 in some kind of order. But when I’m thinking about these songs, I don’t tend to compare them to each other in that way. This is a deeply personal, subjective selection of music I love.
Only 1 song per album. This can be extremely difficult and limiting, especially for my favorite albums. But choosing a single song from an album that might otherwise have multiple favorites helps me focus on what I truly love about a song.
Only 3 songs per artist. This sounds like I rule I might break the most, especially where my personal favorites are concerned. But the way music is recorded these days, for better or worse, a lot of artists go years between albums, so they may only have released 4-5 in the last 25 years anyway. The War on Drugs, to name a band that, yes, will be featured in here multiple times, have five albums to date since their 2008 debut. So, while choosing only three favorites to write about sounds impossible at this point, there is so much other music I want to get to that by the time I’m thinking about a fourth one, well, I’ll be impressed that I’m still keeping up with this.
And that’s about it. I’ll share a version of that playlist as I go along, especially as it grows. I’ll probably write about some songs you hate. I probably won’t write about songs you love, and I’ll almost certainly write about the “wrong” song from that album. We might have little to no overlap with our personal lists of 21st Century Songs. That’s what makes this so special, and that’s why I’m excited to share mine.
Please subscribe and feel free to share this as it grows. I’ll keep writing if you all keep reading.
Next week: A song about loneliness, drinking, and motel rooms far from home