I am copying the Bob Lefsetz letter from March 7th 2015 in full length from his Archive. These are his words not mine...
Playlist Of The Year!
Have you heard the new Death Cab For Cutie track “Black Sun”? Not “Black Hole Sun,” this is definitely not Soundgarden, and if you don’t know Death Cab For Cutie, even if you’ve never heard of them, that’s irrelevant if you like rock music, you’re gonna get it immediately, you’re gonna wonder where it’s been hiding, why you couldn’t find it earlier. I did.
Music has become incomprehensible. There’s too much and not enough good and I don’t know where to start. The radio stations are beholden to the labels, and they’re not on demand in an on demand culture, and online there’s a plethora of material and the playlists are too long with too many clunkers and then this guy e-mails me to check out his Spotify playlist and I start listening and I’m positively stunned, he’s managed to extract the key tracks from all these bands I’ve heard of but don’t know how to penetrate.
The opening cut is by Florence + The Machine, who I certainly know but never really got, and I like this but don’t love it, and then the follow-up cut is Alabama Shakes’ “Don’t Wanna Fight” which is good but not good enough and then comes…Death Cab.
This guy picked out the one Noel Gallagher cut you’ve got to hear. It’s good. I’ve read so much hype but I don’t know where to start, now I do. Then there’s stuff that doesn’t fly on the mainstream radar but is so infectious you wonder why it does not, like Django Django’s “First Light.” Or how about Proxima Parada’s “Climb To Love”?
Now this playlist is not hip-hop, and it only occasionally crosses over to pop, but if you’re a rock fan, mostly without the roll, if you like that white boy music but feel that they stopped making good stuff in the seventies, before MTV, when everything became obvious, you’re gonna love this!
Now I’m telling you, there are so few tune-outs. Unlike every other playlist I check out. You see curation is a skill. The guy’s name is “Songpickr.” All you need to search on is that in Spotify.
Oh, you don’t have a Spotify account? What’s wrong with you? You call yourself a music fan? That’s where everybody is, where the action is, you want to be where the action is, right?
And Songpickr has other playlists, even one for Classic Rock, but the one I’m talking about is: “Songpickr: 2015 Best Songs of the Year (Indie, Rock, Alternative, Folk, Singer-Songwriter, Soul…)”
You search for it and when you find it you click to follow it and then it’s in your playlist list and click to have it sync to your mobile device, so it upgrades on the fly and you can hear the new stuff as it’s put up there.
Now I really like about 70% of the tracks. And I haven’t found a curator this good…EVER! Makes my heart pitter-patter, makes me a believer… Makes me think music has a chance. For you, me and EVERYBODY!