Spotify Wrapped: Frayed at the ends
Every December, Spotify offers “Spotify Wrapped,” showing you stats of how you’ve used their service: hours spent listening, most played songs by season, favorite genres.
This year, as we sputter into a new decade, they went a step further and showed your top artist and song, determined by time spent listening, of each year for the past ten years (or however long you’ve been with Spotify).
My top artist and song had not changed from 2016–2019. Conor Oberst, “Gossamer Thin.”
At first glance, that’s kind of funny. “Wow, Larry, creature of habit much? Broaden your horizons.”
On first listen, it takes a turn. “Wow, Larry, this is sad as shit. Are you okay? Do you wanna talk?”
And, if you marry both of those thoughts together, you’re on your way to understanding the scope of what music does for us.
In April 2016, I lost a very dear friend. His death alone was tragic, but the timeline of events leading up to discovering he had died — the not knowing, texting friends “Have you seen him?” etc. — made it all the more scarring.
I still remember it felt like everything was happening in slow motion. Like I’d put a pin in Real Life, been transported to a movie just before the catalyst, then thrown back into Real Life upon the reveal.
The minutes and days that followed were a fog. In reality, I’d gone nowhere, but felt like a time traveler or astronaut, returning to my home planet an alien, like I’d been gone ten years when it had only been two days, and everything had changed.
Six months later, Conor Oberst released Ruminations, a 10-song album recorded in the span of 48 hours during the winter of 2015. As Oberst himself explains it, the album was “demos” that “just happened to be recorded really nicely.” On Nonesuch, the record label’s website, leading up to the album’s release, Oberst said, “I recorded them quick to get them down but then it just felt right to leave them alone.”
I’d been a fan of Oberst’s for a while, but nothing had resonated the way this sparse album’s worth of “demos” did. Stars had aligned in a broken universe and sent a meteorite crashing into my living room.
The songs felt fragile, uneasy, like the words themselves had been plucked from Real Life and dropped in a movie just before the catalyst. And maybe the narrator had. I had no way of knowing what inspired them for Oberst, only how they felt from personal experience.
It was no different than falling in a fire and seeing someone later with a burn scar. You don’t know how they got theirs, but you know what their scar means to you.
Why would someone want to listen to songs that remind them of something traumatic? Or, to stick to the fire metaphor, why would someone want to feel that burn over and over again?
Well that’s simple, psychological, and people far smarter than me have explained it before: Safety in numbers. In our darkest times, we don’t like feeling alone, like no one else in the world understands what we’re going through. That idea only amplifies the isolation and compounds the madness.
A more nuanced explanation, using Ruminations as an example (though I’m sure this also applies to some of your favorite records), though not the happiest-sounding, hope springs eternal from lyrics that simply recognize tragedy, loss, and frustration and resolve it with a sigh of acceptance.
Hell, subconsciously knowing the singer came through whatever they came through at all and managed to write songs about it should put batteries in your flashlight long enough to help you find your way to the end of the tunnel.
That I continue to revisit this album, and this song in particular, year after year, isn’t a conscious choice. I might be doing something as “important” as trying to write or mundane as doing the dishes and I’ll throw it on with no thought at all (certainly with far less thought than it took to write this article), more frequently, apparently, than any other artist or song for the past four years.
But that shouldn’t surprise you. There are 50 million things to watch on TV and across all the streaming platforms, but I bet you often return to The Office or 30 Rock or whatever, something you’ve seen dozens of times.
There’s comfort in familiarity and warmth in feeling like someone or something “gets” you. Even having a song or show playing as “background noise” you’re not even paying attention to can do wonders for the sense of feeling secure.
I’ve never been in an actual war, but Conor Oberst’s “Gossamer Thin” is my old Army buddy I run into at a bar visiting my hometown for the holidays. It may not have the history of being someone I’ve known my whole life, with an extensive back catalog of inside jokes, nostalgia and mutual friends to reminisce about, but we formed a bond being in the shit together, a bond four years running that will no doubt last a lifetime.
And, there among the clink of glasses, glow of Christmas lights, and background noise of bar chatter and laughter, our conversation doesn’t need any words at all, speaking volumes in knowing nods and little smirks, nestled snug in the realization that we’ve made it one more year.
