I listen to a lot of music from Canada (and other exciting observations about my music listening history)

If you know me well you know that I like numbers and graphs. You may have seen me post a lot of graphs and interpretation that I made about COVID. Here are some numbers and graphs about a more fun topic.

Every year at the beginning of December I see lots of people post their "Spotify Wrapped" on social media. It's always interesting to me to see what music other people listened to the most in the year. But for me personally, I want more than that. So this is kind of like a much nerdier and more detailed version of a Spotify Wrapped. And not just for a year, but for most of my adult life.

Since 2005, I've used the website last.fm to keep track of all the music I listen to (on a computer or iPod, at least; it can also track music you listen to on streaming services on your phone but I very rarely stream music on my phone). The popularity of Spotify Wrapped makes it clear that a lot of people enjoy being able to see stats about the music they listen to, so I recommend the website if you want more of that! If you go to my profile and scroll down, you can see my top eight artists (all time) displayed, kind of like a Spotify Wrapped:

Definitely a big lead for Okkervil River in first place. If you click around you can see breakdowns by artist, by song, by album, over different periods of time. But because I'm such a data nerd, that wasn't enough for me. Luckily, a kind person made a website that exports your entire listening history as a CSV file you can download. So after doing this, I used the programming language R (running under RStudio) to play around with the data.

Here are some of the results I found interesting. Will anyone else find them interesting? Maybe? But lots of people post their Spotify Wrapped every year, so I'm going to post this.

Top artists by year

Here's a scatter plot of my top five artists for each year by year and number of plays. There's a lot of information here so apologies for the small text. Click to open and zoom in if you care to.

Observations:

-For 2005 the data only cover the last five months of the year, hence the second through fifth place artists having low numbers. Still, I listened to songs by Ozma over 1400 times. I was super obsessed with Ozma when I started using last.fm.

-Okkervil River has by far the most appearances in my yearly top five with ten. Next is Typhoon with six. 

-The top seven yearly totals are all either Ozma, Okkervil River, or Woodpigeon.

-The highest yearly totals are all in the earlier years. In more recent years my music listening has become more spread out over a larger number of artists.

-The Weather Station in 2021 recorded my highest yearly total for one artist in nearly ten years.

Top single months for artists

These are the top fifteen totals recorded by artists for single months:

Woodpigeon comes in with three of the top five. Like Ozma, I was also super obsessed with Woodpigeon for a time. I like the story of how I discovered Woodpigeon. When Cara and I saw A Northern Chorus's farewell show in Hamilton, Ontario, in 2008, the next day we went to a music store there and each picked out one used CD to buy (knowing nothing about the music except for what we could see in the artwork and liner notes; it was a thing we often enjoyed doing). Woodpigeon's Songbook was Cara's pick. If you're an indie pop fan, I highly recommend checking out that album and even more so their subsequent album Treasury Library Canada. Sadly, Woodpigeon is the only artist in my top twenty overall artists that I've never seen live.

The way that my music has become more spread out over a larger number of artists and less concentrated on single artists is also evident here as the National's October 2019 tally is the only one on this list more recent than 2013.

Looking at this list, it's fun to think back on what was happening in my life and why I was listening to those particular bands so much in those years and months. Which is a good segue into...

I listen to an awful lot of Sufjan Stevens in December

Sufjan Stevens came in fourth on the above list with his December 2012 tally. That was the month after the release of his second five-disc box set of Christmas music. Yes, he has released ten discs' worth of Christmas music (a mix of traditional and original songs). And I love all of it. To me, Sufjan Stevens' music basically is the Christmas season. December 2012 was also when Cara and I saw Sufjan's spectacular Christmas show at the Beachland Ballroom. Definitely one of the best shows I've ever attended. So December 2012 stands out the most, but every single December, I'm putting all that Sufjan Christmas music in heavy rotation. And so if you take each of my top nine artists overall and sum up how much I've listened to them by month of the year for the entire 2005-2021 period, you get this:

There's one month for one artist that is a really huge outlier here! Everything else is fairly random, although I enjoy the nice oscillatory pattern on the Okkervil River graph.

Now let's move on to...

My music listening habits by geography (or, I listen to a lot of music from Canada)

I took every artist for whom I've recorded at least 100 total plays and manually annotated their nations of origin (as well as state or province for American and Canadian bands). First, here's a graph showing all the nations that appeared in my history, with the total number of listens for each:

The USA has the most by far, which is obviously not surprising. But the USA also has a much larger population than any of the other countries on here. What happens if we adjust the numbers to make them a ratio of the number of plays to the national population? Then we get this:

Canada surges into the lead! Interestingly, Iceland is second. Iceland's population of 366,000 is slightly smaller than the city proper population of Cleveland, Ohio. The USA is now third. I've noticed for quite a while that there's a disproportionate amount of music that I listen to from Canada considering how much smaller a population it has than the US. There's just something about those Canadians, man.

And here's a similar analysis but in list form for the top states and provinces of my music listening history. First ranked by raw number of plays:

No surprise that California comes in first considering its huge population and sizeable music scene, but it just barely edges out Ontario. Now to reorder the list by the population-adjusted numbers:

I think the fact that the top eight states and provinces on this list consist of four Canadian provinces along with the states of Oregon, Washington, Maine, and Ohio is easily the most "on brand" thing for me in this post.

And last, what I consider by far the most interesting result from the analysis I did:

Trends in my music listening by vocalist gender

Similar to the geographical annotation, I also manually annotated by lead vocals: male, female, both, or none (none meaning music without vocals or with extremely minimal vocals). I didn't really have strictly defined criteria for the categorization but just went with what felt right, so Arcade Fire counted as "male" because Win Butler does lead on a large majority of the songs with just the occasional Régine Chassagne song, whereas the New Pornographers counted as "both" because even though most of the songs do have male lead vocals, there are a substantial number of songs throughout their catalog with Neko Case or occasionally another female vocalist taking lead.

I then excluded the "both" and "none" artists (a small fraction of the total), calculated the fraction of what remained that fell under "male" vs. "female" for each year, and got this graph:

It's just such a striking trend! When I first started using last.fm in 2005, I listened to almost no music with female lead vocals. This had been true for as long as I listened to mostly music of my own choosing, going back to adolescence. 2005 was when I first started to really expand my taste in music. And going forward, there was a steady increase in how much music with female lead vocals I listened to. Finally, in 2020 and 2021, I reached very close to a 50/50 balance. It's just such an interesting trend to me. If you're a stats nerd, you might appreciate that a linear regression of fraction (either female or male) against year has a whopping 0.86 R-squared value (p = 5.1 x 10^-8).

I think it says something about how boys are socialized to avoid "girly" things. I don't remember ever having an active dislike for music with female vocals. But I still tended not to choose to listen to it. Then, as an adult, as I explored more and more music, and started to just listen to whatever I enjoyed listening to, this eventually led to a near perfect balance of vocals by gender. Funny how that worked out.

So that includes my super nerdy analysis of my music listening history. I hope someone else found it entertaining, but at the very least I did! It's a more cheery topic for graphs than how many people have died from COVID, so at least there's that.

Sufjan Stevens at the Beachland Ballroom, 12/16/12

I'm fairly convinced that Sufjan Stevens is a genius.  I'm also convinced that he's a pretty weird guy, and that he's aware of this.  Last night, after stumbling over some lyrics early on in his new epic 12-minute holiday masterpiece "Christmas Unicorn," he wryly said, "Who wrote these lyrics, anyway?"  Oh yeah, and let's not forget that he was wearing an elaborate unicorn headdress festooned with balloons and feathers at the time.

There's just something about the guy.  I mean, who does these things?  How many indie folk musicians would bedeck themselves with sparkles and balloons and a unicorn horn during a show?  How many indie folk musicians would release 10 discs of Christmas music, one disc for each year, in two 5 disc sets, each packaged with all sorts of extras ranging from stickers to deep, thoughtful essays on the holiday season to temporary tattoos?  How many indie folk musicians would close an album (The Age of Adz) with a 25 minute pop song ("Impossible Soul")?  How many people, period, could even write a 25 minute pop song and make the whole thing absolutely brilliant?  And how many people could get a room full of mostly twenty-and-thirty-something indie music fans to boisterously sing along to a series of traditional Christmas carols?

I certainly had high expectations for Sufjan's concert at the Beachland, where I'd seen him twice previously.  Both were great shows, and I was excited to see him perform his holiday music, which I love.  That's something I never would have thought I'd say as recently as a few years ago.  I can't say that I ever had any particular fondness for Christmas music before I started listening to Sufjan's Songs For Christmas collection.  I fell in love with the first five disc release, both for the beautiful renditions of traditional carols and (especially) for some of the best original songs of Sufjan's career.  This year he came out with the second five disc set.  It's easily even more ambitious than the first, and I'm beginning to feel that it's just as great.  So Cara and I headed over to the venue a half hour before doors opened, hoping we'd be able to get a decent spot near the stage (last time we'd been near the back), and fortunately, the line was not yet too long when we got there.

I knew beforehand that the show was going to be quite a spectacle, but when I walked into the ballroom, my eyes instantly widened at what I saw.  The stage was all decked out in holiday cheer, and that was nice enough, but to the left of the stage...

There was a giant, colorful, game-show-style wheel stretching from floor to ceiling with the names of different Christmas carols festively decorating it.  One might have guessed that this wheel would be spun during the show to select the songs that would be used for the sing-a-long portion of the night, and one would have been right.  This was all tremendous fun.  There were even hymn booklets handed out at the entrance to ensure that everyone could sing along.  Here's the cover (make note of the instructions printed on it):

Perhaps ten or twelve carols were performed sing-along style, with Sufjan, his band and the audience all celebrating the holidays together.  This was divided into two segments of the main set, the rest of which was a stunning display of musicianship easily up to the standards of any "normal" Sufjan Stevens performance.  I'm truly amazed at the diversity of his catalog, from his early acoustically focused songs to his more electronic and experimental recent stuff.  His Christmas music covers the same range.  Sufjan's music can at times be catchy, rousing, or majestic, but at its best, I'd usually describe it as "heartachingly beautiful."  A prime example would be "For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fatherless in Ypsilanti," a fan favorite from the Michigan album featuring Sufjan's amazing voice and banjo playing which was inserted as a brief, non-Christmas interlude in the middle of the main set.  Several of his holiday songs are just as chills-inducing.  My favorite is probably "Sister Winter," which was an absolute thrill to see performed live.  I also loved "Justice Delivers Its Death," a new song in which Sufjan seems to ponder the strange contradiction of a holiday meant to celebrate Christ's birth that is celebrated with rampant consumption and consumerism.

There were several short hymns which Sufjan and his band performed a cappella, filling the ballroom with angelic harmonies.  And at other points in the show, there were bubble and confetti machines, and inflatable Santas and unicorns and enormous bouncing balls thrown into the crowd.

And then there was Sufjan, dressed as the Christmas Unicorn, climbing up onto a speaker directly above where Cara and I were standing, during an astonishingly good song that goes from gentle, playful verses to an increasingly majestic chorus before transitioning into an irresistibly danceable cover of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart."  It was truly a magical moment, and one that only Sufjan could pull off.  "Christmas Unicorn" closed out the main set perfectly.  After several minutes of unrelenting applause from an enraptured audience, Sufjan returned to the stage sans holiday attire for a perfect encore that filled me with nostalgia for more than one reason.

You see, the first concert I ever attended at the Beachland was Sufjan Stevens on September 13, 2005.  (I know the exact date because we have a poster from the show hanging in our apartment.  I didn't actually buy the poster at the show, but found it at a local shop years later.)  Not only was it my first concert at the Beachland, it was at that point in my life that going to concerts became a "thing" that I did.  In a sense, it was the beginning of a new era in my life.  At that show seven years ago, Sufjan was touring his breakthrough Illinois album, and last night's encore was quite Illinois-heavy, including "John Wayne Gacy, Jr.," another one of those heartachingly beautiful songs on which Sufjan's voice and lyrics do things that no one else's can.  As I stood there, I couldn't help but think of being in the same room, hearing the same music more than seven years ago, and of all the ways my life had changed since then.  In a way, it was like things had come full circle.

After playing "Come On! Feel the Illinoise!" Sufjan said he thought they had time for one more song.  I was silently hoping for one song in particular, and when he laid down the opening notes of "Chicago" on piano I was overjoyed.  "Chicago," after all, was the song Cara and I used for the recessional of our wedding, and now we were standing together, perhaps ten feet away from Sufjan Stevens himself, seeing the song performed live.  (Amazingly, earlier this year we also got to see a live performance of our wedding's first dance song, Bowerbirds' "Northern Lights.")  Talk about a perfect way to end the night!

During the show, some of the stage banter included joking about how the world was supposedly going to end in a few days.  And I thought to myself, if the world were going to end, this was a good concert to go out on!

I'm the Christmas Unicorn.  You're the Christmas Unicorn too.

New music August!

Summer marches on, another year of school starts, and I wonder where all the time has gone. I'm mostly over the broken hip now, which is a relief. I've gotten in some good bike rides lately. More on that, perhaps, in a later entry. For now, some brief thoughts on a couple of exciting new albums that dropped this month.

August, it turns out, contained releases from two of the heavyweights of the indie music scene, and both will undoubtedly be in many conversations for album of the year. Early in the month, Arcade Fire unleashed their third album, The Suburbs, amidst much hype, which it more than lived up to. In contrast, Sufjan Stevens made many people's days (weeks, months, years?) when last week he released a new EP completely out of nowhere. Well, it's called an "EP," but like the new Arcade Fire album, Sufjan's All Delighted People EP clocks in at an hour long - despite containing half as many tracks.

Looking back to five years ago, both of these artists were significant in the evolution of my music tastes. In 2005, my music horizons broadened greatly. It was an exciting time, as I discovered artist after artist putting out great music I had never heard before. I remember looking up numerous albums on Amazon. You know how they have a section for "Customers who bought this album also bought"? I couldn't help but notice that for almost every band I looked up, Arcade Fire's Funeral appeared there. So I bought it, and today it's still one of my favorite albums ever. Although I still consider their debut LP their strongest effort, Neon Bible was an excellent followup, and now I'd say The Suburbs is an even better third release. A couple great things about Arcade Fire - each of their albums is an evolution in their sound, and each of their albums is a real, cohesive album. "Sprawl II" is an amazing song, definitely one of my favorites of the year, but it wouldn't be nearly as powerful if the album hadn't been building perfectly to that point. It's pretty likely that The Suburbs will end up being my top album of the year, and the only band with a string of three albums that I would collectively rate as better than Arcade Fire's first three LPs is Okkervil River (Down the River of Golden Dreams, Black Sheep Boy, and The Stage Names would be my pick there).

Back to 2005. Sufjan Stevens at the Beachland Ballroom was the first big concert I went to after getting into the indie music scene. It was a great show, and I thoroughly enjoyed Illinois, but it's really been in the past year that I've gotten more and more into Sufjan. He's a brilliant artist, but at times it feels like he could use an editor. Illinois is a great album, and its high points are stunning, but it's also a bit longer than it really should be. The (much) less grandiose Seven Swans may actually be his best album. Actually, this probably sounds funny, but my personal favorite Sufjan release is Songs for Christmas Vol. 5. "Sister Winter," "Star of Wonder," and "Holy, Holy, Holy" are three of his greatest and most beautiful songs.

Anyway, I was lucky enough to see Sufjan again last fall, and it was another great show. I admit, though, that I had a mixed reaction to the new material he played then. He's definitely grown much more experimental in his sound. I felt like some of the new stuff was breathtaking, but some of it left me . . . well, somewhat confused. "All Delighted People," the title track from the new EP, was one of the new songs he played, and at 11+ minutes, it had enough in it that I was able to have both reactions within one song. Having listened to it more now, it's definitely grown on me. The last few minutes are especially gorgeous. There are still spots in the song where I feel Sufjan goes a bit over-the-top; at this point I'm pretty sure I prefer the 8-minute "Classic Rock Version," which is probably my favorite track on the EP. The rest of the album contains five shorter, more straightforward (relatively speaking) songs, with "The Owl and the Tanager" being a definite highlight, and closes with the 17-minute "Djohariah." Know what I said earlier about sometimes feeling Sufjan could use an editor? Well, surprisingly, I don't think this is one of those times. The final track really works for me, and the 17 minutes don't drag at all.

So, August has been a good month for music. Arcade Fire and Sufjan Stevens both released albums that will be showing up on lots of end-of-the-year lists. Personally, I rank Arcade Fire's higher, but anyone who is at all into this sort of music would be crazy to miss out on either of these albums. It's a good time to be a music fan!