Are you here for playlists? Here are my favorite songs of 2022. Here are my friends’ favorite songs. And here’s the playlist of 90s songs I listened to quite a bit.
All beautiful images created by my daughter Evie.
The RCA Car Connecting Pack Compact Disc Cassette Adapter
The summer of 1995 was the first summer after my older brother Eddie got his driver’s license. My parents bought him a green Honda Civic, and with the driver’s license and the car came freedom! And by freedom, I mean the responsibility to drive both of us to Foothill College every morning for summer school.
I was taking Algebra. My parents were rushing me through math so I could…take more math sooner? I don’t know. I didn’t understand the reason. I was bored, and I don’t remember much about it. I don’t remember my teacher, or what they looked like, or who my classmates were. I don’t remember what class Eddie was taking or if our classes started or ended at the same time.
I actually barely remember anything from the classroom that summer, but I do remember the drives to and from Foothill. The drives are etched into my mind. And when I think of those drives, here’s what I remember: Darius Rucker’s voice. The first do-do-do-do’s of Ode To My Family by the Cranberries. Kiss From a Rose. Carnival. Only Wanna Be With You. Zombie. The theme song from Friends.
Because the Civic didn’t have power windows or an automatic transmission or much leg room in the back, but it did have something that was probably more important to any 16-year-old: a stereo system with a tape deck. And whether we were headed to summer school, church, basketball with friends (from church), or Mountain Mike’s Pizza (to pick up pizza for church), the tape deck was blasting tunes. “Blasting tunes” is an old-person way of saying listening to music. Anyway, we were blasting tunes. Sometimes with the windows down on the freeway. I was 12. I loved it.
Eddie had bought a couple of cassette tapes. And sometimes we would also make mixtapes by recording songs off the radio using the boombox at home (you’d get part of the DJ introducing the song in there sometimes). But the real coup came when Eddie got an exclusive (not really) offer from Columbia House in the mail: 12 CDs for a penny. Yeah you read that right. This was a real thing. All you had to do was pay full price for one CD and shipping and handling for all the rest, and that came out to maybe 50 bucks or so total. So that was 12 CDs for 50 bucks. As long as you remembered to cancel your membership after that introductory offer, it was a pretty good deal (and if you didn’t, you’d be paying $25 for a CD you didn’t ask for, every month, followed by a bill).
So Eddie started getting a bunch of CDs in the mail, and now it was time to really enjoy the summer drives! Except there was a problem: this car didn’t have a CD player. That was a luxury at the time, and look, this was a manual transmission, two-door starter car. The tape deck was the luxury. So how were we going to play Cracked Rear View (15 million copies sold) if we didn’t have a CD player?
The answer: an RCA Car Connecting Pack Compact Disc Cassette Adapter. If you’re not familiar, it was a dummy cassette tape you put into the tape deck that had a four-foot-long mini-jack cable coming out of it, which fit perfectly into the headphone port of your Sony Discman, which was sitting on the floor of the passenger seat. With the adapter, anyone could play CDs through their tape deck! Problem solved!
Well, kind of. Eddie was a peaceful driver, but you can’t smooth out every bump and pothole on the road. And so every time we would have a little bump, the CD player would skip, and there are few things more annoying in life than a skipping CD player. It’s my firm belief that heaven and hell are both playing your favorite music, but in hell the track is skipping.
So as any younger sibling who grew up in the 90s already knows, the solution for this problem was for me to hold the CD player. And you better believe that I was going to absolutely knock this job out of the park. Allow me to put any humility aside and say that I have always considered myself a great car passenger. I will find you directions. I will reach the snacks. I will keep you awake on a long drive late at night if you need it. I will not be on my phone. I will not fart once. No one takes being a good passenger more seriously than I do.
And if I have to keep a CD player from skipping, I am going to do an incredible job. In my mind, I would do such a good job that Eddie would look over and be like: “buddy, you are holding the crap out of that thing, amazing!” I never chose the songs but I made sure they played well. I rolled with every single bounce, absorbing every bump and zig and zag. I held the discman like a pyramid of fabrege mugs full of hot coffee filled to the brim. Honestly, I’ve never been better at anything. That’s 12-year-old me, holding the CD player in the passenger seat of my brother’s green Honda Civic, with the adapter spooling out of the tape deck right into my hands. Peaking.
Alas, my skills were only necessary for a short time. My brother went to college the next year, and in 1998, on my birthday, I inherited my parents’ Toyota Previa mini-van. Besides having middle seats that turned around, transforming this very egg-shaped, four-cylinder van into a party bus, it also had a built-in CD player. And by that point I had numerous CDs (sorry for bragging) and could listen to any of them in the car at any time (again, sorry for bragging so hard–did I mention this was a minivan).
My favorite CD was Dave Matthews Band’s hit 1996 sophomore album Crash. But I have to admit that I didn’t like it the first time I listened to it. I was like: “what is with these extended instrumental breaks?” “Why is this song over six minutes?” “What is a tripping billy?” Some music clicks with you instantly, some doesn’t.
I bought the CD because my friend Joe had their first album and it had some fun songs on it. But it was a bit of a gamble–in those days, sometimes you would pay $15 for an album and not know if you were going to like it. And on first listen, it was a bad gamble. “Why would you do this, Mr. Matthews?” was my prevailing thought at 14 years old. I wanted it to be different than it was. As my ten-year-old cousin Chris once told me in a debate: “Dave Matthews can learn something from a real band, like Len.” Len wasn’t part of our collective conscience yet, but that’s how I felt on first listen.
But obviously I was an idiot when I was 14. Watch three seconds of literally any footage of me doing anything in high school and you’d come to the same conclusion. Less obviously, I did have a minor capacity to extend appreciation for things outside of my wheelhouse. I liked trying new things even if it took me a minute to warm up.
So I ran the album back, and ended up loving it. Those songs meant so much to me as a high schooler who felt like the music was different than anything he had heard before, only this time in a good way. The album represented freshness and possibility and exploration and complexity. And I listened to it over and over again. In fact, I listened to a lot of music from during high school over and over again: Dave Matthews, Foo Fighters, Third Eye Blind, 311, Sugar Ray and whatever else was playing on Alice@97.3 and Live105. Might have been different bands and different stations for you, but music brought me a lot of joy during a challenging social time, and it’s probably the same for high schoolers across the world, then and now.
I didn’t love high school. I didn’t hate it, either, but I wasn’t that sad when it was over. I was really excited to go to college and have a little more adventure and a lot more freedom. And so, as I headed northeast to UC Davis, as I was making new friends in a new place at a new school with new roommates, with a new computer and new ways of getting music (shoutout limewire and winamp), I slowly felt like putting away the songs that reminded me of things that I was glad to leave behind: living with my parents, waking up at 6:30 am, hours of homework after football practice, college admission anxiety, having an unrequited crush, acne…okay, acne was still very much a part of my life in college. But anyway, imagine a song on your playlist immediately makes you recall driving home from a grueling football practice so you can use clearasil before doing hours of homework. The associations were slightly depressing, and it didn’t feel good to listen to it anymore, even if I knew they (well, some of them) were good songs.
I had burnt myself out on the music of my high school years. The associations were too strong. And as the years passed and we got further away from the 90s, I started to feel like the music was stale, like it had been in a time capsule for a decade. So, in the years after high school, I put all of that music in the closet, and I never felt like opening it back up.
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How The Music of the 90s Helped My 2022
“Andrew I came here to read about your favorite music of 2022, and that prologue was longer than ‘#41’ by Dave Matthews Band off their hit 1996 sophomore album Crash.”
If you said that, you’re right, and also: great song choice. One of many great songs from the late 90s. Yet I still didn’t want to listen to them. That is, until this summer.
I had a pretty challenging spring. It wasn’t a bad spring; in fact, there was a lot of good. But I took on way too much responsibility, and I was doing too many things, and which was mostly my fault, and I was stressed, and I had moments when I wasn’t enjoyable to be around because of it. I was getting emotional in ways I usually don’t. I had higher highs and lower lows. I couldn’t see any part of my life clearly because other things would get in the way, and I couldn’t emotionally manage my way out of a paper bag. Reflecting on it now, I actually kinda felt like I did back in high school.
Teaching was great though. I loved being in the classroom, and my Communication & Sport class was especially joyful. It was full of thoughtful students who seemed to really enjoy being around each other and doing the work. The discussions were rich and the students had great ideas. They engaged so well with our guest speakers. I took some of my students to play frisbee golf on campus. I played music before every class and we talked about what students were into. The baseball players made fun of each other. We had a class dog. In 15 years of teaching, I can’t remember having a better class culture.
One day, I set aside some time for students to do something productive. I don’t really remember what it was. But some students were outside, others were talking with classmates, and as we were wrapping up, Jianna and I started chatting about music. I think we had both gone to the same John Mayer concert in March, and were talking about our appreciation for how well he pulled off his 80s-themed album. Now I generally don’t love music that tries to throw it back, but I can appreciate an 80s homage because the 80s was, as Jianna and other students might say, “a vibe” (I probably used that incorrectly). A particular quality that you can feel. But I can’t say I loved 80s music.
But, Jianna said that she loved the 80s–music, movies, all of it; in fact, she wrote about some 80s sports movies for an earlier assignment. And she loved the 90s, too. This was genuine appreciation. That threw me off. Why would someone born after the heyday of Zubaz love 80s and 90s music? It’s so…80s and 90s! You don’t have to listen to it, we have other music now! The 00s! And the 10s! I don’t what we’re calling those decades but we have 20 whole years of music from them!
A word on behalf of all college instructors: we love the person in class who always has something thoughtful to add to discussion. We also love the student who brings positive energy to every class. We love the student who works to understand others. And the student who clearly cares about the course material. And the person who is clearly going to take what we’re learning and apply it to their life outside of class. We love all those students.
I just described Jianna. She’s the last paragraph of student. I have never appreciated a student more. I’d pay her a salary to sit in my classes if I could afford it. So I care a lot about how she looks at the world.
Jianna explained that her love of 80s and 90s culture, along with simply appreciating the music and the vibes, is partially a connection to her parents. She watches 80s movies with her dad and goes through her mom’s CD collection from the 90s. It’s the stuff they love. She has positive associations with those things, and if you also understand that she’s what most people would describe as an old soul, it’s not hard to see why she would love it all, too.
After our conversations in class, I decided to give my favorite 90s music another shot. Just to see how someone who didn’t live through the decade might appreciate the era in a more positive way than I did. At the same time, the end of the school year was approaching, which meant that my work was slowing down tremendously, and Little League was coming to an end, and I decided to take a self-imposed break from a stressful movie project for a little bit.
Do you remember that feeling in high school, when class would let out for the summer, and you felt weightless? It’s hard to have that feeling as an adult–we have too much responsibility and knowledge–but I kinda had it this summer. At the same time, I was taking my daughter Evie to the high school for preseason volleyball practice, which reminded me of my own experiences driving to high school.
Evie and I always listen to music together in the car. She’s a music lover and has wider and better taste at 14 than I did. You can give credit to Spotify, or her music talent, or something else, she definitely hast the top Spotify artists in her personal playlist. I try to play her all sorts of stuff, and we encourage her to think about music theory and structure and all that, though we’re a bit limited in those regards. She asks questions about instrumentation and makes fun of phrasing and we enjoy flipping through all the songs. In any case, she loves a wide variety of music, including So Much to Say, the first song by Dave Matthews Band off their hit 1996 sophomore album Crash.
So, I’m driving Evie to the high school every day, and we’re listening to my favorite songs from my time in high school. And I was already quite emotional and reflective, and I just felt a lot. High school, emotions, 90s music. Could have gone poorly.
But this time, my memories were different. It wasn’t football practice, homework, and clearasil. It was…A’s games, wiffleball, sleepovers, high school baseball, goofing off, lunch at Togo’s, pool parties, pizza, friends, Friends, road trips to LA, the middle seats in the Toyota Previa…and holding the discman in the car. And yeah, some football practice, but it didn’t give me anxiety to think about it this time. Maybe football practice was actually fine. I was seeing it from a different perspective, and that was all the difference.
What if 90s music came without the baggage I had heaped on it? What if instead it was a way for an old soul to connect with her mom and dad on family trips? Or a father to connect with his music-loving daughter on the way to volleyball practice? Or brothers driving to summer school?
Of course, it didn’t hurt that my summer was nothing like my spring. I had time to focus on the things that mattered to me and my family, and I was the father and husband that I wanted to be. And I was seeing things clearly because I had the time and energy to do so. I was having great conversations with wonderful people and playing basketball and tennis and spending time with family and all that good stuff.
So I had time to reflect on my life, which I did plenty of, especially while listening to music. And I realized that I needed to have a mindset of being a good passenger. I needed to roll with the bumps, find directions, grab the snacks, stay off the phone, and pop in a new CD from time to time. And no farting in the car. Metaphorically. This was me seeing things clearly.
You know how being in a good mood can make everything seem better? In June and July, I would sometimes wake up overwhelmed with positive emotion, excited to experience the day. That’s almost embarrassing to admit but it’s true. Even when we had trips cancelled due to Covid, or I had to deal with difficult people, it was hard to keep me from focusing on the good stuff. I would find either meaning or value in every little thing. “Maybe this isn’t so bad.” And those positive emotions certainly rubbed off on my associations with 90s music. I know that.
But we all know that music affects the way we feel, and I think the music was doing some of the work the other way, too.
This is simplistic, but here’s what I say about 90s music, 80s movies, my spring, the high school experience, and whatever else you or I don’t love right now: maybe it’s actually not “bad.” Maybe it’s actually good but we need a different perspective. Everything seems a little bit rosier with this mentality. That’s something I learned this summer and I hope I never forget it.
And that’s the #1 reason why this was my favorite year for music.
All the Other Reasons
Andrew, I feel like you had So Much To Say but you didn’t talk about the music from this year!
True. So let’s go down the list.
2. Actually, there was a lot of really good music in 2022.
My friend Zack said he thinks the big hits were more upbeat in 2022. That might be true. I don’t know that all my favorites were upbeat, but they certainly brought me a lot of joy. Here’s a playlist of my favorites from 2022.
3. Two of my favorite artists released absolute classics.
Spoon released what I think is their best album ever in January. My friend Josh loves Spoon, and he explained it best when he said they find the groove in every song. The album is titled Lucifer on the Sofa, but hold on Sunday School teachers: you’re allowed to talk about the devil without it being devil worship. In fact, Britt Daniel explains that Lucifer on the Sofa is a figurative way to talk about how easy it is to give into our worst impulses. This album meant a lot to me the whole year.
Phoenix released a great one in November. They know what they’re doing, and there are so many good songs on here, including my favorite song of the year, After Midnight.
Both of these bands, ironically, have been together since the 90s. But I don’t think of them as 90s bands, and I feel that they do a great job refreshing their sound with each album.
4. I had a real Spotify account for the whole year.
Here’s something you should know about today’s young people and music: they have access to all of it. When you were in high school, you might have purchased tapes, CDs, or ripped songs off Napster. The first song I bought off iTunes was Float On by Modest Mouse in May 2004, a month before I graduated from college. “You mean I can just buy any song right away?” So now kids and adults can listen to anything they want at any time. That means you can find so much music from this year and the past that it can be overwhelming.
I think, overall, it’s a great thing. Choice is a positive. This was the first full year of having a Spotify Premium account, and I felt free to explore lots of great music this year.
4. I had good music friends.
I have always enjoying making playlists and CDs for other people, though I would say it was rare that it would go the other way. Well the tide turned in 2022. Starting with my daughter. Her tastes will obviously evolve as time goes on, but she’s 100 percent at the point now where I want to hear all her recommendations. She’s not throwing Encanto (respectfully, nothing wrong with Encanto) and Kidz Bop at me. She understands music, and we have some overlapping taste, and I love about her favorites. We both really loved Charlie Burg’s album.
It’s been a joy to have music as a way to connect with students as well. Jianna and I shared 80s and 90s playlists but also plenty of contemporary stuff. A decent chunk of my 2022 favorites were originally her recs. Margot works at the SCU radio station and shared music with me weekly in the fall. Danny sent me his favorite Taylor Swift songs after a conversation about Midnights in class. So I have enjoyed that a lot.
Like every year, I always love talking music with my best friends. Stacy and I are always sharing favorites, and we work on a year-end playlist for our group of college friends. And I have some friends from church who are a little ambivalent towards music these days, and we had some good conversations about why that is, and what they might like. In those conversations, they’ve shared what they do like from right now. And I think that gets them think a little more about why they might be predisposed towards the music of the past, which has been fun to talk about this year for me, since I’ve always felt the opposite.
Here are my friends’ favorite songs of 2022.
5. We connected through concerts.
We went to some good concerts this year, and my favorite was getting to see Phoenix at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley. I have loved them for a while, and never got the chance to see them live. I’m not sure why I thought they would just be okay, but they were amazing. And I got to go with Heather, which was special because Phoenix has always reminded us of each other–but we didn’t fully realize that until we attended this concert.
I also got to take my mom to see Hauser, an artist that she has loved and was willing to travel to Croatia to see. But we saw him in Concord, which is not Croatia but a lot closer. She loved it.
Among other shows, including seeing John Mayer twice, we took Evie to Lake Street Dive for her birthday. Lots of fun.
6. My son Theo used music to make school better.
Lastly, I have to highlight what my son did at his elementary school. The school played music at lunch every Friday, but to the chagrin of Theo and his friends, it was all Kidz Bop. They didn’t love it. So Theo asked the principal if they could make a change. Theo surveyed all the 4th and 5th graders to collect their favorite songs. Theo and I took the list he compiled, and put all the definitely-appropriate songs into a “School Lunch” Spotify playlist. That’s now the list the school plays every Friday, and his classmates really appreciate it. Theo even included Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley, which for some reason is now a favorite of kids everywhere. They’re rickrolling themselves and I love it.
So it was a great music year for me, both contemporary and classic, I loved how it changed my mindset and helped me make connections with others. Thanks, Music!
Are you still reading?
Here are my top 10 albums of 2022.
1. Spoon– Lucifer on the Sofa
2. Charlie Burg– Infinitely Tall
3. Phoenix – Alpha Zulu
4. Camila Cabello– Familia
5. Este Haim, Christopher Stracey – Cha Cha Real Smooth Soundtrack
6. YEBBA – Live at Electric Lady
7. Wilderado – Wilderado
8. COIN – Uncanny Valley
9. Harry Styles – Harry’s House
10. Lake Street Dive – Fun Machine: The Sequel