The Common Listener
Recommendations from 2024
“The common reader… differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure…” - Virginia Woolf
This isn’t a music blog, exactly - but regular readers know I include a listening recommendation at the end of every essay. Each of the last two years, I collected these recommendations into their own post in lieu of a “best of” or (god forbid) “wrapped.”
In 2024, I also posted a few articles that could maybe pass - if you squint - as music journalism. ICYMI, there are essays about:
Galaxie 500 outtakes
Harry Smith and the Anthology of American Folk Music
Joni Mitchell demos
And here are all the Dada Drummer Almanach listening recommendations from 2024, with hotlinks to Bandcamp wherever possible. This isn’t a ranking, it’s chronological - I’ll include what I was cooking at the time for seasonal flavor. It begins and ends in winter: