When I was 11, I would wake up Saturday mornings and immediately fire up the family desktop to publish my Top 10 songs of the week list on Corel Quattro Pro. My Dad being an announcer at the local Christian radio station, my chart was inevitably filled with Christian music artists, although I liked to think I was including the most interesting artists of this admittedly limited world.

It has been years since music has formed a core part of my identity, and even longer since I actually sat down to write a Top 10 list. As a teenager and young adult, listening to the right music mattered, and I loved the feeling of discovering a cool artist before my friends. I no longer feel this same sense of ownership over artists, especially when people are rarely buying albums and are mostly streaming individual tracks. I am certainly no exception to the wider industry trends. This past year I have consumed music almost exclusively on Spotify and Youtube, and I only purchased two albums, both of which were vinyl and gifts for friends (Josh Ritter’s Gathering and Chuck Berry’s Golden Decade).

This year I did listen to new albums from some of my favourite artists including Arcade Fire, The National, and Phoenix, but I still haven’t fallen in love with any of them. What has captured my attention this year is an ever expanding playlist I created on Spotify, which has grown to about 150 titles. These songs were mostly recommended to me by Spotify’s Discover Weekly Playlist, or by my friend Angel, who is the one person with whom I still consistently talk music with, and who has (mostly) impeccable taste.

Curating the soundtrack of my year through this massive playlist has been incredible satisfying, and it has made me more excited about music than I have been in a long time. But the downside is that this has been a mostly solitary experience. Outside of a couple of major hits that were also some of my favourites of the year, it is very possible that my best friends have never heard many of the songs that have been highlights of the year for me.

To fix this, I have put together a list of the songs that defined 2017 for me. Many of these songs were released in 2017, but others were released in 2016 or even much earlier. The only rule to be included in this list is that they had to be new to me in 2017.

In the spirit of sharing, I hope that you enjoy these songs, especially the ones you haven’t heard before. And please share your favourite songs of the year with me, because there is probably a good chance I haven’t heard many them!

Now to the list. I hope my 11 year old self would be proud.

11. Luis Fonsi (feat. Daddy Yankee and Justin Bieber) – Despacito

One April evening, I was having dinner with some friends when one of them played the remix of Despacito featuring Justin Bieber which had been released earlier that day. At this point, I hadn’t heard the original version of Despacito, which had already been dominating Latin charts for months. I also had no idea that it would become the biggest global hit of the year (Despacito became such a big hit that one friend even tried to convince me that it had already been a hit in Nicaragua when he was there in 2010).

I enjoyed Despacito’s summer domination, and it feels like the one piece of global shared culture that I was part of in 2017. No matter where I travelled I was sure to hear it, perhaps most memorably while watching a water aerobics class in the Slovenian resort town of Portorose.

Despacito may have become the most ubiquitous song of the year, but for me it is still first and foremost that song that my dear friends introduced to me at a dinner party, and for that memory alone it deserves a spot on this list.

10. Mallrat – For Real

And when you smile for real you make me smile for real.

This line, which is at the heart of this song, is one of my favourites of the year. It is so simple, and yet perfectly sums up for me what it feels like to be in love.

9. Camilla Cabello (feat. Young Thug) – Havana

Havana is one of the songs I discovered this year only once they entered the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100. A song featuring Young Thug is currently Number 2? I should probably listen to that!

Cabello opens the song by singing “Havana, ooh na-na”, and I was instantly hooked. This is a perfect song to get the party started, with Young Thug’s verse adding seamlessly to the vibe. Cabello sings about leaving half her heart in Havana, but if that is what led to the creation of this song, I think it was a fair trade-off.

8. Will Joseph Cook – Girls Like Me

A perfect piece of indie pop. I dare you to not be already singing along half way through your first listen.  I love that Cook sings the verses from his own perspective, but sings the chorus from the perspective of the female love interest.

7. Arcade Fire – Put Your Money One Me

Arcade Fire is one of my all-time favourite bands, but the new album hasn’t grabbed me yet as much as past releases yet, and I am not sure why. Maybe my tastes have changed, maybe it just isn’t as good as their past albums, or maybe the simple answer is that I have been listening to this song on repeat instead of giving the whole album a chance.

Put Your Money On Me sees the band revisiting the theme of free will. One of my favourite Arcade Fire songs is Ocean of Noise, especially the haunting line “Now who here among us, still believes in choice — not I.”

This time, Win Butler sings “If there was a race, a race for your heart, it started before you were born” and later “We were born innocent, but it lasts a day”.

We will never be done debating the question of free will, but at least from now on we have the perfect Abba-inspired dance track to accompany such existential discussions.

6. Litany – Bedroom

An instantly classic piece of low-key synth pop. I love the simplicity and directness of the lyrics, which see the singer inviting a potential lover to talk about the weather, meet her parents, and then go to her bedroom.  The lines “I thought I saw you on the Leeds train, but you weren’t there when I looked back again” are also some of my favourite of the year.

5. 1010 Benja SL – Boofiness

This is the most mysterious song on my list. Spotify recommended it to me in October, and it has been in heavy rotation ever since.  A quick search turned up very little about the artist besides a blog post talking about the greatness of this song and how little is known of the singer.

What I do know is that this song is six minutes of pure delight, with a beautiful piano line and sultry vocals.  If you could have seen me cooking anytime in the past two months, there is a good chance you would have seen me  yelling “Be patient while I’m on vacation” while listening to this song.

4. Mura Masa (feat. A$AP Rocky) – Love$ick

I like to think that my friend Angel and I have similar tastes in music, and I love most of the songs he sends me. So when I sent him this song earlier this year, I was surprised to hear he didn’t really like it. After a few months of me listening to it constantly, I tried sending it to him again, and this time he harshly told me that he would even go out of his way to skip it if it came on. This is by far our biggest disagreement about music this year, and Angel, I still cannot forgive you.

I have spent a lot of afternoons alone this year, and sometimes start to drift toward melancholia. Cranking this song was one of the surest ways to lift me from any funk. I am sure my wife Jessica would admit to arriving home after work on more than one occasion to catch me dancing to this song. But then she would also have to admit to joining in the dancing herself.

3. Pino D’Angio – Okay Okay

We moved to Italy at the beginning of the year, so it seems fitting to have at least one Italian song on this list. Pino D’Angio was introduced to me by Angel, who was singing some of his songs one morning while we were getting ready for work. And I want to make it clear that my love for this Italo Disco classic is not ironic. I love the entire sound, especially the interplay between D’Angio’s croaky sing-talking and the backup singers. Also, one of the underrated joys of living in Italy is getting to hear the Italian pronunciation of ‘Okay’, and if you can’t live here and experience that yourself, this song is the next best thing.

2. Jidenna (feat. Roman GianArthur) – Classic Man

There is a scene in the last third of Moonlight, when the protagonist Chiron and his friend Kevin are driving after recently reuniting. Over the car stereo you hear a ‘chopped and screwed version’ of Jidenna’s Classic Man, which Chiron cranks up when Kevin asks him where he would be sleeping that night after driving all the way from Atlanta to Miami.

Moonlight is a beautiful film exploring competing views of masculinity and touches on what it means to be a man, to be black, and to be gay. As a song, Classic Man also plays with and upends some of the dominant ideas of masculinity found in hip-hop, and so the thematic content of the song and the film are a good match.

But in a video for the Genius, Jidenna explains that he was initially surprised when the makers of Moonlight asked him to use Classic Man for the movie, since he didn’t think the sound of the song fit the vibe of the film, and he goes on to say that it was only when he heard the ‘chopped and screwed version’ that it made sense to him.

I had never heard Classic Man before Moonlight, completely unaware that it had been a relatively big hit in 2015. After watching Moonlight, it was actually Jessica who immediately looked up the song and sent it to me. We both quickly fell in love with the original version of the song, and the outfits Jidenna wears in the video make it a treat to watch. Classic Man became our anthem of the year and we have sung it together countless times, even if that meant subjecting our guests to our off-key voices.

Although I the original version of the song is by far my favourite, I love throwing on the ‘chopped and screwed’ version once in awhile and reflecting on Moonlight. In a year where the toxic results of certain ideas of masculinity have become all too clear, I think the importance of the dialogue created by this song and Moonlight cannot be understated.

 

1. Fyfe (feat. Kimbra) – Belong

I began 2017 watching fireworks on the seaside promenade in Baku, Azerbaijan, and I will finish the year on a plane travelling from Toronto to Rome after my first trip home in more than a year. In between I have mostly been in Rome, but also a lot in Geneva, and also 15 other countries. It has been a year of constant movement, of navigating unknowns. It has been a year full of amazing trips and visits from some of my dearest friends and family, but it has also been a year of spending lots of time alone for the simple reason that I had no one to call.

And so when Fyfe opens this song with “Can we make a home together”, I am all in. The song is less than three minutes long, but for me, it packs one hell of an emotional punch, and the first three lines of the chorus pretty much sum up 2017 for me:

I want to belong

Don’t you know we’re physical and we’re spiritual?

I’m tired of being a stranger to myself

And beyond the emotional resonance of the lyrics, this song is just damn catchy, with an irresistible call and response format and the perfect melding of Fyfe and Kimbra’s voices.

This is my favourite song of 2017. It acknowledges pain, loneliness and disillusionment, but ultimately answers that hope lies in giving ourselves to others and working to make a home together.

Honourable mentions (in no particular order)

• Phoenix – Fior Di Latte
• The Brinks – Temporary Love
• Kendrick Lamar (feat. Zacari) – Love
• Portugal The Man – Feel It Still (Medasin Remix)
• Rostam – Wood
• The XX – On Hold
• Ben Phipps – I Don’t Think So