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Over the past couple of years, the staff at All Music Guide has collaborated on All Music Loves, a series of blog posts celebrating a certain music genre or year. That inspired me to make my own hand-picked playlists devoted to personal favorite songs released within a certain year – on Spotify, of course. While the naming of the playlists with initials was cheekily swiped from AMG music critic and Spotify user Stephen Thomas Erlewine, doing a playlist cover which spotlights a design from that particular year is all mine (above, a set of watches designed by Phillippe Starck for Fossil). I’ve already completed one for 1968, which is 128 tracks strong. This latest one is only half as long – 2003!
And why did I pick 2003, of all years? I thought it was a good opportunity to catch up on a year in which I was too bogged down with work (my final year designing at the newspaper, consigned to doing the non-creative, crap jobs at twice the work volume) and blogging (Scrubbles.net was once quite popular, unbelievable as it seems) to think about music. Most of what I heard back then was old stuff – discovering bossa nova, MPB, French and Sunshine Pop, and all sorts of vintage junk on mix CDs from friends. The new stuff didn’t attract me all that much (I believe I bought all of three albums by current artists that year). If anything, this project served as a catching-up on what was going on back then.
The music in MRH03 probably isn’t the hippest stuff around (I’ve even heard a few tracks playing at Wal-Mart), but it does have a good selection of melodic, somewhat underrated pop. Three tracks each come from two of my favorite albums of that year, Belle and Sebastian’s Dear Catastrophe Waitress and the Eels’ Shootenanny! (both albums also use the same font on their covers – the wonderful Clarendon). Putting together this playlist netted a lot of surprising finds. The popular songs of that year were, by and large, awful. Only two US #1 singles wound up here (Beyoncé and Eminem). Unexpectedly, I found a lot of great stuff by super-slick, commercial acts from the UK such as Girls Aloud and Dannii Minogue, along with Indie Twee Pop groups like The Shins, Club 8 and Camera Obscura. Some tunes were gathered by reading through old Rolling Stone magazine issues, Wikipedia, and year-end lists from places like Pitchfork; some were discovered by chance. The beauty of these Spotify playlists is that more songs can be added to them as they’re discovered.