My Favorite Albums of the 2010s

Over the next couple of months I'm going to be posting my favorite albums of the 2010s. Each album will get a post, and I should note upfront that this was made mostly by intuition adhering to my relatively limited indie rock worldview (with occasional forays into other genres). To do a Best Of, or acting as an authority on something as objective as music, feels more and more impossible the more I keep listening and interfacing with it. I know what I like, and I tend to like the things that I like with white hot passion and occasionally insane fervor.

This wasn't an easy list to make, and it is frequently at odds with the year-end lists I made over the last decade. It was fascinating to see how things shook out. Which dark horse contenders from, say, 2016, would become one of the most enduring records in my personal music-listening diet. Or which 2013 album was totally unknown to me at the time and cracked the Top 3. When I graduated and thus left KJHK in 2009 the way I listened to music changed. I spent a solid 3-4 months listening to nothing but the Lemonheads and when I came out I had broken myself of the MUST STAY ON THE CUTTING EDGE MUST LISTEN TO EVERY NEW THING THERE IS. That was quite literally my job for the last two years or so of my time at KJ, and while that was the perfect place for my music brain at the time, it was not at all sustainable. That led to a little bit of scaling back in regard to new musical frontiers. I still occasionally stuck my toe into ambient or hip-hop if I could find something with enough crossover appeal, but mostly I just dug in to what I liked, which is typically guitar-based music with great songwriting. It's just how it is. I don't really even try anymore. 

However, I feel like I love music more now than I ever did. I appreciate it more with some more living under my belt. I started this blog in 2009 mere days after asking my future wife out for the first time, and it's weird to think that this has been with me as long as she has. It was created primarily as a way to reconnect with all of the records I had been hoarding and to shock myself with how much money I had blown on LPs over the years. Things got derailed when I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and had to start selling off my collection to pay for two years worth of out-of-pocket maximums and whittling it down to what I deemed "The Essentials." Ideally I'd like to work my way through all over again in an effort to even further pare down the collection because my hoarder brain has been replaced with a librarian brain and that is where we are now. 

So yeah, this list was hard, and there is plenty left off, and I'm sure plenty I will wish I could fine-tune when it is over. But I can't help myself. I love making these lists, and the Best of the Decade (or Favorites of the Decade, I suppose) list is the absolute must fun to compile and obsess over. Thanks for being here.