blog: your 2012 retrospective

_posts/2013-01-04-musical-year.md

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+---
+title: your musical year in review
+layout: main
+section: blog
+---
+Against my better judgment, I tend to think of music in years. Some part of me feels like it understands music better in the context of its time---what other bands were doing contemporaneously, the year's major headlines, and, most importantly, the phase of my life when I first heard an album I love.
+
+It's the same instinct that, over the last few weeks, has flooded the Web with top-*N* lists. Even if I never write it down, I find myself making a list each winter of the "best" albums of the year. I'm not a music critic, but in January, I sometimes wish I were: as utterly subjective as my yearly mental list is, it helps me close the books on 2012 and file its music away in my memory before moving on to 2013's releases.
+
+Here's how beets can help you with your own retrospective. First and foremost, you probably want to see a list of all your albums that were released last year:
+
+    $ beets ls -a year:2012
+
+(I use this query---or its [randomized][random] counterpart---almost daily throughout the year to decide what to listen to.) You might also be curious to see how many albums you collected in the year:
+
+    $ beet ls -a year:2012 | wc -l
+    85
+
+We can take the chronology-worshiping one step further using full release dates. Since most albums in [MusicBrainz][] have release months and years, we can sort these albums by date:
+
+    $ beet ls -af '$month-$day $albumartist - $album' year:2012 | sort -n
+
+That query helps me "replay" the year from start to finish when thinking about each album.
+
+This kind of flexible collection browsing is one of the reasons I originally started building beets. I hope it helps you look back over the music of 2012.
+
+## My Favorites
+
+For whatever it's worth, here's a sort, predictable list of some albums I remember fondly from last year, copied ’n pasted out of my terminal window in no particular order:
+
+* alt-J - An Awesome Wave
+* Passion Pit - Gossamer
+* Santigold - Master of My Make-Believe
+* Jack White - Blunderbuss
+* Dirty Projectors - Swing Lo Magellan
+* How to Dress Well - Total Loss
+* Miguel - Kaleidoscope Dream
+* Bob Mould - Silver Age
+* Kendrick Lamar - good kid, m.A.A.d city
+* Macklemore & Ryan Lewis - The Heist
+
+Everyone should clearly love all of these records as much as I do.
+
+[MusicBrainz]: http://musicbrainz.org/
+[random]: http://beets.readthedocs.org/en/1.0rc2/plugins/rdm.html