Quarter Notes

It's weeks like this that make it hard to care about listening to new music and making playlists and writing about new albums or what songs are rolling around in my head.

This is Quarter Notes, a newsletter for music discovery and discussion by me, Chris Thiessen. Right now, it’s a pressure-free space to share songs and albums I love, as well as the occasional longer essay on music, culture, and whatever.

Don’t call it a comeback. Quarter Notes has been here for years, rockin’ my peers and puttin’ suckas in fear (probably). But this newsletter has been on hiatus for over a year, and I’ve been putting off starting it up again, frankly, because it scares me and I want it to be perfect and I don’t know what to write or if I’ll have the time to be as consistent as I want or if anyone will like it and I love making long run-on sentences of excuses. But here we are. It’s time to just knock it out.

2022 sprinted out the gate musically. In the first week, we received an instant classic from The Weeknd in Dawn FM—an album that already feels as worn-in as your favorite pair of Nikes, yet we’ve only had it for 26 days. Part of this feeling is surely the nods he gives to Michael Jackson’s collaborations with Quincy Jones in the early ‘80s with dancing, disco-inspired basslines and euphoric synth explorations courtesy of Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never).

Where does our personal understanding of “popular music canon” come from? To be sure, it never comes from one source. As we grow up, we become aware of pop music’s pervasive reach through radio, films, social media, friends’ birthday parties, those late-night infomercials for “ALL the greatest hits on 10 discs for just three easy payments of $19.99…” The potential curators who enter our lives are legion.

A new year has begun! I’m so looking forward to writing some new essays and thinking out loud here at Quarter Notes in 2022. But before we get there, I’ve got a month-end post for December. With all the focus on year-end lists really beginning in November (plus the barrage of Christmas music), it’s easy to miss some of the music that comes out in December. So here’s my new music playlist for the month with blurbs for each song.

2021 was a weird year for me as a music fan. I wrote earlier this year, about the “month I hated music.” I had come to the point where I was listening to music in terms of “how can I use this to pitch a story to a publication?” instead of truly enjoying the music for its own sake and celebrating its place in my life as an instrument of community, growth, and joy. That had to end.

No artist has so soundtracked my journey from adolescence to early adulthood like Taylor Swift. I wouldn’t go so far as to consider her my favorite musical artist (I’m certainly not a raving Swiftie). Honestly, I don’t even believe in “favorite artists” as a concept. There have been many—Switchfoot, Kendrick Lamar, Brandi Carlile, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds—who have profoundly informed my life thus far.