the list

Here’s the gist: artists are ranked by tiers, then ranked high to low within a tier, represented by order listed. S-Tier is for artists I adore, that I love; A-Tier is for artists that I really like; B-Tier is for artists whose music I mostly like; C-Tier is for artists I want to like, artists that I recognize as cool despite not being personally attracted to their style; D-Tier is for artists I don’t like, though I’m not necessarily against them; F-Tier is for artists I specifically dislike. After my rankings is my to-do list of artists, which is exactly what it sounds like.

My process is fairly methodical. First, I pick an artist. This is often on a whim, but if something has been personally recommended to me I try to prioritize it. I like listening to related bands in a chunk (ie. I listened to Bleachers right after Steel Train), so that’s another factor. I also get a little burnt out by people with just so much music (Springsteen, I’m looking at you) and tend to go through a bunch of quicker bands while I recharge. If none of those processes land me an artist I’m excited about, I assign everyone in my list a number based on alphabetical order and use a random number generator to pick it completely arbitrarily. Artist picked, I sort through everything and find their first released studio album. If instead they started out with a shorter EP, I’ll try to find another EP or a couple of singles to combine together and count that as a kind of psuedo-sorta-esque-ish album for the first day. Then I listen to one album, all the way through, twice, every day until the artist is done. Upon finishing an artist’s complete discography in this way, I give them a rank and briefly write up my feelings about them, then move on. That’s about it.

To be clear, these rankings aren’t perfect, or even necessarily close to final. I’m fully aware that my opinion on an artist can become completely different given time to digest their music. For instance, half•alive started as an A+ and just kept growing on me. Surfaces started at an A- and quickly fell to a B+, later fell through to C, and only after a round of reorganizing and adjusting everything settled to its current D-. Repeated exposure to music and time to process that exposure are things that change how I perceive and understand music. Because of this, it’s important that I go back occasionally and check back in on how I feel about an artist. I keep a list of artists that I feel I’ve had enough exposure to and enough time to digest such that I hear them and understand them differently. That list is my “relisten” list, all the people I need to “relisten” to. That list isn’t a priority for me the same way my core to-do list of new artists is, but I try to go through it regularly. It’s represented on this site as my RELISTEN posts- after I relisten to an artist, I give their post a RELISTEN. Instead of one album a day twice through until I’ve gone through the discography, a relisten is two albums a day once through (because I’m already familiar with the music) until I’ve gone through the discography. Even after relistens, though, I waffle. Some artists have already gotten two or three full relistens and are being considered for more. This project will never be finished. It wasn’t designed to be finished, it was designed to be ongoing forever. Hopefully it’s coherent at any given moment, but at the same time my hubris is great and my work is never finished, so what you see is kinda what you get.

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