Playlist Postscript: Best Songs of 2016

Coming full circle to the year the world went topsy-turvy

Welcome back to our weekly journey through End of Year content from bygone rotation around the sun. This week we tackle a doozy of a year. There are long stretches of the 2010s that float half-dissolved through my memory, but 2016 remains nearly intact start to finish. It is a one-year “We Didn’t Start The Fire”. Brexit. Trump vs Hilary. Prince, Bowie, and Leonard Cohen all bit the dust. The Golden State Warriors blew a 3-1 lead in the NBA Finals. The Chicago Cubs won the World Series. I disbanded the Chicago version of the Lamniformes live band and instead focused on recording Sisyphean. I attended Roadburn Festival (good!) and Riot Fest (bad!). I left Unrecorded to focus on Invisible Oranges, where I was promoted to assistant editor. I made legit good money and legit great friends from musical theater gigs. I spent a lot of free time running and lifting weights. I started reading seriously for the first time since college. I was depressed but I was working through it. There may not have been a more consequential year on the shape of my life in the 2010s than 2016.

2016 also had an outsized impact on the shape of this newsletter. By which I mean that so many of the songs featured in the playlist below will turn up in Drumming Upstream that it’ll be easier to point out the songs that I *don’t* have to learn on drums. But where’s the fun in that? Instead, in addition to awarding the Lamniformes Shark Emoji of Approval (🦈) to the songs from 2016 that hold up best in the present, I’ll also mark future entries of Drumming Upstream with the Drum Emoji of Destiny (🥁). Which songs from this tumultous year earn these dubious distinctions? Scroll below to find out!

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