Being a parent can really change a person.
I would argue that being a parent has actually turned me into a much better person in virtually every way. Every now and again, though, the universe throws how much you’ve changed right in your stupid sagging baggy-eyed face.
I’ve been a Dad for over two years now. But let’s get real. I’ve been a guy who takes himself way too seriously – especially when it comes to musical tastes – for way, way longer. Like 25 years or more!
So this year I was looking forward to my yearly readout of my musical discoveries and habits from Spotify (the streaming juggernaut that we all agree is evil but most of us are too weak to resist). What songs reign supreme? Which new discovery was the most interesting?
When I looked at my statistics, it felt like a pink polka-dotted punch in the mouth.
From what I have been made to understand, my top artist of 2020 was… Minnie Mouse. Not only that, I am apparently one of Minnie’s biggest fans. Top 0.5% biggest.
Further inspection revealed that my (or somebody’s) love of Minnie Mouse was not some sort of an outlier or fluke.
No, it seems as though the gang is all here. I would consider Goofy to be at least kind of a punk artist, but this top five has completely obliterated my carefully constructed self-image. Does this look like the top five of someone who will only listen to things if they can be described by slapping the word “core” onto the end of another unrelated word? No.
Also, if you’re wondering who the fuck Luke Amis is, you’re not alone. I also wondered. I was thrilled to see Google reveal that he is a child actor who performs the voice of a cartoon cat on Netflix’s Rhyme Time Town. Christ on a cracker.
What songs were we listening to from this hip gang of artists?
Just tremendous stuff. Although, in all honesty, “Frida Little Ate A Little” is a fucking bop, and “Mickey’s Laugh Shack” has some pretty fun moments if you like things to have a bit of a vaudevillian vibe.
We’ve actually found some kid’s songs that I quite enjoy. A few have found their way onto my own favourites list, which is perhaps a little surprising. An artist named Frances England has a great song called “Bicycle” that my daughter and I love to sing together. We love “Little Bird, Little Bird” as sung by an artist named Elizabeth Mitchell. Hell, we went through a Raffi phase this year that has me convinced all over again that the guy is a genius. It’s not all bad.
Spotify provides you with a list of your top 100 songs and I think that it’s at least 30 songs into the list before it gets to anything I actually chose to listen to. Probably more embarrassing than all of the kid stuff, actually, is the fact that one of my own bands is on this list three or four times, but I insist that it is just because I miss those guys terribly after having moved away to the frozen tundra for some reason.
So… my reputation as a music connoisseur is completely shot. I was upset for a minute. But then I thought about my daughter running around in circles in the living room, singing along to all of these stupid songs that I think are lame… and I feel great about it. Great enough to throw on “Baby Beluga” and keep one finger on the mouse-click to switch things over to a Slayer song if you think that someone might ask what’s playing in your headphones.
If you would like to enjoy some of what we spent this year enjoying, please go ahead and give our top 100 songs of the year a spin in the playlist below!
The Fraudsters' Almanac 
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