The Tiffany Johns Listening Project

in

Finding new music to love is hard.

In an era where an impossible amount of music is at your fingertips via Spotify and other streaming services, it feels harder than ever to find music that you really love. The weeds you must wade through to find a gem are thick and stretch beyond the horizon. I spend quite a lot of time and energy trying to wade through these weeds, but it’s slow going. It’s very rare that I find even one song that I really like, let alone an entire artist.

In January 2023, I began using Spotify’s fleet of discovery tools every day, in a much more dedicated effort to find new music to love. Over the course of that year I did indeed find some amazing music and artists that I never would have come across otherwise, and I added a lot to my library. However, I eventually got to the point where any of the discovery tools kept showing me the same songs they had already shown me before, so I moved on.

About a year later, in early 2024, I had the idea to dive more into artists I already know in a methodical manner, rather than attempting to discover new songs and artists by chance or via an algorithm. I realized that even my favorite artists have a lot of music I’ve never listened to; in fact, I can only think of two artists whose entire library I had listened to before I started this project: Moonchild and Dirty Loops. Along with this, I have massive holes in my knowledge of more popular music (in case you weren’t already aware, I was a turbo nerd in high school) and have intended to fix that for a long time.

So, with all that in mind, I decided to start an ambitious listening project that would take years to complete. I went to Spotify and added the entire discography of every artist I like or want to discover into a few colossal listening playlists sorted by genre. Each of these playlists has thousands of songs, and a couple of them reached the Spotify playlist limit (9,999 songs) so I had to start a second playlist for that genre. These playlists include my favorite artists, artists who have a few songs I really like but I never explored further, artists that I feel like I should know based on the genres I listen to, and artists that I feel like I should know as a Millennial.

I will make a post for each artist when I finish their library, giving general thoughts and my favorite albums. I will also be buying physical copies of the albums I really love - support artists directly! I will also be doing a summary post when I finish each genre, and years in the future maybe an overall summary of the project when I finish them all. All of these will be linked at the bottom of this post.

One final note: I’m writing this after having already finished one artist and nearly finished another. I’ll detail this more in the individual artist posts, but I feel that it’s important to also state here that I have already felt incredibly enriched from this project, and I would absolutely recommend it to anyone.

Here are my favorite albums from the artists I’ve discovered ( * = I knew the album beforehand):

  • ABBA - Super Trouper (1980)*

  • Boston - Boston (1976)

  • Casiopea - Make Up City (1980)*

  • Casiopea - Mint Jams (1982)*

  • Casiopea - The Party (1990)

  • Casiopea - Answers (1994)

  • Casiopea - 20th (2000)

  • Casiopea - Living on a Feeling ~ Casiopea Night Selection (2009)

  • Incognito - Tribes, Vibes + Scribes (1992)

  • Jimsaku - Dispensation (1996)

  • T-Square - 夏の惑星 (Natsu no wakusei) (1994)

  • T-Square w/Munich Symphony - 宝島 (Takarajima) (1995)

  • T-Square - Wordless Anthology II (1999)

  • T-Square - 33 (2007)

  • T-Square - Wings (2012)

  • T-Square - Crème de la Crème (2020)

Chapters: