The songs I've earmarked, from 1979 to now.

About Earmark

Earmark is where I keep the songs I have marked to return to, arranged as playlists and held in the same order on Spotify, Apple Music, and Qobuz. There are seventy of them so far, running from 1979 to now. Each one began as a single song I did not want to lose, and grew into a set that holds together.

The listening behind them is longer than the playlists let on. It starts in Hamilton in 1977, with a Technics turntable and a growing wall of records, and it has not stopped since. It became a CD collection, then an iTunes library, then roughly four hundred albums digitized one side at a time, and now a streaming library north of twenty thousand tracks. The playlists are the public face of that. The library underneath is the private reality.

The taste is its own thing. It was built on the post-punk and art rock of 1979 to 1983, on Bowie and Roxy Music and Talking Heads and XTC, and it has kept moving outward ever since, into singer-songwriters, jazz, electronic, and a deep and constant seam of Canadian music, from Bruce Cockburn and Murray McLauchlan to 54-40, Blue Rodeo, and Daniel Lanois. New songs get earmarked next to old ones. The point was never the decade. The point was the ear.

I am not reviewing anything here, and I am not telling you what is good. I am showing you what one listener kept, and the order he kept it in, and leaving you to play it on whatever service you already use. If a playlist hands you a song you did not know, that is the whole idea.