Announcing Together Through Life

A look back at 30 years of music

Earlier on I worked out that next Friday is exactly 30 weeks until my 30th birthday. I’ve been looking for an excuse to write about a wide range of songs and albums for a while now and this calculation has provided a useful way of tying the tracks and records that I’d like to write about together, so, over the next 30 weeks I am going to write about a number of releases from the last 30 years - one post for each year starting with 1994 to be released each week until November 19th.

Some posts will focus on a specific song whilst others will dive into and explore a single album, but for some years where there are just too many great releases to ignore, there will be a mix of the two.

Aside from the release year, there will be no particular criteria a track or record needs to meet to be included. There’ll be plenty of genre hopping, some big hitters and some more obscure releases. There’ll probably be plenty of glaring omissions or blind-spots. The series won’t just focus on songs that particularly mean a lot to me (although, there will be plenty of that, too) or songs that have made a big impact on my life - sometimes the release will just be undeniable, or something that I’m discovering for the very first time in order to write about it here. Some may just be about musical moments that were too big to miss whilst others will be about releases that most people did in fact miss altogether. Some will be from legendary older artists, some from more contemporary pop super-stars and some from the space in-between.

Over the course of the series there’ll be posts about releases by everyone from Bob Dylan and Tom Waits to Hurray for the Riff Raff, Japanese Breakfast and Fiona Apple; I’ll cover songs and albums by Leonard Cohen, Miley Cyrus, Nathaniel Rateliff + the Night Sweats, Kamasi Washington, The Flaming Lips, Ángela Aguilar, Courtney Barnett, The Strokes and plenty more besides.

For years, I have often heard it said that good new music is being released with increasing scarcity; that it is harder and harder to find new releases that you like and that the new stuff doesn’t stack up against the old, so this series will be dedicated to showing that there is great new music being released all the time for those with ears to hear it, and that it has always been that way.