A New Dawn

New Year's Day, 2023. We had just returned to Nate's house after attending the local ball drop, and proceeded to party for about three hours afterwards. That night, one thing we did was have everyone get together and sing December, 1963 (Oh What A Night!). That night was so unforgettably fun that I knew in an instance that I could finally confine the horrors of the previous year to the dustbin of history. Ever since that moment, life has felt infinitely better than it did at any point in 2022.

In 2023, there was a new force that was affecting my musical consumption: TikTok. As much as I hate admitting it, some of commonly used background songs are extremely catchy. A sped up version of GUY.exe was the first song to make its way into my brain.

TikTokification would have an impact on the kinds of music I listened to in 2023, at least at a small level. It allowed a small number of modern songs into my music tastes.

Ever since I lost interest in the crush I'd had during Life Is Great, I'd held no major romantic interests. My lack of exposure to women during the COVID lockdown in 2020, my career focus in 2021, and the personal struggles I had in 2022 all played a role in preventing that. I'd had several small interests in late 2022, but in January 2023, I developed a new, long-term permanent love interest. Just being able to have those feelings again was wonderful enough. This song was the backdrop to that redevelopment.

TikTokification's second contribution to my music tastes was a song that I may've ran across without it, considering it was from the 1980s. In any case, I found Messages from the Stars to be extremely catchy and highly enjoyable to listen to.

I was legitimately surprised that The RAH Band hadn't had greater success in the 1980s, considering just how good of a song that this was. TikTok does have a pretty good track record of bringing older songs into the limelight, after all.

By February 2023, I had grown extremely fed up with FM radio on car journeys, especially during my work commutes. I finally decided to buy an adapter so I could plug my phone in and play whatever I wanted via Spotify. With the 2013 Nostalgia Wave at an intensified level thanks to its tenth anniversary, The Best Summer Ever was played constantly. As America had been a longtime favorite band, I found myself listening to Tin Man over and over again, reminiscing and singing along as I did.

As I returned to building on the server in a capacity that I hadn't done in several years, I found myself rediscovering the Yogscast, whose Minecraft videos I had consumed en masse in 2013-14. One day, while listening Gay Activity and Happy-Go-Lively, two songs that I'd been familiar with for many years, I let YouTube auto-play new tracks, and the first one it queued up was Hollywood Holiday. This track fit in very well with the theme of light production music, which made it perfect for NosLabs-building.

Morse Code of Love auto-played one day while I was listening to 1950s music on Spotify. The fact that I'd never heard it before was surprising, considering that There's a Moon Out Tonight had been a favorite during Lovestruck Adventurer, and I'd managed to miss it. I found it somewhat of an earworm, listening to it several times in the couple weeks afterwards. My father had never heard it before either, which was even more surprising.

A Million To One has been with me since the era of The First Few Years, which I often found myself reminiscing about during early 2023. I had so many memories with it, but I developed a new appreciation for it in April 2023, as I listened to it on multiple occasions during my work commutes.

Against the backdrop of the return of romantic interest in my life, this song was perfect: I'd often sit and think about the girl in question while listening to it. It wasn't the song I'd mentally tied to her, however. 

The TikTokification of a portion of my music tastes culminated in this song. It wasn't extremely extensive, but as much as I hate admitting it, I did find myself unironically listening to a sped up version of Cupid - Twin Version several times.

To me, this K-Pop song shared a significant number of elements in common with the bubblegum music of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which helped it find its way onto the playlist.

I had heard both of these songs in their original forms separately years earlier, and I also knew who Glen Campbell was. Imagine my surprise when I found that he had recorded the two songs together as one. I even found his version better than the original recordings.

I instantly began to daydream as I was lying in bed one afternoon, with my thoughts instantly turning to the girl I had an interest in. I'd been wrestling with whether I should tell her or not for some time at that point.

In June 2023, the holy grail of lost Steely Dan media was found: an almost completed copy of The Second Arrangement, which would have originally been released on Gaucho in 1980 had its masters not been accidentally erased. I listened to the song over and over again, with one specific edit in mind: Jive Miguel's Final Mix.

Words cannot express how glad I am that a backup copy happened to be sitting in a garage for 40 years.

Gordon Lightfoot's death in May 2023, followed a few weeks later by the loss of the Titan submersible, placed the RMS Titanic, as well as shipwrecks in general, back in public consciousness. Accordingly, I found The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald back in my regular listening routine.

Keeping with the theme of ships, I began watching a new YouTube channel: Oceanliner Designs, which is dedicated to informational content about all kinds of ships, especially Titanic.

Yet another song brought to my attention by TikTok, I found it excellent to gain solace from. I'd been spending some time thinking about the channel reset and all of the reasoning I'd put into making that decision. Listening to Chamber of Reflection allowed me to think about the past and make peace with the fact that it was time to leave our legacy content behind, and move forward with a new outlook on things, in a completely different manner than anything I envisioned way back in 2013.