Indi’s alternative holiday playlist – 2019 – Summary

by | December 23, 2019
0 comment

2019’s alternative playlist was something of a retrospective: it was made up almost entirely of songs that had appeared in past lists but not recent ones, or songs that were considered in the past but never made the cut.

Indi’s alternative holiday playlist 2019:

Legend:

🍁 = Canadian
★ = New this year

I wanted 2019’s list to represent a sort of closure, to go hand-in-hand with the decade’s closure. Next year, after all, will be 2020, the start of a whole new decade. Well, I mean, depending on how you’re counting. I know that by some measures, 2020 is really just the last year of the current decade, and the new decade starts in 2021. But it doesn’t really feel that way, does it? That zero really has more impact as a symbol of starting fresh than of an ending.

[Barenaked Ladies circa-2012]
Barenaked Ladies (c2012)

So 2019’s list was the last of the 2010s lists. Next year’s list will be the first of the 2020s lists, and I already have a bunch of new stuff to add. (But please, do keep sending in suggestions!)

One of the most important decisions I have to make when building the list each year is which song should be #1. I know, I know, I keep saying that the list isn’t ranked, and the order doesn’t matter, and that’s true. But because the list is presented in reverse order, the #1 song is the song that I leave you with each year, and for that reason, I want it to leave you with the right impression. Past #1s have included Gordon Lightfoot’s classic “Song for a Winter’s Night”, Dragonette’s feisty “Merry Xmas (Says Your Text Message)”, and Joni Mitchell’s emotional “River”. This year, to close out what has been a challenging and often batshit insane decade, I thought the perfect send off was the Barenaked Ladies’ daffy tale of an elf labour uprising, buttressed by a silky yet tongue-firmly-in-cheek performance by Michael Bublé. Like those elves, we’ve put up with a lot of shit. I think we can learn from their example: rather than despair, or give in to our anger and resort to violence, they came together – they united against their oppression, and demanded better.

I think that’s a perfect closing message for the 2010s.

Here’s the 2019 list in its entirety:

You can click on the links above one-by-one to listen to the songs, or go back through the list and see the embedded videos. But another, perhaps easier option is to use one of the downloadable playlists.

[Michael Bublé]
Michael Bublé

Depending on your setup, you might just be able to click one of the following links and this year’s playlist will start playing in your favourite media player. If that doesn’t work, try right-clicking on the links and choosing “save as” to download the list, then double-clicking the downloaded file or opening it in your media player. Both files are the same list, just in different formats, so try one, and if that doesn’t work, try the other.

Download playlist file:

NOTE: Those playlist files do not include the songs themselves. The playlist files are just lists of links to the songs on the Internet (for example, YouTube). That’s why the playlist files are so small – just a dozen or two kilobytes when a single song runs into the megabytes. But it means that the playlist files won’t work unless you are connected to the Internet. It also means that if the site the song is on is down, or if the song has been removed or the site simply won’t let it play, the song won’t play.

If you have any problems getting the playlist files to work, just leave a comment, and I’ll try to help you out.

Well, that’s it for Indi’s alternative holiday playlist until next year. But, as always, if you have any suggestions that you’d like to see featured on a future list, leave a note in the comments.

See you next year! And… next decade!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.