Best Songs of 2014 Long Lists

For the past few years I’ve been putting together a list of my favourite songs of 2014. The first time I did it I had over forty tracks, but I’ve been whittling it down to less every year. I try to do less because I feel like seven hours is too much for most people to sit through and I’d rather put together a nice short list of the absolute best. Still, before the short list is the long list – or in my case long lists. I usually have a pretty good idea of what’s going to be in my top ten/twenty but before choosing I like to spend a few weeks listening to the year in review. Here are my sources:

Personal favourites: all year long I’ve been sharing songs on This Is My Jam and favouriting songs on Rdio, Hype Machine, CBC Music and Soundcloud. Everything there goes into consideration. If I don’t really remember the song and a second listen doesn’t really impress me, I eliminate it. I also look at my last.fm charts to get empirical evidence of what I’ve been playing the most.

Critical favourites: I take a look at what’s being chosen by things like Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and other well-known publications. I used to try to listen to all of this but the last couple years I found myself disagreeing with a lot so now I only listen to the ones that are consistently highly ranked that I haven’t heard yet.

Trusted favourites: there are still a few year-end lists that I find often align with me and will have tracks that I overlooked so I’ll try to listen to most of them. This year it’s Exclaim’s Best of 2014, Hype Machine’s Music Zeitgeist, and CBC Radio 3’s 103 best Canadian indie tunes of the year. There’s also a few friends who make lists that I’ll listen to, as well.

As I go through these, I’m adding tracks to a bop.fm playlist which I’ll be streaming regularly because, hey, it’s a bunch of my favourite songs. But eventually I’ll find which ones are my absolute favourites and put them together into my best of 2014 short list, which I’ll be sharing here on my blog. In the meantime, here’s my super long list for your listening pleasure/horror:

Best of 2014 Super Long List | Listen for free at bop.fm