I'm simplifying the format of these from the charts I've been doing every month, because 1. My reader stats show that these posts have a fairly small, targeted audience, and 2. They're a lot of work to compile, given the small amount of interest from my readers.
Also, December's Song of the Day list on Sputnik Music was screwed up this month. The guy who was hosting it ditched it halfway through the month (Grrr!), and the person who followed up to try to complete it got buried in the holiday season and didn't finish it either. (But he gets more of a pass, because he wasn't scheduled to do it in the first place, and he just finished doing a nice job with last month.) So we wound up having songs for the first twenty-five days of the month, and then had a Christmas hiatus. (Thankfully, the SOTD is up and running again for the January 2020.)
So, I'm just going to give you the abbreviated version here.
1. The theme for the month was songs that introduced you to and/or made you fall in love with their respective genres.
2. I had the opportunity to give two recs this month. My first was "Within You Without You" by The Beatles, which was my first exposure to Indian sitar music. While it's not a large part of my musical diet (I think because I really like songs with vocals, and most classic sitar music tends to be all instrumental), it is a kind of music that I still enjoy to this day. My second rec was Nightwish's "The Greatest Show I Love", a fairly recent track, which was the song that really made me love and start to seek out symphonic metal (or as I like to think of it, epic metal).
3. My highest rated pick of the month was someone's rec of Simon & Garfunkle's "Bridge Over Troubled Water", a track that I've obviously been familiar with for many years. My favorite rec that I hadn't been previously familiar with was the Polish metal band Batushka's "Yekteniya 1", which mixes metal with Catholic orthodox chants. (There's a whole fascinating story about this band, which was originally a solo project by one guy, but then the record label and the vocalist stole the band and put out their own album. This track is from the first album, though, before any of this happened.)
4. However, the group's highest rated track for the month was "Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)" by The Talking Heads, not my favorite Talking Heads song ever, but certainly not a bad one.
So there you have it. I suspect I'll be sticking with this format from now on.
