My Year in Music: Amy Phillips

We asked Pitchfork writers and editors to share their personal highs and lows of 2013. Check back for more installments of My Year in Music throughout the next two weeks.

Favorite Tracks of 2013:

Favorite Albums of 2013:

Most Played Song of 2013: Bastille: "Pompeii". The story of the destruction of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii terrified me as a kid. For some reason, I was absolutely convinced that my home city was also going to be buried under thousands of feet of fast-moving molten lava, despite there being no active volcanoes anywhere near Philadelphia. (That we know of, amirite?) Maybe I was just subconsciously absorbing the fact that in the 80s in Philly, fire raining down from the sky wasn't that far-fetched of an idea.

Anyway, when this song called "Pompeii" by the British band Bastille popped up last winter, something buried deep inside of me latched on to it. I've always been a sucker for high drama, and this one is full of it: Lyrics like "Great clouds roll over the hills / Bringing darkness from above," "hey-oh" backing vocals that ring out both ominous and joyful, the kind of chorus that feels like the sun breaking through a thunderstorm. All year, I've craved "Pompeii". I've had to ration it, to force myself not to listen over and over again. I get excited when it pops up in random places, like when it was playing in the grocery store where I was shopping a few weeks ago. Apparently, it's becoming a bit of a hit, so that might start happening a whole lot more often.

An Old Album I Discovered/Rediscovered This Year: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Abbatoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds' set at the Beacon Theatre in March was one of the best shows I saw this year. In the weeks leading up to it, I indulged myself by listening to a whole lot of Nick Cave back catalogue. I kept returning to this 2004 double LP, drawn in by its regal romance and terror. But later in the year, the album came back to me in an unexpected way.

This fall, I re-read the entire Harry Potter series, because this is a totally normal thing for a 32-year-old to do. (And let me tell you: I'm not the only one on the Pitchfork staff who re-read the entire Harry Potter series this year. Not naming names...) I've also been watching all of the movies. Last week, I made it to the scene in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 in which Harry and Hermione dance to The Lyre of Orpheus' "O Children". I actually gasped. It's a bizarre scene that's not in the book and kind of comes out of nowhere. There's barely any pop music in the entire eight-movie series, and then all of a sudden, here's Nick Cave's unmistakable baritone booming out over a radio at one of the most despairing, most hopeless points in the whole Harry Potter saga. But it works. It really works. And if it ended up turning any young Harry Potter obsessives into Nick Cave fans, well, awesome.

Musical Highlights: On December 2, I experienced the biggest surprise of my life: At the end of an incredibly stressful, miserable day, my boyfriend took me up to the roof of our apartment building and proposed marriage. After a whole lot of screaming and crying, we went down to our apartment and I experienced the second biggest surprise of my life: 15 friends and family members gathered there, having an engagement party. (Somehow, all of these people had been planning this surprise for weeks and I didn't catch on. I like to consider myself a pretty detail-oriented, observant person—I guess I'm not!)