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:
01 Drake: "Worst Behavior"
02 Vampire Weekend: "Hannah Hunt"
03 Drake: "Hold On, We're Going Home"
04 Benoit & Sergio: "Adjustments"
05 Kanye West: "Blood on the Leaves"
06 Disclosure: "Latch" [ft. Sam Smith]
07 Dillon Francis: "Without You" [ft. Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs]
08 Chance the Rapper: "Chain Smoker"
09 Jai Paul: "Str8 Outta Mumbai"
10 FKA twigs: "Water Me"
Favorite Albums of 2013:
01 Kanye West: Yeezus
02 Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
03 Jai Paul: Jai Paul
04 John Wizards: John Wizards
05 Disclosure: Settle
06 Devendra Banhart: Mala
07 Volcano Choir: Repave
08 Haim: Days Are Gone
09 Arctic Monkeys: AM
10 Blood Orange: Cupid Deluxe
Listening to dangerously loud music can cause irreparable damage to your hearing. It can also make you feel invincible. At 31, I'm protective of my ears. I often wear plugs at shows. I relish quiet, too. I sometimes put headphones on at work not to listen to music but to block out distracting sounds. I spin a lot of Thelonious Monk albums at home, unfocus my computer-zapped eyeballs, and try to zone out. But it's no coincidence that one of my most vivid memories of the year involved music being played at an unnaturally high level.
When I interviewed ?uestlove a while ago, we got to talking about how different artists go about presenting their music to journalists, label folk, and friends at advance-preview listening sessions. True to character, ?uest prefers a responsibly loud volume to show off new Roots albums. He also mentioned that—also true to character—Kanye West likes to "blast his music to smithereens" when given the chance to impress. This proved to be true at the 2011 session for Watch the Throne, which took place at a fucking planetarium, as well as the one for Yeezus this year, which was held in a concrete loading dock at Milk Studios on the west side of Manhattan. At the time of the session, the album had not leaked. Nobody I knew had heard the whole thing yet. Nobody had heard "Blood on the Leaves". And at that moment in that song—you know the one—everything else faded away as the drums hit my ears, my brain, my general sense of being. Death did not exist in that moment. I felt giddy. I felt relieved, too, knowing this sensation was still out there, still ready to flatten my world at any time. Suddenly inspired to share my euphoria, I texted a friend that I don't text enough—something with exclamation marks. "Ryan, you're rubbing it in," he wrote back. He was not wrong.