136,340 Streamed Minutes in 2016: The Breakdown

According to my Spotify Year in Review, I listened to well over 130,000 minutes of music. That doesn’t include the hours I spent listening to records, or the radio, or podcasts. I take in a lot of media, but I didn’t think it was nearly that much. I figured since I clocked in so many hours of streaming, I should probably put my two cents out there in what the year looked like musically. I shared with Atwood what I thought the album of the year was — but you’ll have to check that out to see what I thought. I’ll link it here when that gets published. Here, though, we’ll break it down by month, and what struck me as big for that period of time.

January

Hamilton — Original Cast Recording
The past few years over the few days it takes to ring in the New Year, I spend the time with one of my closest and oldest drum corps friends, Kayla. The last two years, she’s introduced me to new musicals I end up being obsessed with for the year. Last year, it was In The Heights. This year, it was the musical that’s taken the world by storm, Hamilton. This bad boy has been on repeat periodically throughout the year, but mostly during January. Easily.

Galway Girl — Steve Earle
Since I spent most of the month traveling, and much of that in Ireland, this was a song that we’d listen to as we got ready for the day or a night out and want to channel our inner “Irish bar music.” “Galway Girl” will forever remind me of the craziness that happened over those two weeks abroad this year.

Year in Review: 2016

Wow, what a freakin year. As I went through pictures this time around, I found an astonishing amount of goofy selfies and embarrassing snapchat screenshots of my friends, so the fact that I was able to pull as many “normal” pictures as I’ve got in here is nothing short of a miracle. As I was writing this blog post last year, I knew there’d be a lot to talk about… but I never imagined to have the year shake out like it did. Anyway, here’s 2016 in somewhere around 6,000 words. Stay with us.

Taking in an overlook in Tennessee

Year in Review: 2015

Much like a lot of this past year, I’ve procrastinated a lot in writing this year-end blog post. I’ve been thinking a lot about it, I promise, but time has just gotten away from me. Hopefully, 2016 will be a different story, but let’s end the year on a strong note here on my little corner of the internet filled to the brim with ramblings. 2015 was a great year, and here’s some pictures to prove it. Stay with us.

January

For the second time, I rang in the new year with my Spirit Family. When I arrived on New Years Eve, I wasn’t exactly sure what my summer would consist of, but when I flew back to Chicago a few days later, I knew that I wanted nothing more than to return to my family in baby blue.

(More Than) Just An Old Sweet Song

Since returning to Chicago a week ago, I’ve been hit with the question “So how was your summer?” more times than I care to count; and every time, I’ve given the same quick, easy response. “It was great.” But that’s because Jen Barton was right, once again.

On Semifinals day, she told us people would ask how it was. I mean, they had no idea what we were really doing besides posting pictures in uniform and pictures in basically our underwear from a new state seemingly every day.

She said we’d try to explain it. We’d try to complain about the rehearsal time in Louisiana, and how it felt to swim back to a reset in the thickest air you’ve ever tried to breathe. We’d try to tell the story of Rico getting shat on by a bird during a hot day at Luella about halfway through Spring Training. We’d say things that became norms over the summer, and nobody would laugh at a “yeet everything” and, normal people would get annoyed when we agreed with them by saying “well you’re not wrong.” We’d never be able to properly justify our hatred for Kansas to someone outside of drum corps. We’d never be able to forget how it felt to take the field at Mile High. We’ll never forget the sense of relief after a windy warm-up in San Antonio, knowing that our first dome show, (perfect conditions), was just moments away. We’ll never forget the hornline age-outs waking us up on the Atlanta regional day with Georgia. We’ll never forget the sadness after Allentown, when we realized we only had a week left with “Out of the Ashes,” and the 2015 Delta Diamonds. And hardest of all, we’ll never forget raising our white flag for the very last time in Lucas Oil Stadium, as the last note rang out, Brandt announced us one last time, and we collected our equipment and marched off the field. For the very last time with Spirit of Atlanta 2015.