. . . And I thought last year my average number of listens per album in my top ten of the year was lower than usual! Last year, even my 10th-most heard album had been listened to 16 times; to get at least that number this year we have to get to #10. So goes the trajectory of my aging process, I suppose: As time goes on, as massive a presence as music was in my life in years past, I just keep listening to music less and less, and listening to podcasts more and more. This would be why I cut what had previously been an annual list of Top 20 Albums in half and made it Top 10 in 2014, and that year introduced my Top 10 Podcasts. This way my year-end audio list still totals twenty items. So any anyway, let's get to it:

10.
Sia, We Are Born (2010)

I ripped this album from a CD checked out of the Seattle Public Library last year, and I like it a lot, but at only seven listens in 2017 it did not crack the top 10. Another six listens in 2018, and here we are. I just discovered this music video from the album for the first time yesterday, and it pretty well illustrates why Sia might just be my favorite pop star of the 2010s. This was how she started the decade!

Number of plays in 2018: 6

9.
Tori Amos, Native Invader (2017)

First repeat holdover from 2017! I heard this album 18 times last year, and it's had more staying power than any straightforward studio album she's put out in years. It's a nice match for both Tori Amos's and my own sensibilities, mellowing with age.

Number of plays in 2018: 7

8.
Sia, Some People Have Real Problems (2008)

Here is where my exploration further and further back into Sia's career hit a wall. This album isn't bad, but it falls far short of all albums she released thereafter; the song featured here, "Buttons," is tacked onto the end of the album's track sequencing and kind of stands apart and above all the others. I don't listen to this album a lot and likely never will, and after this one I feel no need to check out any of her three Australian albums released before this.

Number of plays in 2018: 7

7.
The Cranberries, Something Else (2017)

Bittersweet, to say the least: this album was originally released in April 2017, and then lead singer Dolores O'Riordan died nine months later, basically of alcoholism. The Cranberries had not released a particularly good album since Bury the Hatchet in 1999, which was followed by a studio album of average quality in 2001 and then a totally forgettable one 11 years later, in 2012. This acoustic collection is pretty well done, though, and was a nice reminder of what they still had in them. Now it's only a reminder of what once was.

Number of plays in 2018: 7

6.
Cher, Dancing Queen (2018)

There may never have been a more symbiotic marriage of pop sensibilities than those of ABBA and Cher -- Dancing Queen, a collection of ten ABBA covers, is easily Cher's best release since Believe in 1998. Clearly inspired by her relatively small part in this year's sequel I studiously avoided, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, this album is the one thing related to those movies I have any continued interest in. This music is dazzling, and beyond fun to hear Cher's distinctive voice singing it.

Number of plays in 2018: 19

5.
Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, A Star Is Born Soundtrack (2018)

Could this seamless collection of classic-rock and pop tracks, all written just for this movie by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, be the best movie soundtrack since Moulin Rouge! in 2001? I think it might be. I'm not a huge fan of all the dialogue tracks featuring audio clips from the film between each actual song, but I had an easy remedy for that: I simply created an iTunes playlist that includes only the songs. Who knew such disparate music styles could work so well next to each other?

Number of plays in 2018: 22

4.
Tom Betty and the Heartbreakers, Greatest Hits (1993)

I never owned any other Tom Petty album before, but he had many singles I really liked, so it finally occurred to me to get his Greatest Hits collection from the library -- it features several tracks I have always loved, including "Don't Come Around Here No More," "Runnin' Down a Dream," and my all-time favorite Tom Petty track, "Mary Jane's Last Dance." I got into this album even more than I expected to, given how old the songs on it actually are. The second half of the album is truly great.

Number of plays in 2018: 25

3.
Troye Sivan, Blue Neighbourhood (2015)

Sia may have been my Great Pop Discovery in 2016; this year it was Troye Sivan (who, as you will soon see, is also #1 on this list). After getting his great new album released this year, I sought out his one previous album. I did not listen to this one quite as many times due to it having coparatively fewer pop hooks, but it could still easily be argued that this is the better album of the two. There's something about his cozy voice that I just love.

Number of plays in 2018: 32

2.
Justin Timberlake, Man of the Woods (2018)

Honestly, this is a pretty huge step down from Justin Timberlake's previous The 20/20 Experience albums -- but also, truly misguided "reinvention" notwithstanding, still not bad. This was purchased in February and was thereafter the only 2018 new release I got clear until September, and that fact is likely the only thing that propped it up so high to #2 on this year's list: for seven months, it was the only new music I had to listen to.

Number of plays in 2018: 36

1.
Troye Sivan, Bloom (2018)

Now this is the star of 2018 -- the young, cute, talented and unapologetically effeminiate, gay Troye Sivan. I didn't even know who he was until a Twitter friend told me his new album was great -- the same person, in fact, who introduced me to Sia two years ago! Maybe this Wayne guy will just be my source for great new music from now on? Anyway, Bloom is very nearly pop perfection, virtually every track irresistible.

Number of plays in 2018: 47

. . . Then again, these days I spend far more time listening to podcasts than I do to music. So, now my Top 10 Podcasts of the year!

10. Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend, hosted by Conan O'Brien and "Team Coco"

This podcast is so new there have only been six episodes to date, and already it's one of my new favorites -- the first of three to make its debut on this year's list (the three bumped from last year including Dumb People Town, Little Gold Men and Homophilia, all of which I still subscribe to and only the latter two do I still listen to regularly). The conceit is simple: each week a celebrity guest comes on and they talk about whether they think they could become actual friends with Conan O'Brien. No one ever takes it too seriously, the conversations -- thus far, anyway -- are always entertaining, and O'Brien's producer and assistant who become sort of de facto cohosts are fun as well. Much of the time they are all just cracking each other up, and that's what I like about it.

9. Savage Lovecast, hosted by Dan Savage

Savage Lovecast has been on this list every year since I started it, although it keeps moving its way systematically to the back. I always want to include this one, though, just because of how vital I regard it to be. If you want your mind to be opened to the myriad possibilities of human relationships -- romantic, sexual or otherwise -- just keep this podcast in your regular rotation. It doesn't hurt that, even though twenty years ago he was kind of a dick, Dan Savage is now an all around great guy.

8. Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, hosted by Peter Sagal

I seem to have fallen into fairly reliable weekly patterns with my podcasts, and Wait Wait Don't Tell Me comes out on Saturdays, which means it is my morning podcast as I shower and get ready for the day on Sundays. You might think its longtime formula of comic takes on the week's news would become worn, but so far I have yet to tire of it.

7. Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone,, hosted by Paula Poundstone and Adam Felber

I worry a little about whether this fun and silly podcast might not last, considering Live from the Poundstone Institute both started and ended in 2017 -- I find myself wondering if Paula's self-profesed OCD might keep her from being satisfied with any version of a podcast she hosts. To be fair, fun as last year's version was, Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone is an improvement, with greater structure yielding better humor more consistently. (You might correctly guess that I am a big fan of Paula Poundstone, who is of course a big part of the draw when she often guests on the panel for Wait Wait Don't Tell Me.)

6. The Complete Guide to Everything, hosted by Tom Reynolds and Tim Daniels

Who would have thought I would stick with a podcast about two straight guys, best friends who pick a random topic they often know frustratingly little about each week? This is a steady holdover from the several recommendations Gabriel made when I asked him after I first started listening to podcasts, and to this day I would know nothing about it without having had that conversation back in 2013. Tim and Tom just have great chemistry together, and after all this time, listening to their banter is like listening to old friends.

5. Threedom,, hosted by Scott Aukerman, Lauren Lapkus and Paul F. Tompkins

And then, with new podcasts come new friends! How did I find out about this podcast earlier this year? I can't remember. A promotional tweet about it must have been retweeted by one of the comedians I already followed on Twitter. Their entire 20-episode sequence of this podcast was first offered for free and without ads via the Howl app earlier this year, and is now being run through again, this time with ads, on Apple Podcasts. I find this podcast so thoroughly delightful that I am happily listening to them all a second time -- and each episode is little more than just these three friends, all good friends after extensive experience working together as improvisers in various contexts, making each other laugh and amusing each other. The so-called "feature," where each episode one of them suggests a game of some sort, is almost added as an afterthought, to give almost a semblance of structure. Every part of it adds to the charm, and the more any of them laughs uncontrollably at the proceedings (this happening mostly with Paul F. Tompkins), the more it makes me laugh as well. Honestly right now no podcast I listen to regularly makes me laugh more than this one does.

4. Do You Need a Ride?, hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Chris Fairbanks

Ah, my introduction to Karen Kilgariff, the Queen of Twitter as far as I'm concerned! Here she just records podcasts passing the time taking car rides with her friend and fellow comic Chris Fairbanks -- and often they have a guest, to whom they are literally giving a ride somewhere. You may be discerning a bit of a theme here, where I have taken a liking to podcasts that are basically just funny people shooting the shit with each other. Hey, so long as there is chemistry, charisma, and reliably humor and laughter, how can you go wrong?

3. My Favorite Murder, hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark

My Favorite Murder is now a bona fide phenomenon -- I might have made it to their first-ever live show at the L.A. Podcast Festival in 2016, the year they started this podcast, but now when they tour they sell out in minutes. It's nuts! And, honestly, I am starting to detect elements of the podcast potentially getting too huge for its own good. So far, though, Karen and Georgia still seem pretty grounded, all things considered, and I remain a loyal fan. Again, though, the appeal to me is in the interaction of these two funny friends, much more than in the true crime stories they talk about -- although I certainly have an appreciation for anyone having such dark and twisted interests.

2. WTF with Marc Maron, hosted by Marc Maron

The top two really don't change -- #2 being the signaling beacon for all popular podcasts that followed, and the first one I ever listened to with any regularity, WTF with Marc Maron. Before Rolling Stone published a blurb about this sometime around 2013, I didn't even know who Marc Maron was. Now I am intimiately familiar with him, his life, his conversational interviewing style, his comedy, and his acting work on the Netflix original show GLOW. I've been listening to podcasts for so many years now that he was in his forties when I started -- and I was in my thirties! And with two new episdes reliably released every week, once on Mondays and once on Thursdays, every once in a while a guest isn't that fascinating to listen to (for me, that often tends to be, say, an aging guitarist), most of the time the conversations are pretty absorbing no matter what the background. And Maron has been at it so long now that he regularly gets pretty famous actors on -- but I'm still partial to listening to him "talk shop" with fellow comedians.

1. Doug Loves Movies, hosted by Doug Benson

Number one now and forever, I love Doug Benson, who loves movies! He is a comedian as well, just as famous for his love of weed as he is for his love of movies, but it's the latter that sparks my interest, of course. I love comedy and I love movies, and this podcast perfectly combines the two, with a panel of comedian guests playing movie trivia games. It's not always as funny as I want it to be, but it usually is, and of course that largely depends on who the guests are. This one also does not have any set release schedule, so there can be a burst of several in one week or a break of a week or two. That just makes it all the more of a delight when a new episode appears in my podcast feed. I keep this podcast at #1 because it remains highest on my priority list: even if there is also a new WTF, if there is a new episode of Doug Loves Movies, that's always what I listen to first.

[posted 7:26 am]