Half a lifetime ago, I discovered Audioscrobbler and Last.fm, tools that tracked what I and my ‘friends’ listened to, made new artist suggestions, and played me custom internet radio stations based on them. This was a few years before Spotify or any other major streaming services, and the algorithm always felt less mainstream and more personally relevant than the ‘recommended tracks’ that streaming services would later come to offer me anyway.
Sadly, it wasn’t a huge amount of time before Last.fm lost its way a bit, was acquired by CBS, employed questionable ethics policies regarding user listening data, and then dropped the custom radio stations feature. I didn’t log in for years and I’d actually forgotten that it still existed.
But here we are in 2026, Last.fm has recently become an independent company again, and I stumbled back across it. It’s a different thing than the last time I used it, and it has many flaws, but it’s still quite fun and interesting to have a way to accurately track what I listen to across different streaming services, on physical media, and from online radio.
It makes it much harder to be a musical snob when you can see the data in front of you and realise that the cool stuff you think you listen to, and the reality of your most played tracks are sometimes a million miles apart.
So, in light of that, this playlist is made up of the ten tracks that I have apparently listened to the most in the last couple of months since I started accurately tracking them. I’ve changed the order to give them some kind of coherent flow, and made notes about the reasons that I’m not going to apologise for thinking they are great.
You can also listen to this playlist as a Spotify or YouTube playlist.
The Ballad of Dorothy Parker – Prince
It’s track one, so why not start with a controversial opinion: Purple Rain is one of the most overrated albums in the history of popular music, it is good of course, but nothing more.
Sign O’ the Times on the other hand is magical and captivating from start to finish (with the possible exception of Housequake). It’s peak Prince and contains at least three tracks I love, the title track, Starfish and Coffee, and this…
Renegade – Big Red Machine (feat. Taylor Swift)
Aaron Dessner is almost annoyingly talented. Apart from being a founding member of The National, a multi-instrumentalist performer, a producer, writer for many artists – we’ll come back to that in a second, he’s also one half of Big Red Machine, along with the also great Justin Vernon (Bon Iver).
Then we come to Taylor Swift, who you might think would offend my indie sensibilities, but no. I’m not gushing over all of her work, but both Folklore and Evermore, written with and produced by the aforementioned Mr. Dessner, are actually fantastic albums. Dessner and Swift get the writing credits on Renegade, but the Justin Vernon influence is also difficult not to hear.
Ceilings – Lizzy McAlpine
It’s a nice song, but not much more. The lyrics are well written but not massively impressive, and the plot twist is quite unexpected the first time you hear it. It’s musically fine, the vocal performance is fine. It’s not a song I’d expect to play a lot, and I can’t say why I like it so much, but it seems that I just do.
Living in Disgrace – John Smith
Regular readers may have noticed me shoehorning John Smith tracks into playlists all over the place, and I am completely unapologetic about that, even if this one is here without my free choice.
If I were a judge on a TV talent show, I’d prattle on a bit about cadence, tonality, and authenticity. I’m not though, so instead I’ll just say that John Smith sounds like someone who actually feels things, and I like his voice.
Matrica – Saulius Mykolaitis
This is not part of a 90s sci-fi soundtrack. The matrix that Saulius Mykolaitis sings about is an existential one made up of love, isolation, and nature. I’m not going to pretend that my language skills give me perfect understanding but it’s beautiful enough that even a simple machine translation carries some gravity. It feels a bit dark, intimate and almost unfinished on some level, as if you are taking a sneak listen to something that was never really intended for you.
Before his death in 2006, Mykolaitis worked mostly as a stage actor and director, but also left a small but quite intense catalogue of what Lithuania calls singing poetry. This song, in my opinion, is the finest moment of that collection.
Your Ghost – Kristin Hersh
It’s the first track on the first solo album by Kristin Hersh. I really like Throwing Muses, have no feelings at all about 50FootWave, and have never really listened to the majority of her solo discography, but I do love this album and this song.
Perfect Skin – Lloyd Cole and The Commotions
This is not my favourite Lloyd Cole song, in fact it doesn’t even make it into the top three, which would be made up of Jennifer She Said, Rattlesnakes, and Lost Weekend. It’s still a decent track and apparently it’s the one that I listen to the most right now.
Do You Remember The First Time – Pulp
This could almost be any track from Intro, His ‘n’ Hers, or Different Class. I’m sure that most of them are hovering around in the top 50 somewhere.
There is no band in the world quite like Pulp, no frontman with quite the awkward grace of Jarvis Cocker, and these songs present a kind of commentary on early 90’s Britain that are absolutely of their time and place but also still strangely relatable.
Waking Up – Elastica
It’s a Britpop classic, it’s arguably not Elastica’s finest moment, but it’s still pretty bloody good.
The Only Living Boy in New Cross – Carter U.S.M.
Another slightly odd inclusion. They are not a band that I’ve ever really paid much attention to, but this track and Sheriff Fatman are always singalongable, in much the same way as EMF’s Unbelievable.