Ten Songs That Held the Year Together

The year ends and the first thing I reach for is the playlist. Not the memories themselves—those come later, fuzzy and rearranged—but the music that was playing underneath them. That’s the honest record of a year.

2006 was new people and lost ones, momentum and dead stops, vague promises made at midnight on January first that I broke by February. What stayed consistent was the iPod. I don’t think I had a single sleepless night this year that didn’t come with a soundtrack: J-Pop at its most shamelessly saccharine, ballads that felt like someone reaching into your chest, punk that screamed everything I couldn’t say out loud. All of it, shuffled together into something that somehow made sense in the dark.

So here are my ten songs of 2006. Lovingly assembled. Gloriously mixed up. No apologies for any of it.