One Song Per Year

I found Favtape last week—a website that does something charmingly specific: it picks one song for every year from 1901 to now. 1956 gets Elvis. 1987 gets Van Halen. No reasoning, no essays about why, just the song and the year. The interface is a grid that mimics the old Muxtape design, which feels appropriate for a site that’s basically one very long mixtape.

I can’t stop clicking through it. There’s something compelling about the specificity of the conceit—someone actually sat down and made a choice for every year. Not a playlist, not a top ten, just one song per year. You know it’s wrong, obviously. You know there’s no such thing as a definitive song for 1934, but the fact that the choice exists at all is weirdly hypnotic.

Scrolling through years you weren’t alive for—1952, 1968, 1975—you start imagining what those times sounded like. The curators are probably full of shit, but it doesn’t matter. You’re looking at their narrative about how music changed, one year at a time, like someone making a mixtape for history itself. And you can’t help building your own story on top of theirs.

I don’t think I’ve actually discovered anything new from it. It’s not useful in that way. But there’s something satisfying about a website that exists just to make a specific, slightly absurd choice and then let you live inside it for a while. That’s all it has to do.