2014: The Year in not-so Random Thoughts

Hi everyone & Happy New Year.

For the last couple of years, I’ve put together compilations of random thoughts and personal favs, mostly about music and movies, as a way of looking back at the year that was. The lists were heavy on sarcasm and mockery of easy targets like Justin Bieber, Robin Thicke, Lana Del Rey and Kanye West.

This year, I started my list and was about to post when I got an email from my brother in Paris describing how his sons’ school had gone on lockdown because it was quite near the kosher supermarket (site of the hostage crisis that followed the Charlie Hedbo massacre). As soon as he’d heard the news he went down to wait at the barricades along with many other anxious parents. He said his boys were ‘fine and brave’ after they were allowed to leave school but also exhausted after the stress of the day.

So you’ll have to excuse me if I couldn’t find a reason to post an inconsequential list about big names and my little problems with them. I know we all need humor in our lives and sure, it’s fun to mock the pompous and famous – witness three hours of Golden Globe tweets – but somehow this week I feel the need to put aside the snark.

We fly on airplanes, we shop for groceries, we send our kids to school, we pick up coffees on our way to work. We do all these things, every day. Yet sometimes, some of us – whether we live in Sydney or Paris or Peshawar – don’t make it home.

And so as I count my blessings and try not to live in fear in a frightening world, I think about why I started this blog in the first place: to connect with friends and family via music. Not only because many of the people I love are far away but because music has always been my source – of solace, energy, connection, transcendence.

Some people might think music is unimportant or frivolous, but I hope you, dear reader, can appreciate where I’m coming from. I’ll finish with the following playlist of fifteen songs that brought me joy and grooviness and something close to a state of grace in 2014.

May 2015 bring you love, peace and good music.