How many of us took shelter in a specific song during 2020? For me, 2019’s “Suffocate” by New York punks Gnarcissists was the right amount of loud and pissed off that I needed to process all of the rage and anxiety that I was feeling. It ended up being my top song of 2020 according to Spotify Wrapped, but nearly every other song in that neatly packaged graphic was a remnant of pre-pandemic times—before whatever energy I had to listen and enjoy music was sapped up by the pandemic. Marisa Aveling, a New York-based writer, went through a similar experience of numbness that inspired her to create 2020isasong in collaboration with designer Naomi Abel and web developer Chris Allick.

Part online time capsule, part crowd-sourced playlist of music that got people through 2020, 2020isasong is a year-end campaign that emphasizes the relationship between listeners and the music they love. The website launched in December 2020, and over the course of a month it collected over 1600 unique submissions from more than 53 countries around the world. At the end of the year, each submission was collected and added to a giant Spotify playlist that has over 97 hours worth of music—and that doesn’t even include songs that were submitted more than once or can’t be found on Spotify

While the Spotify playlist is impressive, 2020isasong’s website captures the full spirit of the project. Not only could submitters add a personal note explaining why a song mattered to them, but they also had the option to tag a song with a set list of emotions: Rage, Joy, Anxiety, Love, Hope, Insanity, and Sadness. The songs submitted here won’t match most music critics’ year-end lists, as listeners picked songs based on cathartic versus aesthetic or cultural value. Some people revisited the music of their adolescence, like My Chemical Romance's "I'm Not Okay (I Promise)", while others found older songs to be particularly timely, like "The Times They Are A-Changin'" by Bob Dylan. More than just a collection of songs, 2020isasong is a peek not just into the music that helped people survive 2020, but a glimpse at how people were feeling throughout this whirlwind of a year

The results are surprising: in a year full of so much loss, Aveling says that the majority of submissions were actually tagged with hope, joy, and love. For New Yorkers, who felt the brunt of the pandemic back in March, the results were similar: out of 296 submissions, 36% of people tagged their songs with hope, over 25% chose Joy, and around 15% picked Joy. Just as many people tagged their songs with Sadness as they did Love, but only 9% chose Rage, Insanity, or Anxiety. Music from Phoebe Bridgers and Fiona Apple resonated the most for New Yorkers, although Bob Dylan, Christine and the Queens, HAIM, Harry Styles, Jessie Ware, Stevie Wonder, Taylor Swift, and LCD Soundsystem were also popular.

But behind each stat are personal stories and memories that submitters associate with each song: Liz from Brooklyn submitted “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” by The Police after dealing with one too many maskless customers, while Faye from Brooklyn reflected on one of the last concerts they saw pre-pandemic with "New York, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down" by LCD Soundsystem. The most popular songs in New York were “This Year” by The Mountain Goats and “Rain on Me” by Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande, and both of these elicited different responses from submitters, who tagged them with Joy and Anxiety and Hope and Sadness, respectivelyLooking through the personal notes attached to each song on 2020isasong is a wonderful reminder that everyone’s attachment to music is unique and that songs can trigger individual memories for each person. In her Baffler essay on Spotify Wrapped, Liz Pelly asks, “What if we decided to reject this “masterful coup of free advertising” and instead chose to collectively admire all of the different ways, besides the shallow value of play counts, that music has contributed to our lives and to society this year?” 2020isasong seems to step in where Spotify Wrapped fails, emphasizing emotion over data with the basic understanding that music’s value isn’t derived from how many times it is streamed but how it makes the listener feel.

In a year without live music, 2020isasong reminded me of what’s at stake in the new year: the venues we’ve lost and could continue to lose, the artists who are struggling to earn a living without live music, and the countless number of people within the music ecosystem who will feel the impact of this pandemic for years to come. Despite all the pain and isolation we experienced last year, 2020isasong shows us just how much music connects us to a broader community—that there could be someone out there listening to the same song as you, feeling the same way you do. And isn’t that more comforting than anything Spotify Wrapped could tell you?

2020isasong: Remembering the Pandemic Year Through Music

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