2020

 I thought I started strong with introducing myself to new music this year. Right from January, I started following albums of the month lists and I thought I did find some good new albums. But then the pandemic happened and most albums were postponed so they could be released when touring was again possible. I don't think many people realised just how long it would take until that happened, so many of these albums were released later in the year anyway. In any case, when the pandemic started, I lost my momentum in looking for new albums. I got occupied by recording my own album and somehow I felt more comfortable listening to those old favourite albums of mine. I also listened to a lot of old jazz this year as I was reading more than ever and needed instrumental music in the background. Around the end of November, I started investigating albums I had missed this year. It proofed much more difficult than I had imagined to find good albums. There were good individual songs here and there, but it was kind of difficult to find albums that would've worked in their entirety. I still think this wasn't one of the best years in music, but I think I did manage to find a nice collection of albums to this list. Many of these only opened properly after listening to them many times. Only time will tell if I keep listening to these in the longer term.

2019

I’m a bit late to release my favourite albums of 2019. This is because when the year was coming to the end, I felt like I hadn’t paid enough attention to the new albums to come up with a good top10 list. It’s not that I haven’t heard any good new music, but compared to earlier years, I’ve had less time to listen to music. Partly this is because I started a new job where I have less time than before to listen to music while I work. My feeling is that 2019 was quite a good year in music. This is a list of good 10 albums from that year, but I can by no means claim that these are the best 10 from that year, since I feel like I haven’t spent enough time exploring what’s out there. Still, I want to get this out there. This year's list includes lots of country, Americana and folk sounds. It's probably not that fashionable at the moment, so it tells a lot more about my personal taste at the moment. There are also quite a few female singer-songwriters on this list. Some of the years on this blog have been quite male-dominated, so I really welcome the new wave of excellent albums by women.