After spending so much time in the past few decades in particular areas, not always “mainstream” or anything, the 2010s because the decade where I ended up listening to a lot more top forty for a lot of it. Driving my kids around as they moved into tween and teen years, before they discovered their own sound (which, going into the next decade, is hugely k-pop for one and alternative for the other), we listened to a lot of pop music and the things that everyone listened to. And unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of good and catch stuff. While I seriously got into performers like Marie Digby and Shanna Zell on my own, I also enjoyed the latest things out of performers like Beyonce and Rihanna, took a really solid liking to a lot of what Taylor Swift produced, and more. There’s always an easy dismissal toward pop but there’s a lot of really good things that always moves through the genre and to deny it is foolish.

But what stuck out most in the decade for me? I really try to avoid it being anything that’s new or recent because it’s just stuck in my mind, but the reality is that 2020 has been listening to less music overall because the pandemic has me not in my car, which is my primary music listening place. And that’s had me seeking out things more and the one that I did that with, and repeatedly, is Billie Eilish with everything i wanted, whose lyrics and overall style and tone is something that really just scratches an itch in my brain in an incredibly pleasing way.