Firstly, for those who are following my albums of 2021 features, please understand the time I am taking in writing about my twenty favorites is simply down to the fact that this is how I like to do it. They are all worth spending some time with; proper listening undistracted by other goings on so that is how I am approaching it. They were my stand-out LP discoveries of the year and I maintain the philosophy that a great album is worth spending time with and digging in deep. Not only that but it has been a busy month getting back into action after my Covid experience.

The monthly playlists I compile have always been presented on Spotify, mainly because that was the streaming service I signed up with first eleven or so years ago and I just stayed with them. But this month two of my top artists, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, pulled their music from the platform in protest at a podcast spreading Covid vaccine misinformation. It is not a podcast I have heard and it does not sound like something which would appeal, but regardless I cannot argue against the ethics of the stance. If this podcast is supporting any anti-vax nonsense, then that is an opinion that should not be supported as it could potentially cost lives. And let us not overlook the fact that Spotify deserves more dissension than that received around a dubious Podcast it hosts. Yes, they have provided musical convenience and ease of discovery for all of us but artists routinely complain of not being paid adequately whilst Spotify get rich off their intellectual property.

So, my own response to this has been to look elsewhere for streaming as well. Whilst I suspect Spotify will ride this storm out, they may even coax Young and Mitchell back one day, those two alone leave so many holes in my various playlists that I have investigated Apple music and been quite impressed by the quality on offer there. From now on, the playlists will be available from both Spotify and Apple Music. Please remember though, the mission drive of the Fruit Tree Records website is to point readers in the direction of fantastic vinyl records for their collections, the playlists should really be viewed as try before you buy selections. As for Spotify podcasts, well there are many that I enjoy so I can hardly pretend that I am going to completely flush them away. One that is on the way out however is ‘The 500 with Josh Adam Meyers’. He is covering, album by album, the Rolling Stone Magazine top 500 albums list published in 2012. Admittedly he acknowledges that he has never been a music connoisseur, but this week he featured Richard & Linda Thompson’s 1982 classic ‘Shoot Out The Lights’ and gave it a kicking I cannot get on board with. Yes, he and his co-host did grudgingly give some kudos for guitar sound and a couple of decent songs, but the repeated calling Richard “Dick” and the general piss taking was way out of order.

They said Richard has a face you want to keep on punching on the cover, has Josh Adam Meyers not looked in the mirror lately? I know he would take me down for voicing this opinion and yes, maybe I am taking it all a bit too seriously as I agree that writing about music is a fundamentally pointless and unnecessary activity, just go and listen to stuff. And no, I am not defending Richard Thompson for cheating on and then leaving his heavily pregnant wife but they did take some shockingly inaccurate liberties with lyric analysis to further their Richard roasting agenda. The music is what the podcast claims to be discussing and the private lives of the artists should not be the main factor in assessing musical content. If we took wrongheaded domestic behavior into account, then music the sadly departed Ronnie Spector made with Phil Spector producing would be avoided like Gary Glitter. I am firmly on the side of Richard Thompson here as Josh Adam Meyers podcast got this one horribly wrong, even adding insult to an already infuriatingly ignorant position by mentioning Tears For Fears as a better call from the early eighties! Richard, with his boring looking 1980s geography teacher appearance, has struggled to receive the kind of acclaim his talent really does deserve so he hardly needs a bell end like Meyers putting the boot in. A shame because certain other episodes of his podcast had been laugh out loud funny, what a pity it was one of my favorite artists on the rough end of this shoddy treatment. Couldn’t he have saved that for the Red Hot Chili Peppers? (Maybe he did, I haven’t actually listened to that many).

Loving so much music from the fifties,sixties and seventies onwards does have a dark edge in 2022 because every month it now seems like artists who are beloved among the record collection pass away. Two of the great female singers have left us in January, Ronnie Spector and Norma Waterson, both were in their own way masters of the form in which they were most celebrated. Ronnie’s voice enriches the soul of that early sixties, post rock ‘n’ roll and pre-British invasion wall-of-sound pop era. For me and many others I am sure Norma was the authentic voice of UK folk music. It comes back to that word soul again as when Norma sang you really heard the heart of the song, these voices could move you tears then lift you back up again and believe me, they have frequently done just that and continue to do so with their indelible legacies.