Anyone who’s been reading this blog for any amount of time knows that while I’m a physical, tangible media kind of a dude, I’m also on the go a lot. I have a portable handheld cassette player but it’s cumbersome to carry around more than one cassette at any given time to play in it. I’m also very careful, gentle, and anal-retentive with all of my belongings so I don’t relish the thought of my cassettes (or any of my belongings, for that matter) being exposed to the elements and/or being jostled in my purse.

That said, I tend to carry around just one book at a time (zipped in my purse carefully or protected in a padded book sleeve) and listen to music on my phone via Apple Music. Please note that I’m aware that in the current zeitgeist Spotify reigns supreme while Apple Music, much like Facebook, is for oldsters. I don’t care. I like to look at my Replay every week to see which songs I’ve had on repeat, some of them the whole year long. I wanted to share them here so you can see just how unhinged my listening habits truly are.

Top 5 Songs

#1: Innocent (Taylor’s Version) by Taylor Swift (64 plays)

#2: Violet Chemistry by Miley Cyrus (54 plays)

#3: Choreomania by Florence + the Machine (46 plays)

#4: Thousand Miles (feat. Brandi Carlile) (38 plays)

#5: Used To Be Young by Miley Cyrus (36 plays)

Top 5 Artists

#1: Taylor Swift (4,325 minutes)

#2: Lana Del Rey (2,034 minutes)

#3: Miley Cyrus (776 minutes)

#4: Florence + the Machine (428 minutes)

#5: Halsey (335 minutes)

Top 5 Albums

#1: Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) by Taylor Swift (203 plays)

#2: Midnights (The Til Dawn Edition) by Taylor Swift (188 plays)

#3: Endless Summer Vacation by Miley Cyrus (136 plays)

#4: Midnights (3am Edition) by Taylor Swift (121 plays)

#5: folklore (deluxe version) by Taylor Swift (108 plays)

Two things of note I want to point out. One, there are two different versions of Midnights in my top five. That’s 309 plays on Apple Music alone. That doesn’t count all the times I’ve listened to the album on any other format. Can I quote it by heart? Yes. Do I think it should win Album of the Year at the Grammys? Absolutely! Midnights supremacy.

The second thing is that Miley Cyrus’s song Used To Be Young was just released on August 25th and it’s already in my top five most-played songs of the current calendar year. That song is resonating with me. I mean, I’m not nostalgic about a youth spent basking in an endless bacchanalia because that wasn’t ever my reality. I spent my youth working my way through school and now just working, endlessly. Am I still young? I guess I am, by most conventional definitions. I’m 27, but I feel hundreds of years old. Like a vampire. I have high blood pressure and diabetes and asthma and I live 95-plus percent of my life in a 5-mile radius. But enough with the self-pity. It’s just a really good song.

Anyway, here’s the link to my Replay 2023: Apple Music for Fred. Enjoy!

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.