Tag: Endless Summer Vacation

What I’ve Been Listening To

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.

Album Review: Endless Summer Vacation by Miley Cyrus

Endless Summer Vacation by Miley Cyrus

I grew up with Miley Cyrus. She’s the Madonna of my micro-generation, that batch of kids born between 1995 and 2000. We’re old enough to have owned and operated a VCR but young enough to remember having the Internet at least on the periphery of our entire lives, if not always the forefront. I am a child of Hannah Montana. When I went shopping with my dad at Walmart for new school clothes before my 6th grade year started, I bought the Hannah Montana 2 / Meet Miley Cyrus double album. That album provided the soundtrack to much of my pre-middle school life, that weird in-between time when you’re not really a teenager but also not a little kid anymore. You feel everything and nothing. Gravity doesn’t really know which way to pull you so you’re in a stasis between what you were before and what you will inevitably become. So yeah, I’ll fight someone over Miley. Anyone at any time.

She’s [Miley Cyrus] the Madonna of my micro-generation, that batch of kids born between 1995 and 2000.

I became an adult right around the time when Bangerz released. Actually, that CD was one of my 18th birthday presents from my parents, who paled at the theatrics and the unapologetic sexuality of that record and decided to buy it for me anyway. There’s a photo of me floating around on the Internet where I’m dressed as Miley for Halloween, tongue out and peace sign flashed.

There’s a photo of me floating around on the Internet where I’m dressed as Miley for Halloween, tongue out and peace sign flashed.

All of that said, I think Endless Summer Vacation is her best album yet. She’s a woman who’s been through a lot and that is evident not only in her autobiographical lyrics but the lived-in feel of the music itself. The entire record, from beginning to end, is a pop masterpiece. Although to be honest, I hesitate to put that label on it, slapping it in a pop box. Cyrus has, for the entirety of her career, defied all genre expectations and instead exists as a mashup of everything all at once. Any box you put her in will inevitably be smashed and there she’ll be, dancing madly in and around the detritus. We should all just be happy to be along for the ride.

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.