Hello! We're already 12 days into 2015, but I've just now had a minute to sit down and think about my favorite songs of 2014. Last year when I shared my favorite songs, I cut it down to 10. Honestly, this year I just didn't want to try to cut it down. 2014 was an incredible year for music overall, and the older I get the more I truly love the songs that I like. The more music I listen to the easier it is to recognize songs that I'm going to love. I listened to most of the songs on this list on repeat for weeks or in constant rotation for months on end. iTunes has a function allowing you to view the date you added a song to it, so that is how I chose the songs for this year. Some of them came out before 2014, but I didn't find them until then. Anyways, there are 50 songs below that I just loved last year in a Spotify playlist.

The albums I loved most this year seemed to be few and far between. The albums I loved last year continued to be in constant rotation, so I didn't find myself searching for new music as much. I'm a person who still buys physical CDs which seems to be pretty rare in today's world. In an article that Taylor Swift wrote for the Wall Street Journal earlier this year (read here), she spoke about how young people today haven't stopped buying albums, we just only buy the one's that prove their value to us in some way. I couldn't agree more. I've spent plenty of money on albums over the years, and I've come to regret a few of those purchases. If I'm buying an entire album, I want to feel some emotional connection to it as a whole. That may sound stupid, but viewing it this way has led me to make better musical decisions overall. The albums that you feel a connection to are the ones that you'll still love years later. Again with this list, they didn't all come out last year, but I personally loved them in 2014.

What has been your favorite song this summer?

If you have ever attended a baseball game at any level, you may have noticed that the players get to choose a song that will play every time they walk up to bat (My personal favorite example is the member of the Atlanta Braves who used "We Can't Stop" all summer last year). I have heard my fair share of these because my older brother played baseball in high school (That photo is actually him hitting a grand slam when he played in the State Championship his senior year). I have had a playlist idea floating around in my head since the first time I heard the AM album by the Arctic Monkeys. I wanted to choose some songs that I wish would play every time I walked into a room. It happens in movies all the time. People get these incredibly cool songs that are played while they enter in slow motion (I hope you are thinking of the Mean Girls hallway scene). I've been thinking about these for a while, and it is definitely a change in genre from most of the playlists I share with you. This one has a LOT of guitar. A killer guitar riff is the key to my heart when it comes to songs that instantly make me feel cool when I listen to them. I've got 5 picked out for you today, and I'll share something about why I like it!