Swim Into The Sound's Greatest Hits: A 400 Article Celebration
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With this post, Swim Into The Sound has officially published 400 articles! That’s pretty wild to me, especially considering we just hit 300 a year ago last May. Since we’ve celebrated 100 and 200 with similar fanfare, I figured it’s only fitting we continue the tradition and celebrate this as the landmark occasion that it is. Outside of just “cool number,” these intervals offer a nice reminder to look back and appreciate how much hard work has gone into this site and all the passion that’s helped us get here.
Our first-ever review was published back in 2015, and while I don’t necessarily recommend you go back and read it, I think it’s important to recognize where you came from, so I’ll link it here for completeness’ sake. While I consider June 15th, 2015 to be the true birthday of this site, it wasn’t until 2016 that I really committed to updating it regularly. If you were curious to learn some stats, those 400 articles stretched across nine years add up to roughly 640k words. A majority of those have been written by me, but also includes dozens of other contributors, guest writers, and friends who have been kind enough to let me publish their work.
2024 has marked a bit of a sea change for this site as I move from Swim Into The Sound’s primary writer to more of an editor-in-chief-type role. Working with a team of writers that’s now 20- to 50-strong has been a blast because it’s allowed us to be more prolific than ever. There have already been several weeks this year where we’ve been publishing a review, round-up, or something every day, and that’s amazing to me. Not only has Swim Into The Sound been more relevant and up-to-date than ever, but it’s also felt amazing to connect so many writers with opportunities to write about music they’re passionate about. That’s why this whole thing exists.
Speaking of which, I’m currently in the process of finishing up a bigger project, something more involved and more expansive than anything else this blog has ever published. So, when I’m not working my day job or editing other people’s work, that project is where most of my time and creative energy has gone. I’m beyond excited to share that in the coming weeks, but for now, I wanted to pause and reflect on the scope of 400 articles published over the course of nine years.
While I’m immensely proud of this body of work, I also recognize that 400 articles is a lot of writing to chew through. Just look at this unwieldy page that lists everything in one place. I don’t think anyone besides me has read everything published on Swim, but if you’re out there, I want to meet you. Are all of those articles winners? No. Am I proud of them all? You bet your ass. It’s hard to quantify how much work goes into writing, editing, programming, and promoting an article. I do my best to make sure everything is said in earnest and that the music we cover is something I can put my weight behind, written about by people who mean it.
Since there’s such an unwieldy amount of writing on this site, and we’ve been publishing more than ever before, I thought it might be nice to highlight some of my favorite things I’ve written over the last nine years. There’s always our Favorites tab, which is designed to showcase some of these articles, but I figured it could be fun to re-surface some of my personal favorites with a little bit of director’s commentary. I hope you enjoy this greatest hits collection, and if you’re reading this, thank you for supporting Swim Into The Sound and helping us get to 400 articles. I’ll see you when we break off the next hundo.
Post #261
Published November 16, 2022
Hey, did you guys know I like Wednesday? How about MJ Lenderman? Those two are some of my favorite artists currently working, and together, they’ve already made a sprawling collection of music that articulates a hyper-specific type of southern living. It’s desolate and dilapidated, collaborative and caring, humorous and honest, breathtaking and beautiful. This article attempts to recount my fandom of these two bands, their body of work, and the charming semi-fake cross-sectional genre their music has spawned.
Post #43
Published November 30, 2017
When it comes to writing about Sufjan Stevens, you know I had to lean in with a long-winded title and an overly-earnest explanation of my adoration. While I adore Carrie & Lowell, Illinois, and Age of Adz, I’ll always be a Michigan Boy in my heart of hearts. In this nearly 4k-word essay, I detail the hyper-specific way I fell into Sufjan’s music and delve directly into the masterwork that is his sophomore album. I even made a bunch of phone wallpapers out of the album art if that’s your type of thing.
Post #122
Published February 4, 2020
I love the indie/math rock outfit Minus The Bear. Throughout most of high school, college, and my twenties, I’d catch MTB in concert every time they came through Portland as they wound their way north back to Seattle. In this post, I rank all of their 11 official releases and use that as an opportunity to extol the virtues of various songs across their almost two-decade-long career. It’s long and heartfelt, but I still agree with the ranking to this day, so it’s nice to know I’m consistent.
Post #132
Published April 24, 2020
I love putting people on. There’s no better feeling than recommending a band or album to someone and finding out that it connected. With this article, I wanted to give people an entry point into the post-rock genre. Since it’s largely instrumental and has tons of legacy acts, it can be hard to know exactly where to start with music like this, so I attempted to take my decades of fandom and hone down to an album (or two) from some of the genre’s most essential bands. The result was a collection of nine albums that will hopefully open the door to exploring each of these artist’s phenomenal discographies and the genre as a whole.
Post #38
Published September 22, 2017
Here is one of the first times I ever waded into music “theory” on this site. I say “theory” in quotes because it’s all very floaty pontificating, not music theory in the traditional, educational sense. Instead, what you get is a ten-point outline of how we come to like (or dislike) records. I pull from pop music, hip-hop, indie rock, and more to explore the concept of “growers” and how many extra-musical factors come into play with our fandom of any given artist. It’s a vaguely scientific analysis of what “liking” an album means, and I’m still proud of how thorough this feels.
Post #47
Published January 24, 2018
Have you ever wanted to get into Ween? You know, the glue-huffing Spongebob-adjacent duo that changed the face of Alternative Rock for a brief window back in the 90s? They have a massive body of work that is vibrant, goofy, and hard to pin down. Their early work is rough and haphazard, but their later work loses some of the group’s youthful shine. As such, they have an ambitious discography that can be difficult to navigate, but with this piece, I try to lay out a path for prospective listeners to jump into their music with both feet because I truly believe it’s a journey worth taking.
Post #34
Published August 14, 2017
The Wonder Years changed my life. Hearing The Upsides for the first time in my senior year of high school didn’t just comfort and compel me; it tipped life’s hand and let me know what I could expect throughout college and my early 20s. That band remains incredibly special to me, but their sophomore album will always be The One. If you want to learn why (or read about my failed high school relationship), this article is for you.
Post #178
Published May 9, 2021
I don’t write many anniversary pieces for this blog, but I have a special connection with Tunnel Blanket. The third album from post-rock mainstays This Will Destroy You is a largely wordless meditation on death, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a lot to say. I wound up writing this love letter to their seismic third album, and by the time I finished the first draft, I realized that the record just happened to have a birthday coming up. So, with that happy coincidence falling into my lap, everything lined up, and I published my first-ever anniversary review ten years on the dot.
Post #80
Published October 17, 2018
Okay, let’s do a silly one. Back in 2018, Migos were untouchable. Everyone was listening to “Bad and Boujee,” doing the dab, and whipping up stir fry. In the midst of Migos Mania, the group released Culture II, a two-hour affair that packed 24 songs into one release, for better or worse. In listening to the whole thing, it’s hard to ignore how often Offset name-drops Patek Philippe. It’s such a distinct combination of words, and the rapper does deliver them well, but after a while, the name starts to lose all meaning. Here, I try to compile all of the rapper's references to the watch brand in an attempt to answer the question, “Does Offset own a Patek Philippe?” I also took a bunch of old Patek print ads and put Migos lyrics over them, so that’s still funny to me.
Post #99
Published April 7, 2019
Like any good Millennial, I have an unwavering affinity for Bon Iver. Like so many other people in 2007, I heard “Skinny Love,” and it shook me to my core. I followed his career closely, eventually culminating in an absolute masterwork with 22, A Million, an experimental and electronic album that couldn’t have sounded further from the folksy strums of his breakthrough. In this article, I chart that journey and make a case for both ends of this spectrum being equally beautiful.
Post #41
Published November 06, 2017
I love Portugal. The Man. That’s a sentence that’s even more embarrassing to say now than it was back in 2017 when I wrote this article, but let me explain. PTM was one of the very first overtly “indie” bands I ever loved, and the fact that they’re essentially a Portland group filled me with an immense amount of hometown pride. I love their early proggy post-hardcore stuff, I adore their 2010s dips into psychedelia, and I even admire them for everything they’ve been able to achieve in the last half-decade since cementing themselves as an alternative rock mainstay. In this article, I rank every one of their studio albums, though, again, it was really an excuse to write about how much I adore each one of their records.
Post #119
Published January 7, 2020
Okay, one more Sufjan post. What can I say? The guy’s influential to me. Here, I focus on the Carrie & Lowell era as a suite of releases, stacking the original album side-by-side with the accompanying live album and collection of B-sides and demos released throughout the back half of the 2010s. What drew me to this body of work is how you can hear any given song scale up or down; you get these beautiful original versions on the LP, then bombastic renditions when performed live, and somehow even more quiet and careful versions when the same songs are in demo form. It’s a true marvel, and I’m grateful to follow an artist who treats his own work with this much reverence.
Post #214
Published November 19, 2021
We’ll end this with my favorite. Not necessarily my favorite thing I’ve ever written here, but a post about my favorite type of music. Specifically, a song that is long, winding, and wandering, preferably with a big, expansive, searching instrumental. It’s not quite a jam, but it’s not not a jam. In this post, I simply try to articulate what that feeling is and why it hits my brain so nicely.
And there you have it: a baker’s dozen of essential Swim Into The Sound articles for your reading enjoyment. I hope you have had fun on this walk down memory lane, and thank you again for helping this site achieve such a landmark milestone. Now it’s onward to 500!
