Introduction

Hi! You may notice that this is in a somewhat different format than the other liner notes. The reasons for this are multitudinous but all basically boil down to "I have a silly brain". Like, here's the thing:

• I know you don't listen to music physically, and, to my knowledge, you don't even have a thing to play physical CDs on
• I planned on making playlists for everybody initially, I didn't because it was a lot of work, but I always wanted to
• I realized partway through making the first set of liner notes that making liner notes the way I want to is a bitch ¹ and takes a really long time.
• I didn't want to make another physical set of liner notes, especially because the sets I did make couldn't even be stapled, and were impossible to fit in the actual cases
• Working in google docs to make the liner notes fit to the dimensions of a CD case, and formatting it so that it could be flipped left to right, and getting all my images and text and shit to line up and text wrap is so ass

So I wound up wanting to do a format other than physical. It was in a lot of ways easier for me, but at the same time, I didn't want it to feel like less effort was taken, so here we are! I went with a website because:

• The online nature of a website felt more to the spirit of your playlist, being that the physical media aspect is mostly being shed, and better and easier for you to check, plus it didn't require any sort of log-in or sharing like a google doc would
• I wanted to somewhat match the vibe of Notion in the sense of being a clean, nice looking website that you could read a lot of text on
• It gives me an excuse to try something new and learn something new (in this case, HTML, the programming language used for websites of the early 2000s.)
• It's also relatively simple to learn so I can just start writing essentially, and don't have to fuss around with fancy functions and such to get things to look the way I want ²
• I don't have to deal with the limitations of physical documents! I am free to yap as much as I want without needing to cut myself off or make text unreadably small! Surely this will cause no issues on mobile platforms whatsoever!
• My Reccommended Songs sections can simply directly link to the songs I want to share as opposed to just being a reference you seek out for yourself. The secret about these playlists is that the recommendations putting even more niche and weird stuff is the real meat of the playlist, and the part of the playlist that I organized is just a lure :3. The reccommendations are like homework except they're awesome songs and I physically cannot tell you that they are required BUT I will feel a little sad if you don't check at least some of them out
• I can use the silly little interactive text features like clickable footnotes and drop downs and embedded videos that wouldn't be possible on paper and generally give the liner notes a more "interactive vibe"

So yeah, all that is why this took a while for me to get around to making. That and the usual ADHDness of it all, y'know, the "oh I have negative emotions associated with doing this thing and now it is Very Difficult for me to get back to doing the thing", which like, I set myself up for that, I shouldn't be surprised.

This playlist is about half stuff I've more recently added to my personal library, half stuff I've had on there for a while, and all music that makes me think of you (or at the very least, music I think you might like). If you happen to encounter any songs on here that feel like "Wow, Chris is calling me out", please don't get me wrong, anything I have on here like that is calling myself out as well.
Oh yeah, and if you find me explaining stuff you know already, don't fret too much about it, I'm not explaining it because I'm assuming you don't know, it's moreso that I like talking about this kinda stuff so I just kinda have to. It's something that makes these liner notes feel "complete" to me, like a polished thing anyone could read and not just making assumptions with various knowledge.

Music means a lot to me, and I've wanted to do this with everyone for a while, the problem, like I think I've mentioned to you before, is that I have low-key trauma around sharing music with people. Growing up, the kind of music I wanted to listen to wasn't on the radio, it wasn't on Pandora, it wasn't on Spotify for a while, so I always assumed people didn't want to listen to it, or just didn't care. My love for video game music was cultivated through youtube uploads and youtube comment sections that aren't available anymore, so music has always felt like this private, online-first thing for me. Even when I had bands I was really into, I didn't know anyone else that was into them and didn't want to buy tickets to see them myself, or I made up some excuse to not see them live, e.g. "they're past their prime, it would just be sad to watch", "oh X member of the band left since they recorded these albums", etc etc. The only way for me to play music to my family would either be to let it play from the TV (when it was usually ignored) or take the aux to play it from my phone (where it was usually disliked, either for not having lyrics, or the lyrics not being in english, or being "too repetitive", "to annoying", or some other issue). So I generally have this anxiety around sharing music I like with others that they're not going to like it or they're not going to care about it. And, a lot of the music I like, I really like, so that sort of reaction, as much as I know there's no intention to be mean or rude or hurtful in any way (it's literally just an expression of an opinion lol, I do so all the time) still hurts a bit. It's because of my history with it, and now that I've been putting it this way, I realize it might need to be something I work out. "How can I know what I think 'till I see what I say", I suppose.

Finally, to put out what I said on the other playlists; I designed this playlist for a decent experience listening from front-to-back, and the songs in this playlist need not be for your ears only, feel free to share them if you like. As far as I'm concerned, if even One (1) song from here gets added to your liked videos or your regular shuffle, then this is a success.

And yeah. In retrospect, it was definetely a dick move to give multiple other people this Cool Thing I Made and then not give it to others. In my head I was definetely a bit lost in the work of making it all, and definetely running under the assumption that everyone who didn't get one would be like "oh that's a cool thing that I wouldn't need or care for, I'm glad this other person got it but it wouldn't be for me", because that's a whole kind of gift category. But yeah, shitty move, I'm sorry about that.

On the format

For most of these songs, I'm going to be sticking to the performer as the primary credit. There will be a few songs where the only reasonable credit will be the arranger or composer, but for all songs I'll be crediting the composer, the performer, and the lyricist (if different from the composer). Some of these tracks, if you look them up, will more likely be under the composer/producer than the performer, because they use virtual singers. For songs with multiple singers, I'll be representing each singer in different colored text or with a bracket banner, depending on the amount of effort.