[Image: one frame of an old stereograph, the droll caption to which is “What’s the matter dad? you seem put out.” (Click image to see the whole thing.) Technically, the gentleman here is not running after his hat, but losing it. It is sometimes hard to tell the difference in other contexts, too.]

• some crazy illustration (photo/artwork) of the blog’s title;
• a playlist of songs from the blog’s history; and
• a brace of woolgatherings about the blog, and/or about blogging in general.

First, about this year’s playlist: last year, the topic was “Discoveries” — songs which I’d encountered more or less as a result of maintaining this blog. (Most of their performers had been new to me, too.) This year, it felt only natural to revisit some songs I’ve blogged about which I’d known for years before hitting the first keystroke of what became Running After My Hat. Here’s the final list, with links to the posts in which the songs were included. (Each link opens in a new browser window or tab.)

The songs have little specific in common, other than their long familiarity to me. (Two of the songs came from a single post — one appearing in the post proper, one in a comment. A disproportionate number, for some reason, came from posts in 2011… feeling self-indulgent that year, maybe… and there are none at all from 2009.) These aren’t necessarily the songs most personally meaningful to me; I haven’t included any which I remember because I listened to them repeatedly as a child, for example, or because they were family favorites. And there’s no particular significance to the posts in which they appeared, either. The original list of all songs I knew pre-RAMH, in fact, included — unmanageably — over 200 items.

Luckily, I could start by disregarding any songs I’d used in an earlier anniversary playlist. I could likewise ignore (as I always do for these things) any songs in the annual Christmas playlists. So, after a few weeks’ off-and-on-again work, I eventually whittled the list down until I came up with one which is — on my terms, anyhow — repeatedly listenable, and no more than a single audio CD in length.

(“Repeatedly listenable” is a tough criterion to meet. I liked hearing every single song at the time of its posting, and on many occasions since; I was excited to (re-)discover many at the time of their posts’ writing. But damn: some songs just don’t hold up when you’ve got a CD in the car stereo, and you — by intention or not — leave it there over the course of a month or two rather than choose a successor.)

After all that, finally, here’s the usual little audio-player gizmo to run through the songs in the order above.

[If you’d prefer to order the songs however you like, and/or to remove some songs from the list altogether, feel free to use your secret RAMH right-square-bracket decoder ring.]

RAMH@7: Old Friends

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