Every Song I Love is a series where I attempt to write about every song that I love, or die trying. Sometimes I’ll explain why I love them, sometimes I’ll tell the stories behind how I fell in love with them, sometimes I’ll do both. Most importantly, I hope you love them too.

I’m not sure exactly when my interest in pop music turned to love and then obsession, but it was some time around the time I entered double figures. I watched Top of the Pops and The Chart Show every week. I listened to the Top 40 countdown every Sunday, and even went through a phase of trying to predict the following week’s chart. I had a book which listed every offical chart from when they started through to 1991, with interesting facts interspersed. I still remember being scandalised that Groove Is In The Heart had been denied a joint No. 1 despite equalling the sales of The Joker (that still annoys me now in fact).

Throughout the Nineties, even as my tastes in music changed, and I became more self conscious about my taste, I still knew pretty much every song by pretty much every artist, and could offer an unneccesarily strong opinion. I read the NME and Melody Maker every week, which were very much indie music focused, but still covered pop music with varying levels of positivity.

As I entered my Twenties, I couldn’t keep up quite as much as my time became occupied by other things both good (friends, clubbing) and bad (work, clubbing), but I still knew all the major artists and songs, but by the time I turned 30 in 2010, all that had changed. Top of the Pops was gone, The Chart Show was long gone, Melody Maker was long gone. The NME was still around, but not good and I didn’t read it any more. I had a job, and a wife-to-be and a professional qualification I was studying for, and didn’t have the time or inclination to pay attention to the pop charts.

I guess on some level I thought my tastes had moved away from pop, to use a dread word, matured. I, of course heard pop music in passing, in shops and TV trailers and other such places, but I wasn’t seeking it out. But, it turned out I was wrong. After my first kid was born in 2014, I started a blog on music and fatherhood, which then became just a blog on music as realised I didn’t want information on my kids out there online, and that most dad bloggers were kind of wankers. It made me pay attention to what was going on the world of music outside my immediate taste a little more, then as my kids got a little older, Radio 1 became a fixture of our mealtimes and suddenly I was exposed to all the pop music again.

It became apparent fairly quickly that pop music, contrary to popular middle-aged opinion, was not worse than it used, to be but just as good. Arguably better in fact than in my nineties youth, as whilst the highs were no higher, there were fewer absolutely terrible songs it seemed. I began to appreciate the good pop that was out there, Dua Lipa and the like, peaking in 2024, the year of brat summer of course, but also Chappel Roan, Sabrina Carpenet, APT and Angel of My Dreams. It helped that in that year my main social media site became BlueSky, having left Facebook during the pandemic and Twitter a couple of years later, where I found a small but devoted group of people like me, middle aged, but who loved to appreciate and debate pop. Often like me they had had a period of time where they had lost touch a little with pop, but returned.

I was left with a big gap in my pop music knowledge, from roughly 2010 to 2014, where I had no doubt missed some good stuff, and nowhere was the gap more glaring than ‘Dancing On My Own’ by Robyn. It seems hard now to believe it passed me by entirely, but the first time I knowingly heard it was an indie-pop cover version on a DIY charity, whose shonkiness couldn’t hide was clearly a great song. Clearly I needed to check out the song, and the artist further. I was only vaguely aware of Robyn’s existence, and wasn’t even totally clear that she wasn’t the same person as Robin S, who sang Show Me Love back in the ealry nineties.

It turned out she had a string of brilliant songs, but Dancing On My Own was quite rightly held in greater esteem than all the other. The quintessential sad banger, a tale of a broken heart over Moroder type grooves. The more I listened the more I loved, to the point where the song found a place on my playlist of my very favourite songs of all time.

It struck me as astonishing that such a wonderful record had passed me by for so long, and it made me wonder what else I had been missing in those wilderness years. I’ve been going back and doing some discovery, aided by the fact there is a 2010s music challenge going on right now on BlueSky, with everyone picking their favourite songs from the decade.

More than anything, Dancing On My Own made me hope to never drift away from pop again. I have long since come to terms that there will be great records out there that I will never hear. There is so much music out there, and even the small percentage that is truly outstanding is more than one man could ever discover in a lifetime. But records like this make me at least want to try, and at the very least make sure I don’t miss out on the truly great ones.