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 can’t pinpoint exactly when my interest in pop music became love, then obsession, but it was somewhere in the period now called ‘tween’. 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 and give myself points based on how accurate my predictions were. 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 (a fact that still annoys me a little to be honest).

Throughout the Nineties my tastes in music changed and I became more self conscious about those tastes. I still knew pretty much every chart song by pretty much every artist, and could offer an unneccesarily strong opinion on most. I read the NME and Melody Maker every week, which were indie-dominated (especially during the Britpop era), but also covered pop, if not always 100% positively. I generally just had a lot of time on my hands to take in as much music as I possibly could.

As I entered my twenties, it became a little harder to keep up. My time became occupied by other things both good (friends, clubbing) and bad (work, clubbing). I still knew all the major artists and songs, but my knowledge was definitely becoming patchier. By the time I turned 30 in 2010, patchy was an understatement. 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 was studying for a professional qualification. I didn’t have the time or, honestly, the inclination to pay attention to the pop charts.I guess on some level I thought my tastes had moved away from pop, even (dread word), matured. I, of course heard pop music in passing, in shops and TV trailers and suchlike, but I wasn’t seeking it out. It turned out I should have been.

It took me a little time to realise this, and I quite easily might never have done. But after our first child was born in 2014, I started a blog on music and fatherhood, having read a book which suggested starting a ‘dad blog’ would be a good way to remember those early years. It swiftly became just a music blog, as realised I didn’t want information on my kids online, and that many dad bloggers (possibly myself included) were quite irritating. The blog encouraged me to pay more attention to what was going on in the world of music, beyond just the stuff I would have naturally chosen to listen to.

Also, as the kids got a little older, they started to pay attenion to music and Radio 1 became a fixture of our mealtimes. Suddenly I was exposed to absolutely all of the pop music for the first time in decades. It quickly became apparent that, contrary to popular middle-aged opinion, pop music was not worse than it used to be. It was at least as good, if not better (there certainly seemed to be fewer absolutely terrible novelty songs and pointless covers than I remembered from my youth).

I began to appreciate the good pop that was out there, Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish, Janelle Monae and the like, peaking in 2024. That was the year of brat summer of course, but also Chappel Roan and Sabrina Carpenter, APT and Angel of My Dreams. It helped that 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 discuss pop. Often, also like me, they had had a period of time where they had lost touch a little with pop, but returned.

I was still left with a big gap in my pop music knowledge, from roughly 2010 to 2014, where I had no doubt missed some good stuff. None of the stuff was more good 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 compilation, the shonkiness of which couldn’t hide was the great song underneath. Clearly I needed to investigate Robyn further. I was aware of her existence, but only vaguely, and wasn’t even totally clear that she wasn’t the same person as Robin S, who sang Show Me Love back in the early nineties.

It turned out she had a string of brilliant songs, especially from her 2010 album Body Talk, but it was clear why Dancing On My Own was esteeemed above the rest. It is the quintessential sad banger, a tale of a broken heart that sounds great in any form but transcendent when paired with Robyn’s voice and Moroder grooves. The more I listened to it the more I loved it, to the point where it became my favourite song of the decade and one of my favourites 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. I’ve found a few more favourites, if nothing quite as perfect as Dancing On My Own

More than anything, it made me realise I never want to drift away from pop again. I have come to terms that there will be many wonderful records 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 person could ever discover in a lifetime. But records like Dancing On My Own make me want to try, to keep searching and at the very least make sure I don’t miss out on the very greatest.