The Great Unheard began in 2008, when 40 music lovers each made a CD containing ten under-appreciated songs. I collected those 400 songs and sent them around to the participants on a DVD. Around 2010, I figured out how to move the songs online, and TheGreatUnheard.com was born. In succeeding years, just over 100 people contributed playlists to the site, each of them pulling great songs from the awesome-but-overwhelming torrent of music available to us all.
Six Great Unheard “projects” are archived on this site:
- Original is the first project from 2008, in which 40 contributors made ten-song playlists comprised of “great songs that most people have not heard before.”
- Covers is from 2010. Thirty-six people made ten-song playlists of “great cover songs that most people have not heard before.”
- Places is from 2012ish and two dozen people made ten-song playlists comprised of “great songs about places that most people have not heard before.”
- 2X5 is from 2014. Seventeen people each made a ten-song playlist comprised of “two under-appreciated songs from each of five separate decades.” The goal of the project was to get a sampling of songs from different eras.
- Live playlists hail from amateur Internet radio broadcasts that ran (very) intermittently in the early 2000-teens, then again on weekly Zoom gatherings during the early months of the 2020 pandemic. In the days preceding each “show”, contributors sent in two or three songs, and we kept a running conversation going on a live-chat as the broadcast unfolded.
- Top 100 is the site’s current project. It departs a little from the original mission of the site in that it asks contributors to simply list their “favorite 100 songs of all time, regardless of whether or not those songs are well known or not.” For people who love music, this is an impossibly cruel assignment. Almost everyone bitched about it, and each person came up with his or her own tortured method for identifying a Top 100. In the end, it has yielded extremely listenable playlists that mix hidden gems with some time-honored classics.If you’d like to participate in the project or if you’d like to be notified when a new playlist posts, please drop me a line at matthewbarthel@hotmail.com, or @TheGreatUnheard on Twitter.Thanks, and happy listening!Matt