This Monday I went to see one of my favorite bands, Garbage, in concert. It was awesome. This Tuesday I went to see my favorite musical artist, Nine Inch Nails, in concert. It, too, was awesome.

I haven’t done anything time-consuming or stupid in a while on this website, so with my surplus of excitement and zeal coming off the back-to-back concerts, I decided to do something I’d joked about doing in the past but never actually done. A favorite song bracket! Two of them, actually.

Here’s the gist: I’m going to create two Bluesky threads, one for Nine Inch Nails, one for Garbage. I have randomized all of the songs in my music library and created matchups for each band. Every day I will do two songs by each band and pick a winner to advance to the next single-elimination round. I’m sure there will be a longer article at the end of this, but that’s the setup.

I’m going to do my best to evaluate each song honestly. Obviously, this is going to be my personal preference regardless, but what I’m really trying to remove is my historical emotional attachment to each song. Both artists continue to create amazing new work, but I feel like I don’t appreciate it as much as I probably should given the heavy emotional weight of the old and how long it has been with me. This is a time to ignore some of that and maybe appreciate some songs better.

Caveats: I removed all live versions. I removed all remixes. I removed all of the Ghosts albums because otherwise this would take literally forever as opposed to figuratively forever.

The Nine Inch Nails thread: https://bsky.app/profile/juxentente.com/post/3lylb7xb2pk2b

The Garbage thread: https://bsky.app/profile/juxentente.com/post/3lylbdltqkc2b

This should be fun!