The worst thing about the Gremmys is how much weight it puts on my opinions. I may have listened to a lot, but my tastes are as fickle as anybody else's, and even as I write them I know I'm leaving off specific records that others really enjoyed. So why not bring in some friends to provide some different perpsectives? Here are some picks from cool people who I know listened to a lot and whose opinions I respect.

This year was an especially difficult Gremmy Awards with so many great surf releases to sift through. I start to feel guilty, I'm subject to my own tastes and biases as much as anybody else, but most of those anybodies don't have a series of awards. So the Guest Gremmys help mitigate that guilt by bringing in other prominent surf ears to either agree with me or mention all the things that I felt guilty about not mentioning. Guilt aside, it's eye opening to see how albums land on other listeners. Despite all this social media, I still don't have a feel for whether my peers have similar feelings about these releases as I do, and The Guest Gremmys are a great way to lay it all on the table.

Odds and ends, things that I feel need to be recognized to sum up the year. Some categories return year-on-year, some don't.

The Gremmy Awards hinge pretty heavily on my own inexplicable tastes and biases, which is why I like to call for backup and ask for opinions from people who I know absorb a LOT of new surf material. I give them carte blanche as to how they'd like to present it, and most of my "editing" here is just formatting to fit the site better.

I want to make this known: this is publishing in April solely because of me -- these wonderful people submitted these months ago and I've just been such a disorganized mess that I'm getting around to compiling them now.

There aren't too many people doing awards for surf music which makes me very self-conscious about my choices. The Gremmys are just my opinions and some albums that didn't make an impact for me meant a lot to others, not to mention ones that I loved but just didn't make it to the top tier. So here are some other voices from people that I know are listening to a lot of surf and whose opinions I respect, and hopefully they'll cover some of the ground that I didn't.