Top 15 albums of 2022

It’s the biggest cliche, but it turns out to be true: when you have a kid, it gets a lot harder to listen to new music.

Part of it is simple math. There are just a finite number of hours in the day, and parenthood takes up many of those hours. But it’s not like I didn’t listen to music this year. I love having music on around the house when playing with the kiddo. But we spent a lot of that time with old favorites–at 21 months he’s already intimately familiar with all the Beatles deep cuts, and has heard a lot of New Orleans brass. And even when I put on new stuff, there’s a difference between solitary time when you can really focus on the music, and busy time when music is a nice accompaniment.

So I found plenty to love this year. And some of it feels especially important to me, since I got to share it with Eric. So if my listening was a little less comprehensive this year, I certainly didn’t miss out on the joy of music, which is really the important part.

As usual, I’ve created a Spotify list. But Spotify pays artists basically nothing, so I’ll make my annual request: if you like this music, go pay real money for it. At Bandcamp preferably. Artists are really hurting these days, after two years of limited or non-existent touring. Music is so so good, and artists should be compensated for giving it to us.

15. First Aid Kit – Palomino

I don’t think these sisters are capable of making an album I don’t enjoy. There’s more of a 70s FM radio feel to it than anything else they’ve done, which is a nice change–albeit one that I hope doesn’t define their new sound going forward. It didn’t grab me as forcefully as their other records have, but it still perfectly lovely.

14. Taylor Swift – Midnights

This album makes my list this year almost entirely because of the aforementioned difficulties finding time for music. I’m almost certain that some of the honorable mentions below will end up mattering more to me over the next few years. But Taylor Swift writes some ACCESSIBLE music. Which might sound like a diss, but it’s really not. If there’s nothing I truly loved on this record, I still listened to it a lot and got plenty of enjoyment from it. And that’s fine; not everything has to be a game-changer.

13. Tiny Moving PartsTiny Moving Parts

Midwestern emo punk that delivers exactly what it says on the tin. There’s nothing here that surprised me, and even after a fair few listens I still can barely distinguish any of the specific tracks in my mind. So I suppose that makes it a bit disappointing. But I’m hardly the sort to believe that everything needs to be Great Art in order to count as sucessful. if the standard is less ‘Great American Novel’ and more ’13th installment in a page-turning detective series that you enjoy’ then it delivers just fine.

12. LumenetteAll Around My Head

It’s produced by one of the guys from Hammock (who have shown up plenty of times on my year-end lists over the years), and you can definitely hear the similar vibes. But when Hammock does ambient/post-rock, this has far more dream pop sensibilities. It’s a lot warmer than you might expect from a Cocteau Twins or Mazzy Star, but those are still the reference points that make the most sense to me.

11. Caroline SpenceTrue North

It lacks the standout song that has really elevated her previous records, but if there aren’t any gamechangers here, there certainly aren’t any missteps either. The result is just a dozen lovely songs. My biggest complaint is actually with the production, which is a bit too clean, and with the drums in particular coming in too high in the mix. Every time I listen, I find myself wishing I was hearing these songs live–preferably in room with only mediocre acoustics. Her vocal delivery is so perfect that I want to hear it struggling against something, to give it the full range of possibility.

10. PixeyDreams, Pains & Paper Planes

It feels like there’s been a lot of this sort of thing–music that seems to be drawing from both the alternative and pop traditions of the mid-90s. As a 90s kid, this manages to feel simultaneously nostalgic but also kind of alien. On the whole, I can’t say it’s a fusion that I generally enjoy all that much. But this record definitely makes me see the potential. The pop bops definitely pop. And the hooks have plenty of hook.

9. GordiInhuman EP

I have yet to find a Gordi record I don’t love. Even this short EP offers more than enough to justify a spot on the list. Gordi excels at building soundscapes, but that can come in a lot of forms. You can literally hear the progression of ideas as you work through the record. The opening tracks are acoustic-driven, built around some very simple chords. The later tracks are far more laden with studio production–with her delightfully sparse cover of Grass is Blue providing a palate-cleanser before the closing title track. To my ears, the soft contemplative tracks are the best. But the real joy is in the interplay.

8. Nina NesbittÄlskar Nights
7. Yumi ZoumaPresent Tense

You’d think that the better part of a century into the history of modern pop music, the supply of perfect pop gems would be starting to run low. But they somehow keep finding new ways to play with the same basic components and produce things that sound fresh and lively. These two records fit together very nicely, in that they both explore aspects of the contemporary pop scene.

Yumi Zouma starts with a dream pop template, but has added quite a bit of jauntiness on this record, to wonderful effect. Nina Nesbitt’s record is a bit more mainstream in its songcraft, albeit the mainstream of a few years back. Which is just to say that if Katy Perry had released some of these songs in the early 2010s, they would absolutely have rocketed up the charts. But the best moments are the ones that get away from the big anthemic choruses and dwell in the particulars. It’s also worth getting the Älskar Nights deluxe edition, since several of the best tracks were inexplicably relegated to the bonus disc.

6. Mariel BuckleyEverywhere I Used to Be

It bounces between melancholy and depression. If at times, that makes it all feel just a little TOO bleak, she rescues things with some quite jaunty tunes. It’s a country record on the surface and deep in its bones, but in between you can find plenty of synthetic elements and AOR vibes. The effect is something that’s pleasantly timeless.

5. Caitlin RoseCAZIMI

It’s been almost a decade since her last album, which is far far too long. Her music is deeply Nashville, but in the fullest sense. These songs are immaculately produced, but they also feel utterly real and specific–full of all the life and love and sadness of the struggling busker, the fresh-eyed kid chasing a dream, the lifer trying to recall what made them fall in love in the first place.

4. Etran de L’AïrAgadez

By self-description, Etran de L’Air are “stars of the local wedding circuit” in the city of Agadez on the southern edge of the Sahara–quite literally the last homely house before a thousand miles of desert. That’s not exactly the bio I would have expected to be responsible for maybe the most kickass record of the year. But apparently that supposition was a product of my own ignorance, because damn this thing SMOKES.

3. Soft Blue ShimmerLove Lives in the Body

If you name your band Soft Blue Shimmer, you better sound like a soft blue shimmer. Mission Accomplished. Damn this album is good.

2. Built to SpillWhen The Wind Forgets Your Name

Built to Spill isn’t the sort of band that inspires a lot of anticipation. These days, they just drop a new album every five years or so. They all still sound like Built to Spill, but also all have their own unique vibe. Some are merely fine. Some are genuinely great. This one falls on the very high end of that range. I still probably think There Is No Enemy is my favorite of their post-90s albums, but this one is pretty close.

1. marine eyeschamomile

An absolutely gorgeous record. I’m tempted to call it things like ‘exquisite’ and ‘delicate,’ because it absolutely is. But I worry that those words will make it sound fragile. And it’s anything but fragile. Listening to this record makes you feel like the ocean and the clouds and the stars and the sunshine, all humming together. It’s my favorite album of the year, and there isn’t really anything else that came close. Every time I listen to it, I find new depths and new joys.

Honorable Mentions:

  • bahía mansa – boyas + monolitos
  • Bruce Springsteen – Only the Strong Survive
  • HOLY FAWN – Dimensional Bleed
  • Viul & Benoit Pioulard – Konec
  • Hayley Kiyoko – Panorama
  • The Window Smashing Job Creators – The Power of Friendship
  • Ethel Cain – Preacher’s Daughter
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Top 15 albums of 2021

I’ve been writing up my lists of favorite albums here for fifteen years now. This is the first year in all that time that I don’t have full writeups on all the albums that I’d like to cover. I tried to carve out some space for it, but 2021 has been a pretty eventful year. Among everything going on out there, in our little corner of the world we had a baby and then moved to Sweden. So for the past few months I’ve been full-time parenting while also teaching three classes, and doing all that while trying to deal with an intercontinental move. It has been an incredible experience, but also a very busy one.

So I’ve enjoyed a lot of music this year, but haven’t had nearly as much time to sit listening carefully. Whether or not that’s reflected in this list, I’m not sure. But I can say that these are mostly the albums that I enjoyed listening to with our little guy.

As usual, I’ve created a Spotify list. But Spotify pays artists basically nothing, so I’ll make my annual request: if you like this music, go pay real money for it. At Bandcamp preferably. Artists are really hurting these days, after two years of limited or non-existent touring. Music is so so good, and artists should be compensated for giving it to us.

10. Harmony WoodsGRACEFUL RAGE

I’ve loved the last two Harmony Woods records, and this one is more of the same. But more. More of what? More emo, more explosions, more audio saturation. It doesn’t always work out—the middle section of the record in particular feels a little overworked—but it makes for a powerful punch.

9. Vanessa PetersModern Age

One of my favorite artists with another lovely record. It’s the loudest record she’s released in a long time, and in general I prefer her quieter, more introspective songs. But there’s something refreshing about letting your hair down and playing it loud. That was especially true this year, when this CD lived in our car stereo all spring and summer and soundtracked our trips to the park with the baby.

8. Magdalena BayMercurial World

The music of the 2020s often feels like it’s really just 80s music made by kids born in the 90s for kids born in the 2000s using the production techniques of the 2010s. Magdalena Bay feel like a peak example of this phenomenon. It’s Madonna interpolated through Grimes and broadcast on TikTok. As an old millennial, I find almost everything around the band to be somewhat baffling (and more than a little annoying). But the music…the music absolutely rips. And that’s enough.

7. DeafheavenInfinite Granite

They’ve been dialing down the metal in recent years, but this one is a major step beyond what they’ve done before. Where the melodic element used to live underneath the noise, providing a tiny counterpoint, the hierarchy is fully reversed here. These songs are soft, almost tender. That doesn’t mean it’s not a loud record. But they’re hitting the drums hard and turning the amps up high not to blow you away, but to give you a chance to fully experience every harmonic breath.

6. Middle KidsToday We’re The Greatest

A blend of mid-2000s indie rock, late 70s power pop, with songs that could just as easily have been written in a folk tradition. But lyrically, it owes far more to a contemporary sensibility. There is pain here, and loss, but also an insistent joyfulness.

5. GrouperShade

Another record built around aural texture. It does not feel like a cohesive whole, unsurprising for an album composed from pieces recorded over the course of fifteen years. It works best in the extremes—the pure quiet beauty and the chaotic destructive madness—and in the relationship between those experiences. That relationship is captured very well by the opening two tracks, which cast the whole world into the storm and then strum softly back into the light.

4. Kacey Musgravesstar-crossed

One of those records that managed to be both a huge disappointment and a stirring success. Given her career progression to this point, it felt like a Kacey Musgraves breakup album had the potential to become a new all-time standard in the genre. But instead of leaning into the pathos, she tried to make Art. But the thematic structure doesn’t really work, and some of the genre-busting choices succeed but others really don’t. Even still, there are some absolutely killer tunes here. And that’s more than enough to save it.

3. Benoît PioulardBloodless

Soundscapes that layer gorgeous slow sweeping melodies on top of tape hiss and the distant crackling of stars. I love everything he does, and this record is no exception.

2. The War on DrugsI Don’t Live Here Anymore

Another gem from one of the best bands in the world right now. The production is going to turn some folks off—I’ve seen some unfavorable comparisons to Steely Dan—but I think that’s a little misguided. Yes, it’s sleek. And yes, the musicianship is expert. But this record is filled with unexpected twists and turns that keep it from ever feeling even a little bit sterile.

1. James McMurtryThe Horses and the Hounds

This one really snuck up on me as my #1 for the year. I enjoyed it on the first listen, but would never have flagged it as the year’s best. But the more time I spent with it, the more it meant to me. McMurtry has always been a genius of character studies, but he’s really outdone himself this time. Every song feels like a novel sanded down to its pure, perfect core. The back half of the record drags a tiny bit, but the opening sextet absolutely blows me away every time.

Honorable Mentions

11. Antlers – Green to Gold
12. Olivia Rodrigo – SOUR
13. Rodeola – Arlene
14. Amy Shark – Cry Forever
15. Lightning Bug – A Color of the Sky

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Top 40 Songs of 2021

These lists are always a sort of personal soundtrack. They remind me of where I was and what I was doing each year. More than anything this year, ‘where I was and what I was doing’ was very simple: at home with my family. So it’s probably no surprise that many of these songs tend toward the contemplative. That doesn’t mean there’s no joy here, but it’s probably the quietest list I’ve put together in a while.

I’ve created a Spotify list. But Spotify pays artists basically nothing, so I’ll make my annual request: if you like this music, go pay real money for it. At Bandcamp preferably. Artists are really hurting these days, after two years of limited or non-existent touring. Music is so so good, and artists should be compensated for giving it to us

40. I Need Your Love – Tristen
There’s something soul-enriching about a perfect two minute pop song. No artifice, no unnecessary exertions. Pure conservation of energy.

39. Long Distance Conjoined Twins – Home Is Where
Folk emo hardcore riots. With harmonicas.

38. Shellstar – Deafheaven
This sort of neo-90s shimmering guitar noise has never fully gone out of style, which also means it’s never really experienced a revival. But this is among the best of the genre in recent years.

37. Don’t Go Puttin Wishes in My Head – TORRES
An indie rock fireworks display.

36. Peace of Mind – Tim Easton
Back in the early 2000s, a friend of mine got in touch with Tim Easton when he was on tour and got him to swing through our tiny college town to play a backyard show. Most of the audience was the made up the high schoolers from our debate camp. To this day, it’s still probably one of the 10 or 15 best shows I’ve ever seen.

35. Make Up My Mind – Vanessa Peters
A beautiful day out kayaking. Most of the time you can glide calmly along enjoying the scenery. But then the rapids come, your pulse rises, and you begin paddling for your life.

34. Valentine – Snail Mail
Nothing on this album hit me with nearly the same force as her debut, but this one comes the closest. Especially that moment when she explodes “why’d you wanna ERASE me.”

33. At It Again (Again) – Slow Pulp
Dreamy bedroom pop that is here and gone in two minutes.

32. Cut Cut – CUIR
I have no idea what these French punks are screaming about in this song, but it absolutely slays.

31. Paprika – Japanese Breakfast
I mostly didn’t love the turn toward bubblegum pop on this record, but this song is a strong exception. I absolutely adore the horns.

30. Qué Lío – Natti Natasha
I tend to expect big thumping songs from Natti Natasha, so I’m always delighted to discover songs like this one, which seem to just float on the breeze as it passes by.

29. Spike the Punch – Alex Lahey
A lovely little slice of power pop

28. God’s Gift To Women – Harmony Woods
Best line of the year: “Keep writing those records about how you know best, like you’re a walking fucking copy of Infinite Jest.”

27. La Perla – Sofia Kourtesis
Coiled energy being released in carefully measured doses.

26. Dominoes – Lorde
I was hoping for a barn-burner from Lorde this year, and it didn’t quite happen. But I’m reasonably happy to settle for this very relaxed little diss track.

25. Followed the Ocean – Grouper
A beautiful noise.

24. Introvert – Little Simz
Kicks the album off in incredible style. The orchestral sweep sets the stage and then she strolls out: cool, collected, ready to blow you away.

23. Do You Mind? – Orla Gartland
Long after the pain first tears through you, when it’s no longer reasonable to act like your world is being torn apart but you also can’t make yourself act normal. And more than anything you just want to get away.

22. No Sense – Blankenberge
Blankerberge excel at big driving shoegaze. This one doesn’t really offer anything to deviate from that mold, but if you’ve got a good fastball, sometimes it’s a perfectly good idea to just throw another one right down the middle.

21. Ghost – Rodeola
The sort of song that feels like being wrapped up in a warm blanket.

20. Kiss Me More – Doja Cat ft. SZA
I’ve seen this song described as ‘bubblegum pop’ and ‘R&B’ and ‘disco’ and ‘funk’ among many other things. I don’t know about all that. But whatever label you want to settle on, it’s a delight.

19. Male Fantasy – Billie Eilish
I know a lot of people were mildly disappointed in this album, but I actually dug it a lot more than the debut. The idea of a followup record that deals with the languid ennui of becoming a star is a cliché, but very rarely is it addressed so deftly.

18. New Age – Mackie
Mackie was a member of the punk band Blitz back in the 80s. He left the band before the recorded this song. So now, four decades later, he’s covering it. And absolutely killing it, too.

17. The Right Thing Is Hard to Do – Lightning Bug
I’m such a sucker for a stately shoegazy torch song.

16. Tried To Tell You – The Weather Station
A song about the things we lose by refusing to be open to the beauty of the world around us, which is, appropriately, stunningly beautiful itself.

15. Pretty Pictures – Indigo De Souza
This was a really nice album with plenty of other less conventional tracks. In another year, I might have gone with one of them. But this year, I just wanted something beautiful.

14. Grass Is Blue – Gordi
Gordi covering a Dolly Parton tune, and yes it’s exactly as good as you would expect.

13. Brando – Lucy Dacus
“You called me cerebral. I didn’t know what you meant. But now I do, would it have killed you to call me pretty instead?”

12. Dino’s – Gordi & Alex Lahey
I love Gordi and I love Alex Lahey (see: elsewhere on this list), so it’s no surprise I love their collaboration. It really captures that feeling of falling for someone long before you know enough about them for it to actually make sense.

11. coping mechanism dub – Car Culture
I have literally no information about this song. I’m pretty sure I found it on Bandcamp, but it doesn’t appear to exist there anymore. Who is this? What even is going on here? No idea. But I love it.

10. Little Things – Big Thief
It never fails to amaze me what magic you can create with one guitar and two chords.

9. Morne – Benoît Pioulard
The sound of the universe breathing.

8. Last Day on Earth – Beabadoobee
An indie pop gem about the onset of lockdown. Produced by Matty Healy from The 1975 and you can really hear that influence in the chiming guitars.

7. Farfalla Run (Tossing Remix) – Batch Kalat
Deep ambient textures, a hint of unexplored menace, the crisp clarity of a cold winter night.

6. Jackie – James McMurtry
So many gorgeous lines in this song: “Half a section in the short grass at the foot of the plains / Grows broomweed in the dry times, ragweed when it rains” – “Watch the country roll by in the halogens’ glow” – “She jack knifed on black ice with an oversized load / There’s a white cross in the borrow ditch where she went off the road”

5. Drivers License – Olivia Rodrigo
The thing I love most about this song is its emphatic earnestness. She knows it’s silly, she knows that it’s an overreaction. But knowing doesn’t make it hurt any less, and doesn’t make it any less important to really feel the feelings as they are.

4. Camera Roll – Kacey Musgraves
A very close call between this and Hookup Scene–two absolutely jewels from the record. This one gets the slight edge for that final verse, which just breaks my heart every time.

3. Occasional Rain – The War On Drugs
I really do like the incredible attention to detail in this album’s production, but I also think its best song is the one with the lightest touch. It’s a perfect album closer: contemplative, heartfelt, just a little bit wistful.

2. Play It By Fear – The Sonder Bombs
A propulsive explosion of a song with the best chorus of the year, which starts “I’m too big of a nihilist for a world like this, I know.”

1. R U 4 Me? – Middle Kids
A blistering, joyous, emotional rollercoaster. I first heard this song on a crisp spring morning out walking the dog and immediately fell in love. It’s only grown in my affection over the year.

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Vaccine optimism

I want to offer some vaccine optimism. I see a lot of negative feelings out there, and I understand them. This has been a terrible year, and it sometimes feels like even the good news is drowned by the never-ending tidal waves of bad news. But it’s worth understanding just how good our trajectory is, compared to where we could be.

We have vaccines long before we could have reasonably expected them, they are far more effective than we could have reasonably hoped, and they’re being distributed at a decent (though not great) pace. There’s every reason to think the world could be back to a reasonable approximation of normal by the end of summer. If we can buckle down and stay safe for just a few more months, things are going to start getting massively better.

The vaccines are near-miracles

It has been almost exactly one year since COVID hit the US and we have not only created a vaccine, we have already distributed it to 20 million people. This is absolutely unprecedented, and far faster than all the experts expected last spring.

And the vaccines themselves are incredibly effective. They almost completely eliminate the risk of catching COVID, and for all practical purposes they completely eliminate the risk of a serious case. We don’t know for sure that the vaccine prevents one from being a carrier—passing it along without catching it yourself—but the experts think this is extremely unlikely.

These vaccines are not quite miracles, but they’re the next best thing. Once we get to herd immunity levels, things will be able to go back to normal. And even before then, we’ll start massively driving down rates of transmission and cutting into these absolutely horrifying hospitalization and death numbers.

Vaccine distribution is going okay

Of course, there is a lot of negative news about the rates of vaccine dispersal. But it’s worth putting it into context. I’ve heard a lot of people who think that the program has been a disaster because ‘we were promised 20 million doses by the end of 2020.’ Obviously that didn’t come close to proving true. But the important thing to remember about that promise is that the people who made it are huge liars who lie about everything all the time. It was never realistic! The far more realistic promise of 100 million doses in the first 100 days of Biden’s administration is not only achievable, we will likely blow past it.

You will also hear people say things like: ‘at the current pace it will take a full year or more to vaccinate everyone.’ That’s true, but not very informative. The ‘current pace’ changes every day as distribution ramps up. It took 3 weeks to give out the first 5 million doses. But it only took 7 days for the next five million, 6 days for the next five, and only 4 days for the most recent five. We won’t get endless acceleration, but we certainly shouldn’t expect the current rate to be the plateau. And things will only get better when the Johnson & Johnson vaccine (which only takes one shot) is available.

Light at the end of the tunnel means we need to double down in the meantime

None of this is a reason to be satisfied. We can and should invest way more in the vaccine program. Every minute of delay means more people getting this virus and more people dying.

But there really is light at the end of the tunnel. By April, we should expect a fifth of the country to be vaccinated, with another fifth entering the pipeline. A lot of people will be inoculated, and everyone else will be a lot safer.

In the meantime, we really REALLY need to buckle down and stay safe. There’s light at the end of the tunnel but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re currently in the middle of the worst stage of the pandemic, with hundreds of thousands of infections, and several thousand deaths, every day. And the newer, much more contagious strain is starting to spread. This strain, along with the scope of the current breakout, means a lot of stuff that was safe enough to justify the risk a few months ago is not safe anymore.

Folks have put up with a lot over the past ten months. It’s been an incredible collective effort to protect each other. And I know it’s wearing thin. A lot of people are struggling. But we’re close. We aren’t going to have to live like this forever. It’s really just another few months before the corner will truly be turned.

So please please please consider the following recommendations:

  • Avoid any situation where you have to be indoors with other people. Even if you’re distanced, even if you’re masked. In three months, it will be pretty safe. Right now, it’s really not. If you absolutely can’t avoid going somewhere, try to limit your time. Every little bit makes a difference to reduce the risk.
  • Get better masks. Cloth masks are better than nothing, but they really don’t do enough. If you can afford it, get yourself some N95 or KF94 masks. If not, layering masks helps a lot.
  • Be careful outside. The newer strain is more easily transmitted outdoors. In general, outdoors activity is still pretty safe, but it’s not nearly as safe as it used to be. Keep your distance, wear a mask.
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Top 15 albums of 2020

Music has been so important this year, given how we have lost so many of the intimate connections of friends and family that bring us peace and stability. Music can’t replace those things, but it’s something. A warm fire on a dark night, a promise that love and connection is still out there, just over the horizon.

I think those feelings help explain why some kinds of music spoke more to me this year. I often found myself looking for something contemplative, quiet, comforting. That led me to a lot more ambient and instrumental music. But it also meant that I really wanted to spend the most time with records that put empathy front and center. I didn’t reflexively shy away from anything that was difficult or dark, but if I let myself drift, it generally wasn’t in that direction.

So my usual caveat applies: this is a list of my favorites, not an attempt to categorize what is objectively ‘the best.’ But it’s even more true this year than usual. I can’t say whether these are all Great albums. I just know they meant a lot to me.

One other note: I’ve only listed 15, in part due to a lack of time to write up my thoughts. The ten honorable mentions were all great, and I wish I had the bandwidth to give them a full discussion.

I’ve created a Spotify list, but Spotify pays artists effectively nothing so please if you like the music, click the links and go buy it. Bandcamp is great, and even includes some artists who you can’t find on Spotify.

15. Andrew WasylykFugitive Light and Themes of Consolation

An instrumental investigation of the Scottish coastline, built around the idea of fugitive light. You hear the interplay of ocean and fog, the tentative warmth of sun rays cutting through a cold spring morning, the sense of separation between past and present. This is probably best understood as a jazz record, but there are strong currents of 60s pop, classical baroque music, ambient found sound, even old western film scores.

Highlights: Black Bay Dream Minor, Last Sunbeams of Childhood, Fugitive Light Restless Water, Everywhere Something Sublime

14. The War on DrugsLIVE DRUGS

I’m always hesitant to include live albums on these lists. But The War on Drugs are one of the tightest live bands in the world right now, and Adam Granduciel has written some absolutely world class songs in recent years. So while this record doesn’t do much to surprise, it still manages to punch hard enough to justify a place on the list. It’s inessential if you aren’t already inclined to like the band, but is a very pleasant way to spend an hour if you’re already on the bandwagon. My only real regret is the performance of An Ocean Between the Waves. When I saw them back in 2014 on the Lost in the Dream tour, that song was absolutely electric. This take sadly didn’t fully capture that energy.

Highlights: Not the best songs of the bunch, but the best performances relative to their studio versions: Buenos Aires Beach, Pain, Strangest Place, Thinking of a Place, and the nice cover of Zevon’s Accidentally Like A Martyr

13. The BethsJump Rope Gazers

In its best moments, this record blends winsomeness and dreamy chord progressions with just enough cutting edge to stay sharp. The middle third of the record—from the title track to Out of Sight—manage this balance extremely well. Outside of that run, some tracks dip a bit too heavily into the sugar bag while others push the 70s power pop buttons a little too heavily. There certainly aren’t any bad songs here; I just wish they could have sustained the strength of that middle stretch over the whole record.

Highlights: Out of Sight, Jump Rope Gazers, Do You Want Me Now, Just Shy of Sure

12. snarlsBurst

The line between present life and nostalgia and has never felt thinner to me. Maybe it’s a function of the terminally online social media world we all inhabit. Maybe it’s the pandemic. Maybe it’s just my own age. But a record like this really gets me thinking about the forever-life of fuzzed out rock and roll. snarls certainly haven’t done anything to reinvent the genre, but if you can produce perfect songs like this, there’s absolutely no need to expand the range just for the sake of doing so. More than enough to blend monster hooks, jangly chords, dreamy interludes, and long arcs of shoegaze noise.

Highlights: Walk in the Woods, Falling, Marbles, Burst

11. The DaySoon I Will Forget

I said above that I’m generally hesitant to rank live albums. And this isn’t even really an album; it’s just four songs selected from a live performance in June during lockdown. But it makes the list anyways because that livestream will forever be a shining memory when I think back on this terrible year.

At the time, I had spent three months in a tiny bubble, with just Caroline and our dog as company. No friends, no events. I literally didn’t step inside a building that wasn’t my own home for seven straight weeks at one point. But I was able to sign into a stream and watch one of my favorite bands together in a big empty room, playing their music, opening their hearts to the world. I spent the whole week floating on a cloud, just remembering what it felt like to connect with other people, taking joy together from our shared experience of something beautiful.

10. Goran GetoAтмосфера Два

A blend of ambient elements with driving house beats. It’s deeply meditative, but still active, driving, engaging. The mix is full of sounds from field recordings—mountain streams, birds, wind—which balance the electronic textures nicely to communicate the lived experience of human beings interacting with the natural world.

Highlights: Rtanj (Original Mix), Tornik (Original Mix), Rudnik (Mechanist Retexture)

9. Lawrence ArmsSkeleton Coast

I’m pretty sure that there’s never going to be a Brendan Kelly record I don’t enjoy. This one is certainly no exception. Even if it doesn’t quite match up with the band’s best work. Unlike 2014’s Metropole, which took some steps toward more classic pop forms, this one falls back in their wheelhouse of fast-paced punk rock. At times, the metaphors are laid on a little thick, but with 14 songs spread over just 34 minutes, none ever have enough time to truly wear out their welcome.

Highlights: PTA, Goblin Foxhunt, Pigeons and Spies, Last Last Words, Lose Control

8. Taylor SwiftFolklore

There was absolutely nothing surprising about Taylor Swift releasing a record full of mostly acoustic songs with quiet reflections on youth and lost love. Nor was there anything surprising about critics lauding the more mature turn in her music. Of course that was the next step in her career progression. But while it may have all been inevitable, the context of COVID kept it from feeling overdetermined. And it’s to the credit of the music critic community that there was far less navel-gazing about Taylor and the epistemology of authenticity than I’d have expected. Mostly, people just focused on the songs themselves. And that’s nice, because this is a great collection of songs.

Mirrorball shimmers in the pale light. Betty is a sun-drenched exercise in radical empathy. The Last Great American Dynasty is a joyful romp. Exile is the Bon Iver/Taylor Swift duet that we all obviously needed. Epiphany is the leisurely piano ballad that brings us home at the end of the night. Does it all add up to her best record? Maybe, or maybe not. But it’s certainly the best record she could have released in 2020.

(For what it’s worth, I haven’t had the time to spend with Evermore to really judge it yet, but on first listen it feels significantly inferior to Folklore. If the sense of looseness made the first record feel free and untrammeled, on Evermore it just feels…unedited)

Highlights: Mirrorball, Betty, Exile, Epiphany, The 1, The Last Great American Dynasty

7. Six Organs Of AdmittanceSleep Tones

While designed as music to help you sleep, for me it’s been even more important during the hour before sleep. It’s a time for laying back, reading by candlelight, letting the day soak away. There’s something meditative about it, but it’s not the work of true meditation, just the quiet restoration that comes from relaxed attentiveness. These tracks are almost impossibly sparse in terms of melody—literally just a couple notes worth of movement spread out of twenty minutes. But the sensation is as comforting as the ebb and flow of the tides as they lap up against the distant shore.

Highlights: They are all lovely in their own way, but Alnitak is one of the most beautiful pieces of ambient music I’ve heard in years

6. Katie PruittExpectations

This is a truly comfortable record. But not comfort in the sense of lightness or superficiality. It’s that comfortable feeling that comes from being outside on a cool autumn evening, all wrapped up in a fluffy sweater. The chill nips as you a bit, but that only makes you feel a little more alive. And a little more thankful at the warmth. The title Expectations structures the whole record, which is a true bildungsroman about the pain of growing up. Specifically, the pain of growing up queer in a world that seems to provide no place for you.

“What’s it like to be normal” she muses, before turning to that oh-so-common reply to expectations: “If I could be normal, then trust me, I would.” Of course, it’s not really true. The difference hurts. It’s hurts terribly. But it would hurt even more to shut up that true part of yourself.

Those themes come through most powerfully on the heartfelt Georgia, about the home state that she felt would never accept her. But this is also where the ending is happiest. Now in her mid-20s, putting the finishing touches on this beautiful record, she sent a recording of the song to her mother. Some might have heard it as an accusation, but the thing about expectations is that all of us are still learning how to manage them.

It’s not exactly a happy ending, all smiles with everything tied up in bows. But there’s hope. And that’s enough for now.

Highlights: Georgia, Normal, My Mind’s A Ship (That’s Going Down), Expectations, Grace Has A Gun

5. HumInlet

Hum released two perfect space rock albums in the mid 90s, and then effectively disappeared. It’s always a shame when a band shuffles off the stage while they’re still producing at the highest level. But there’s almost something worse about the bands who keep releasing increasingly inessential work until the initial creative spark is completely smothered. So I didn’t lament too much. I mean, You’d Prefer an Astronaut literally closed with a track called Songs Of Farewell And Departure. It seemed like these guys knew when it was time to drift into the mist. And after all, they’d left us with two shining stars hanging in the sky.

And yet, here we are. A new Hum record in 2020. And defying all the odds, it’s really really good. Just listening to that opening riff on Waves. These guys are not messing around.

In terms of style, it picks right up from Downward is Heavenward, but with a couple decades worth of experience to enrich things on the margins. The surprising result: a deeper sense of optimism. These songs still communicate the grand sweep of time and space—the certainty that all things must pass. But they do so with a greater sensitivity for the time that remains.

Highlights: Waves, Step Into You, Folding, Cloud City, In the Den

4. GrimesMiss Anthropocene

Each Grimes album is a project of Hegelian Becoming–following from, but also structured in opposition to, her previous record. In this case, Miss Anthropocene is primarily a sublation of Art Angels–extracting the pop elements, fracturing them into pieces, and then reassembling them in new forms. But you can also hear traces of Visions, and even of her more esoteric earlier works. This process of destruction and rebirth can be a little uneven, and that’s certainly true this time around. But there’s more than enough great stuff here to produce a top-class album.

Delete Forever is almost pure folk, poignant, and beautiful. You’ll Miss Me When I’m Not Around is a bit of perfect angular pop. Before the Fever is a quiet dance with fire. And every song has something to offer. But even after spending a year with this record, I still can’t quite make sense of it. There’s a slight bitterness to the final concoction which goes uncut. Then again, I’m not quite sure that’s a bad thing. After all, the world itself is falling apart so why shouldn’t our art represent that fact?

Highlights: You’ll Miss Me When I’m Not Around, Delete Forever, So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth, Before the Fever, 4ÆM

3. sea oleenaWeaving a Basket

Imagine Grouper covering a Stars of the Lid record and you’ll just about hit the mark. These songs are quiet, gossamer thin, and impossibly beautiful. The textures are almost entirely acoustic, but the atmosphere is broadened substantially with deft touches of feedback, double-tracking, tape loops, and other effects. Listen to it as background music and you’ll savor its wistfulness and peacefulness. Listen to it on headphones in a dark room and you’ll find your soul shattered into a million pieces and then put back together again.

Highlights: Horses, Calvisius, Carrying, Will I Know

2. Katie MalcoFailures

A pack of tightly-crafted pop songs built around chiming guitars, resolute drums, and heartfelt lyrics. The record as a whole feels tender, but there’s also a sense of desperation here, of deep loss. It comes from the perspective of someone who finally feels like she might understand what it means to face those fears.

I’ve spent a lot of time this year thinking about this record, and the feelings it evokes in me. And the thing I keep thinking about is this: Failures reminds me of everything that made me want to start a music blog, back in the heady days of the mid-aughts when ‘indie’ was suddenly trendy and the medium allowed us to all talk to each other. There was a joyfulness about finding yet another great artist making great music that you could share with the world. That’s how I feel about Katie Malco, and I’m just a little bit sad that the form isn’t really alive anymore. So all I can do include it here on my year-end list, and encourage everyone out there to listen.

Highlights: Animal, September, Brooklyn, Creatures, The First Snow

1. GordiOur Two Skins

By far my most-listened record of the year. I’m pretty sure you could cut the number of times I listened to it in half, it would still be first on the list.

These songs are highly specific to a particular moment, place, and person: a young woman in Australia in the 2010s, queer and just coming out to her family, a grandmother who has shaped her life on the verge of passing into the next world. But that specificity is precisely what makes it feel so universal. This is a record for anyone who experienced the love of family, the trauma of loss, the terror of exposing your true self to the world, the even deeper terror of exposing your true self to yourself.

Each track is brimming with warmth—from the effervescent Unready to the open-hearted Limits to the stubborn hopefulness of Hate the World. As always, her arrangements are impeccable but the studio effects have been dialed back a bit—enough to build a stage but still leaving plenty of room for the imagination to work. The result is something that feels grand in terms of its reach but also intimate in terms of its scale.

I would have loved this record no matter when it was released. But it felt particularly essential this year. It arrived in June, at a time when the drain of separation from friends and the social world was starting to feel like a new normal. Listening to it breathed life back into me, lifted me up, and helped me to find new reasons to feel hopeful. And for that I am endlessly thankful.

Highlights: Extraordinary Life, Unready, Volcanic, Sandwiches, Limits, Free Association

Honorable mentions:

  • Recondite – Dwell
  • Ólafur Arnalds – Some Kind of Peace
  • Vanessa Peters – Mixtape
  • Run the Jewels – RTJ4
  • Dua Lipa – Future Nostalgia
  • Beach Bunny – Honeymoon
  • Hammock – Into the Blank / Madi
  • Ratboys – Printer’s Devil
  • Bxnjamin – Some Colour Us Mad (SCUM)
  • Cloud Nothings – The Black Hole Understands
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Top 50 songs of 2020

For me, the last few years have often felt like a process of constant motion. Travel has taken me all around the US, all around the world. I’ve spent countless hours on airplanes, on trains, in cars, on subways. So much of that time was spent listening to music. The songs that defined those periods therefore have an intense association with place and time.

This year has obviously been different. When I hear these songs, I process them together, as the soundtrack to a tightly-wound experience of place and time. As I listen, the seasons slowly change, while I sit motionless. Waiting. Simply waiting.

There’s something lost in that process. And I do wonder how I will process these songs in coming years. Will they have etched themselves as deeply? Will I feel them with the same burning force? I hope so. Because these are wonderful tracks, from one to fifty. They’ve done a lot to brighten my year, when it has been sorely needed. I hope that sharing them will bring you some joy as well.

As always, these are just my favorites, not a claim about what was objectively the best. One song per artist.

I’ve created a Spotify list, but Spotify pays artists effectively nothing so please if you like the music, go buy it. Almost every artist here is available on Bandcamp–including a few who aren’t on Spotify at all.

50. There Is a Space in Between – Lucy Gooch
There’s something powerful about liminal spaces–between memory and forgetting, between the sacred and profane, between heaven and earth, between self and other. What do we make of them? What do they make of us?

49. Angel School Anthem – STAR
An early 90s throwback in terms of style–with the atmospherics of a lost My Bloody Valentine or Ride cut–but the sentiment is pretty 2020: “When they say everything’s okay, it’s time to panic.”

48. Partir dans la nuit – Carla Bruni
The title translates to ‘go into the night,’ and it speaks to the joy of quiet spaces, of setting yourself free and waking up fresh in a bright new world.

47. The Lure Follows The Line – Eerie Gaits
The slow wash of sounds is deeply soothing, like a warm summer breeze bringing you the smell of the ocean in the distance.

46. Living Life – Steady Holiday
One of the things I’ve desperately missed this year is the tiny interactions that come when you’re out in the world. Those moments that make you feel just a little bit closer our shared experience of humanity. Where we look at each other and share a little knowing smile, and then return to our own worlds.

45. Note To Self (ft. Empress Of) – Jim-E Stack
A simple vehicle of bits and bops, perfectly designed to lift up Lorely Rodriguez’s voice and let it shine.

44. Rain On Me (feat. Ariana Grande) – Lady Gaga
“I’d rather be dry, but at least I’m alive” seems like a pretty workable rallying cry for those of us who made it to the end of 2020.

43. GREYHOUND – Petite League
A grungy little song about love in dark times, or possibly about dark times in love. Reminds me a lot of Sebadoh, particularly in the guitar breakdown that comes about halfway through.

42. not a lot just forever – adrianne lenker
The delicate guitar picking, the wrenching vocals, the quiet desperation. An emotional hurricane.

41. The Beauty of the Universe (ft. Mimi Page) – Yuta Itani & ミミ ページ
A collaboration between Japanese ambient artist Yuta Itani and American composer and singer Mimi Page. It’s languid, soft, soothing. A moment of tranquility in a turbulent world.

40. The Ascension – Sufjan Stevens
An unrelentingly bleak song, rendered with such grace and awareness that it still feels holy. I can’t quite tell if that’s an example of Stevens’ genius overwhelming the intent, or whether it’s a perfectly intentional expression of the contradiction inherent in belief. Either way, it’s a majestic experience.

39. Skeleton Couch – Seablite
60s girl group vibes filtered through some 80s post-punk fuzz. What’s not to love?

38. When the Smoke Clears – Jasper Lotti
Self-described as dystopian pop, which is perfectly apt. When she sings “tell me the time and the place” it sounds equal parts tender and threatening.

37. Other Side of the Wheel – Nadia Reid
I love Nadia Reid for the sparseness of her songwriting, the way she takes empty spaces and makes them sing. So it’s a little surprising that my favorite song from this record was one of the most traditional. There are still touches of strangeness, but it’s really just a lovely little folk-inspired pop song. Which, fair enough.

36. Cursed – Kllo
Quiet, introspective electro-pop, with glitchy beats designed to unsettle you. Silky-smooth vocals to bring everything back home.

35. Sunlight – Radical Face
The chorus begins “Could you share a little piece of your sunlight?” and that feels like an appropriate mission statement for a song that begins in the dark night, with crickets chirping and the daylight far away and concludes in the warm light of dawn.

34. Scene Suspended – Jon Hopkins
Nothing but a piano and light touches from a violin. It’s the sound of a morning sunrise after a long night, and the promise of warmth that it brings.

33. Gap Tooth (On My Mind) – Best Ex
A sugary sweet synthpop song that’s actually almost too sugary in its construction. But the bitterness of the lyric sharpens the edge, and makes the eventual turn toward self-care all the more fulfilling.

32. Dammit – Jenny Owen Youngs and Charlatan
It’s been almost fifteen years since a Jenny Owen Youngs song has made an appearance on the blog. Not because she hasn’t produced anything of note in that time; I’ve just never quite felt the need to write something up. I never would have guessed that the song to break the streak would be Blink-182 cover. But here we are. It’s actually from an entire album of Dammit covers (28 of them!), which…I don’t really know where to go with that.

31. No Clue – The Northern Belle
I remember the first time I heard Americana by way of Scandinavia, and I found the concept to be hilarious and fun. Many years on, and it no longer feels hilarious. Some of the finest Nashville tunes of recent years have come from the far north. The Northern Belle are a 7-piece band from Norway, and they continue the tradition in fine form. “I only want what’s best for you” she sings over the weeping pedal steel, and everything feels alright with the world.

30. Rtanj (Original Mix) – Goran Geto
If you could discover an equation capable of expressing the intersections of life and the physical world–everything from photosynthesis to the transfer of carbon dioxide and oxygen to struggle between hunter and prey–and then translated it into music, I think it would sound like this.

29. Generation Loss – Spanish Love Songs
The punk rock melodrama grows a little heavy when taken together in a whole album, but in small doses–like this song–it’s pure catharsis.

28. Lonely After – Yumi Zouma
A perfect indie pop song. The synths are light, the harmonies rich, and the songcraft is deft. If it risks feeling just a touch evanescent, that warm bass line grabs hold and pulls you back in for more.

27. Mother – Eve Owen
A song that builds and builds toward an epic crescendo. But it’s wonderful genius is that each step up the track comes as a surprise. Even after dozens and dozens of listens, I’m continually blindsided.

26. Silence – I Break Horses
When I was in Paris last year, I visited the Centre Pompidou where I saw an exhibit on light and movement. Semi-circular objects twisting and twirling to follow a designated path. If you didn’t look closely, they looked like the normal hypnotic circles you’ve seen many times before. But if you stayed with them, you discovered peculiarities–light echoes falling in strange directions. Your mind wanted to impose order, but if you looked just the right way you could open yourself to the uncertainty and experience the regularity as another type of chaos.

25. Local Radio – BAD MOVES
You work in a restaurant for less than minimum wage waiting tables for influence-peddlers and then play a show in the evening for 20-somethings still trying to convince themselves that they can live out their ideals. Everyone thinks that things should be better. No one seems to be able to actually do anything to make it happen.

24. Walking In The Snow – Run The Jewels
Released a month or so before the murder of George Floyd, but eerily prescient of what was to come. Every year is a good year for a Run the Jewels album but 2020 needed one in an existential way. The key thing they bring–which comes through on this song–is a balance of righteous outrage and genuine joyfulness. Both are necessary. There is no sustenance in rehashing the pain and suffering alone. You also need to find reasons to laugh, reasons to love, reasons to believe.

23. Siberian Butterfly – Bob Mould
Bob Mould is making some of the best music of his career these days, and this song is probably my favorite from him in decades. It’s a two minute burst of energy which begins as a critique of those who feel the need to capture natural things, to build collections, then transitions to a larger critique of our attitude toward the natural world as a whole, and concludes as an exultation of freedom and self-love (“Every Sunday the local men gather up at the barn and when the sun goes down the sky is filled with rainbow butterflies”). All in two minutes!

22. Out of Sight – The Beths
Delicate notes that bob and weave over you. But as it develops, the spine grows stronger. What began as a shimmery little pop song becomes an emphatic shoegaze explosion. You feel them reaching out over the distance, trying to bridge the gap.

21. Ms. California – Beach Bunny
A breezy California love song, but sung from the perspective of someone on the outside, filled with bitterness at losing out. The whininess hits precisely the right note–enough to feel genuine, but not so much to suggest genuine trauma. This is a song of adolescent frustrations–the perverse feeling of pleasure you get from dwelling on the pain. The way the object of your affection is understood primarily through your experience of loss.

20. Can’t Go Back – PRIZM
The New Wave is now four decades old, but it still sparkles and shines like a brand new jewel here.

19. Love Again – Dua Lipa
Most of the songs on this record failed to truly thrill me. They’re all good and I enjoyed listening to it plenty. But this is the only one that burrowed its way deep into me. That’s partly because of the wonderful sample–to my ears is inextricably linked to White Town’s late-90s classic Your Woman, but I was surprised to discover it’s actually itself a sample from a song called My Woman by Al Bowlly. Which makes this a third iteration on the theme, and all the more thrilling for that fact.

18. Mirrorball – Taylor Swift
Her genius has never been about carving out new pathways; it’s been about figuring out precisely what she wants to evoke and then evoking the absolute bejeezus out of it. This time she wanted to evoke Sarah McLachlan, and holy hell did it work.

17. Notice that, – Benoît Pioulard
A diaphanous bubble drifting over the hillside. You look back, aching for that which has been left behind. You take a deep breath, savor the feeling of new possibility to come.

16. when i look at you. – Rosie Carney
A breakup song, but one that’s far more about the trauma that comes from within. The way you relied on someone else to keep you afloat, and the abject terror when that anchor begins to drift away. It’s a terrifying song, but also an achingly beautiful one.

15. For Those We Knew (feat. Mimi Page) – Jody Wisternoff
I almost always have a song from Mimi Page on these lists, since I love her own music and she also has excellent taste in collaboration projects. This track is her second appearance for 2020. Where the Yuta Itani collaboration above was all atmospherics and textures, this one is a gentle but insistent deep house track. Page’s vocals are bright-eyed and piercingly clear, providing the perfect counterpoint to the ebbing and flowing violin.

14. Don’t Tell Me – glimmers
Sometimes a band’s name so perfectly encapsulates their sound that there’s almost nothing left to say. That’s definitely the case with glimmers. This song hits me like a ton of bricks today. I think it would have literally broken me if I’d heard it twenty years ago.

13. Georgia – Katie Pruitt
A song written to her home state that she felt would never accept her. And to the family that she worried wouldn’t either. It sounds like her family was able to come around. And of course Georgia has been in the news a lot this year for turning ever-so-slightly blue. Which is certainly not to say the troubles are over. But it feels like a moment of possibility and hope. That the next generation of kids growing up queer in the state might find more acceptance, more love, more room to be themselves.

12. PTA – The Lawrence Arms
A scorching bit of punk rock from some of the best in the business. The final line kills me: “Remember? We used to hold hands / Now, I just go out alone when I need to dance.”

11. Helpless (Feat. Old Crow Medicine Show) – Molly Tuttle
One of my favorite Neil Young songs, and one that I’ve always felt could only be captured in his voice. But Molly Tuttle managed to make it very much her own. The etherealness is replaced with warmth, turning this beautiful song into a wondrous campfire sing-a-long.

10. Sounds Are Fine – Sophie Moon
A balm on my soul. In the longest days of the spring lockdown, when I had spent several months wholly removed from the world, this beautiful song found its way into the world. It was written by Mike Park (one of the few truly Good Guys in the music world) and sung as a duet between between Dan Adriano of Alkaline Trio and his daughter. It is good and right and never fails to make me smile.

9. I See You – Phoebe Bridgers
It’s a strange thing when an artist that you’ve closely followed for years has a huge breakout year. It’s even stranger when it’s for an album that mostly left you cold. Try as I might, I just couldn’t find a way into Punisher. With one exception: this song. It wrecks me in the way that the whole album seems to wreck everyone else.

8. Alnitak – Six Organs Of Admittance
Given its 20 minute running time, this is probably the song I’ve spent the most actual minutes listening to this year. It hangs over your shoulders like a warm scarf, asking nothing of you except the opportunity to keep you warm and safe.

7. You’ll miss me when I’m not around – Grimes
It’s a killer track on its own, with one of the purest melodies she’s ever constructed. But it’s also one of those tracks that gains strength in context. To my ears, this track and Delete Forever are the tentpoles that hold up the rest of Miss Anthropocene–and therefore create the potential for all the darkness that lurks within.

6. Animal – Katie Malco
A strong competitor for chorus of the year, and it’s not even the best part of the song. The best part of the song is the instrumental breakdown that serves as the bridge between moments of catharsis.

5. Waves – Hum
A missive launched into the cold dark night sky. It leaves behind a blistering trail of heat and light and thundering echoes of what might have been.

4. Horses – sea oleena
A single exhalation stretched out to twelve minutes. Heart-wrenching, pure as a mountain stream, effortlessly soft, impossibly beautiful.

3. Walk In The Woods – snarls
Shimmering guitars, a warm bass line, soaring vocals. It’s already perfect, and then they somehow rocket things up another level in the final chorus and I burst into a million pieces. Technically released in 2019, but I missed it, and the album is from 2020, so I’m absolutely counting it.

2. Extraordinary Life – Gordi
Most of the great love songs are really songs about infatuation, the early blush of love, the excitement and anticipation. This is something better. John Lennon called the final verse of The End a ‘cosmic line.’ I think fits here as well. It seems to me that there is no higher expression of love than: “I want to give you an extraordinary life.”

1. Tenderfoot – The Day
It was originally by Smudge, but I always knew Tenderfoot as a Lemonheads track–with that classic Evan Dando crackle being its defining characteristic. And while I like that version just fine, I would never in a million years have guessed that a new cover would end up as my favorite song of 2020. But to borrow from Vin Scully: in a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened. What began as a scuzzy drunker brawler of a song has been utterly transformed. This reimagination massively expands the sonic palette, significantly softening the edges in the process. The result is absolutely glorious. A song I could listen to on repeat for days and never get tired of hearing. It just makes me smile so much. And in 2020, that’s the greatest gift I could ask for.

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I was planting flowers in the spring

These last few months have been difficult to say the least. The whole world came face to face with a crisis beyond our capacity to ignore. And, somewhat amazingly, billions of people accepted the responsibility and radically changed their behavior. It doesn’t present as a political act – because we’re trained to think of politics as connected to voting and policy – but this mass act of collective solidarity is genuinely one of the most impressive moments in the political history of our species. To help save one another, we all withdrew into cocoons. Even our governments, for all their many catastrophic flaws, took unprecedented action to sustain those who could no longer work.

Of course, the evil continues to trudge along with the good, and our society has plenty of evil to go around. That’s true everywhere on earth, but it’s been especially stark here in America, where we are taking on one of the great crises of the last half-century with an incoherent ball of white ressentiment occupying the White House. And with a society still so beholden to the siren call of white nationalism that simply saying ‘black lives matter’ is somehow a radical political act.

It’s exhausting. The weight of all this bears down on me every day, to the point when it can sometimes feel like a literal physical presence on my chest.

And I have been incredibly lucky. My job remains intact. And while the transition to online teaching wasn’t seamless, it wasn’t terribly hard. I’ve spent this time in isolation with my partner–who would otherwise have been thousands of miles away in California for much of the spring. We got a dog – and he’s a good dog, Brent.

And yet it all still bears down on me. I can only imagine how much harder it’s been for those who have lost loved ones, who have feared for their paychecks, who have feared for their lives as their states opened too soon, who have been stuck in isolation with abusers, who have seen the racial inequalities multiplying and recognized this pandemic as one more example of the ways that racism infiltrates every facet of our world.

It’s exhausting.

And like many others, I have been searching for things to provide some form of comfort. Fortunately, there’s always music. It can’t erase everything else, but it can at least shift your perspective. For the most part, I’ve been seeking out songs that bring me joy, the emotional salves in a dark time. There’s also something to be said for those that dive straight into the madness, the fear, the sense of being trapped. But for the most part, this playlist reflects the former impulse. Sometimes you do need something that helps you to truly dwell with the madness in this moment, but for me this is a time that calls more for connection and comfort.

There’s no song that better exemplifies that ideal than “Sounds are Fine” by Sophie Moon. It’s a duet between Dan Adriano of Alkaline Trio and his daughter, written by Mike Park of Asian Man Records–one of my favorite labels going all the way back to my ska-obsessed youth. Here’s Park’s description of the song:

Earlier this year my friend Dan Andriano sent me a recording that he had done with his 12 year old daughter Sophie Moon and I was taken aback by how good it was.

FF and we’re in the middle of this pandemic and both my daughter and Dan’s daughter are dealing with a whole new world of home school/video school and being away from their friends.

I started writing a song about my experience through the eyes of my daughter and then I thought how much I would like to hear this song sung by Dan’s daughter. So I sent over a track to Dan of me playing a lo fi version on guitar asking if Sophie would be interested in singing this.

And then the next day Dan sent me a wav file and said what do you think? Wow, it gave it me chills to be honest. And most importantly it brought a smile to my face and emphasized to me the power that music has on human emotion.

MUSIC RULES!!

It really does.

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50 songs for 50 states: Virginia

For sheer emotional weight, my heart lies with Rosanne Cash, whose “When the Master Calls the Roll” might just be the best song ever written about the Civil War. But I feel like Virginia demands something broader. Beautiful as that song is, it remains the expression of a particular moment. A profoundly important moment, to be sure, but still just a moment.

Hamilton, though, reaches far beyond the immediate terrain of the battle. Yorktown was the final major conflict of the American Revolution, but it’s so much more than that. As told by Miranda, it’s the turning point in the life of his story’s troubled hero, and the foundation stone for an entire new realm of possibility. As the song goes: it is when the world turned upside down.It’s also the origin of the line – “immigrants we get the job done” – which has in some ways become the critical cultural resonance of Hamilton.

And this all feels right. Virginia has meant so much in so many ways over the course of American history. But more than almost any other state, it feels deeply and essentially political. From Jamestown in 1607 to Alexandria in 2020. The home of George Washington, of Jefferson, of Madison. In fact, it’s the home state of eight American presidents, more than any other state.

Virginia is the borderland between North and South, where identities jostle and push each other. Where white supremacists march through Charlottesville, where Liberty University resides in the city of Lynchburg (!), where DoD employees come in every day to work at the Pentagon, where old soldiers lay in their rest at Arlington.

It was also a central reference point of the Constitutional Convention, with Madison’s Virginia Plan creating the skeleton for our entire constitutional system. It effectively enfolds the nation’s capital, and it also contained the capital of the treasonous Confederacy. Its shifts from Democratic to Republican to Democratic to Republican have defined major themes in demographic and ideological change.

Every state is a microcosm of the nation in its own way. But I’m not sure that any state more fully embodies the entire scope of American political history.

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50 songs for 50 states: Vermont


It’s the unofficial state song, and has been covered by Frank Sinatra and Linda Ronstadt, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Ray Charles, Rosemary Clooney, Nat King Cole, Sam Cooke, and Willie Nelson. There was never any way I could have picked anything else. Even if it’s actually not a song I particularly enjoy that much personally. It’s fine – and the conceit of each verse being a haiku is fun – but not one that I’d go out of my way to listen to.

Really, my favorite part is the instrumental break. It’s where Louis gets to play his trumpet, where Willie pulls out his harmonica, where Ray strolls up and down his piano keys, where Frank gets…some overly enthusiastic strings. Well, not all of them can be winners, I guess.

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50 songs for 50 states: Utah


It only references Utah once, in the opening line (“On a rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert”), but the song was based on an actual road trip taken by Springsteen, Stevie Van Zandt, and photographer Eric Meola in 1977. Most of that trip actually covered the deserts of Nevada, but they started out in the Bonneville salt flats west of Salt Lake City.

Springsteen had vaulted into rock and roll stardom two years prior, and was looking for something to reset his artistic equilibrium. The desolate flats seemed ideal. And so they headed out. Bizarrely, the day before the trip began, they got word that Elvis Presley had just died, putting an even stranger capstone on the experience. For an artist whose whole career has been built around engines and movement—the freedom of the road, but also the way that the dream of freedom could become its own trap—I can hardly think of a more perfect vision: Bruce and Stevie, in a 1965 Ford Galaxy, setting off into the desert, telling stories about the de facto godfather of their entire musical world. They slept in the car, weathered thunder storms, and the whole time Springsteen was putting together this song.

It’s a song about the limitless potential of the human spirit, but also about being so beaten down you can’t quite picture what it would mean to fulfill them. You create dreams for yourself, and you follow them to the end of the line, only to discover that somehow there’s nothing left there for you. And yet, somewhere beyond, you still can picture the promised land. What is it, exactly? And where can it be? He’s not actually sure. But that’s not the important thing. No, the important thing is: he believes in it.

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