Songs of the Year, 2021: Hard Drive, Cassandra Jenkins

There is a LOT going on in "Hard Drive."  It's got a definite Laurie Anderson feel to it, almost as if it were a lost track from 1989's "Strange Angels."  Each verse tells a different micro-story, featuring a diverse cast of characters: the security guard, the bookkeeper, the driving teacher, and Peri.  The thread binding each of the stories together is what Jenkins addresses in her spoken intro - "our spirit, our humanity, our sense of self."

The emotional payoff, from both a narrative and a musical perspective, comes in the final verse:

I ran into Peri at Lowell's place
Her gemstone eyes caught my gaze
She said, "Oh, dear, I can see you've had a rough few months
But this year, it's gonna be a good one
I'll count to three and tap your shoulder
We're gonna put your heart back together
So all those little pieces they took from you
They're coming back now
They'll miss 'em too
So close your eyes
I'll count to three
Take a deep breath
Count with me"

It's an extraordinary song.

Songs of the Year, 2021: Calling Me Home, Rhiannon Giddens + Francesco Turrisi

The music that Rhiannon Giddens has made on her last two albums with Francesco Turrisi cuts like a scythe, slashing through fields of grain.  The emotional power of her voice combines with the miraculous but spare instrumentation from both artists to create an emotional power that more or less wipes every other song off the map.  When you listen, it's as if time is standing still.  

Songs of the Year, 2021: Tom Jones - I'm Growing Old

Over the next few days, in preparation for posting my Top Ten Albums of 2021, I'll be posting some of my favorite songs of the year from the albums that were Honorable Mentions.

First up, the great Tom Jones.  Still making great music, and in a sense reinventing himself, at the age of 80.  At the same time, recognizing his mortality.

...Ring in the New

And that bad boy in the middle now holds the place of honor previously occupied by the Technics Receiver.

So yeah, I no longer have the ability to listen to the radio, but considering I can't even remember the last time I listened to the radio, I think I'll survive.

So this should last me well into my 90s...

And what better CD to test it out than a little classic Steely Dan?

BTW, many thanks are due to my 31-year old son, without whom this would probably be sitting in its box for some period of time to be determined, given dad's lack of prowess with anything having to do with technology installation.

Happy New Year!

 

Ring Out the Old...

 

This bad boy served me well for close to 40 years, but it was well past the time to say farewell.  Little did I know that the frustrating glitches in my recent stereo listening experience were due, not to faulty speakers or speaker wires, but to the fact that this guy was just tired.

But hey - considering that among the first CDs I played with this setup were Springsteen's "Born in the USA" and Madonna's "Like a Virgin," I think I got my money's worth.  

R.I.P.

Memorializing

 2020 was the year that I made the transition from buying CDs (I've bought two this year) to listening to music almost exclusively via streaming.  It's scrambled my brain a bit, to be honest.  I've had to force myself to dedicate time to listening to full albums, because it's so enticing to come up with another playlist; another quest for the perfect segue between songs.  There are albums on the list below where I can't remember a single song.  That's not great, obviously - so for my 2021 sidebar list, I'm going to include only those albums that truly sunk in, that I've gone back to on a regular basis.  

The 2020 list:

• Starting Over - Chris Stapleton
• Generations - Will Butler
• Hey Clockface - Elvis Costello
• Love is the King - Jeff Tweedy
• Uncivil War - Shemekia Copeland
• On My Own - Lera Lynn
• Letter to You - Bruce Springsteen
• Serpentine Prison - Matt Berninger
• Cuttin' Grass, Vol. 1 - Sturgill Simpson
• Speed, Sound, Lonely kv (EP) - Kurt Vile
• Good Luck With Whatever - Dawes
• As Long As You Are - Future Islands
• Alone Together Sessions - Hayes Carll
• The New OK - Drive-By Truckers
• What Is There - Delta Spirit
• Aftermath - Elizabeth Cook
• Hearts Town - The War and Treaty
• Daughter - Lydia Loveless
• The Ascension - Sufjan Stevens
• Shore - Fleet Foxes
• Long Violent History - Tyler Childers
• Shallow Graves - India Ramey
• Blackbirds - Bettye Lavette
• Die Midwestern - Arlo McKinney
• The Beautiful Madness - Jerry Joseph
• Twelfth - Old 97's
• Total Freedom - Kathleen Edwards
• Xoxo - The Jayhawks
• The Dirt and the Stars - Mary Chapin Carpenter
• Such Pretty Forks in the Road - Alanis Morrisette
• Made of Rain - The Psychedelic Furs
• The Balladeer - Lori McKenna
• Old Flowers - Courtney Marie Andrews
• folklore - Taylor Swift
• Hate for Sale - Pretenders
• The Waterfall II - My Morning Jacket
• Gaslighter - The Chicks
• All the Good Times - Gillian Welch, David Rawlings
• That's How Rumors Get Started - Margo Price
• What's Your Pleasure? - Jessie Ware
• On the Road: A Tribute to John Hartford
• Women in Music Part III - HAIM
• No Dream - Jeff Rosenstock
• Homegrown - Neil Young
• Rough and Rowdy Ways - Bob Dylan
• Punisher - Phoebe Bridgers
• Built to Spill Plays the Songs of Daniel Johnston
• Self Made Man - Larkin Poe
• Introduction, Presence - Nation of Language
• All Visible Objects - Moby
• World on the Ground - Sarah Jarosz
• Dreaming Again - Lizzy Long
• RTJ4 - Run the Jewels
• Spider Tales - Jake Blount
• Folk 'n Roll Vol. 1 - J.S. Ondara
• A Different War - Daniela Cotton and the Church Boys
• Danzig Sings Elvis
• Neon Cross - Jaime Wyatt
• Tessy Lou Williams
• Dedicated Side B - Carly Rae Jepsen
• Chromatica - Lady Gaga
• Cold Water - Medhane
• Copy That - Sara Evans
• how i'm feeling now - Charli XCX
• Going to the Movies - Mark Fredson
• Reunions - Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
• Beautiful and Strange - Chelsea Williams
• Bad Luck - Sylvia Rose Novak
• The Way It Feels - Maddie & Tae
• Invisible People - Chicano Batman
• We Still Go to Rodeos - Whitney Rose
• Alphabetland - X
• Future Nostalgia - Dua Lipa
• Lamentations - American Aquarium
• Walking Proof - Lilly Hiatt
• Fetch the Bolt Cutters - Fiona Apple
• The New Abnormal - The Strokes
• Mama's Biscuits - Kirby Heard
• Never Will - Ashley McBryde
• The Family Songbook - The Haden Triplets
• Saint Cloud - Waxahatchee
• Gigaton - Pearl Jam
• Anybody Out There - Sadler Vaden
• Your Life is a Record - Brandy Clark
• Expectations - Katie Pruitt
• The Dream - Hailey Whitters
• Saturn Return - The Secret Sisters
• Honeymoon - Beach Bunny
• color theory - Soccer Mommy
• Open Book - Kalie Shorr
• Miss Anthropocene - Grimes
• The Unraveling - Drive-By Truckers
• County Squire - Tyler Childers

Top Ten Albums of 2020

1. Fleet Foxes - Shore.  Over the years I've toyed around with the concept of what I call "Autumn Albums."  Not necessarily albums that were released in the fall, but ones with a signature sound that evokes the feel of the season.  Linda Ronstadt's Simple Dreams is an Autumn Album; I wrote about about it here (dear Lord, more than ten years ago now).  George Winston's Linus and Lucy: The Music of Vince Guaraldi is an Autumn album, as is Frank Sinatra's Where Are You?  Bruce Springsteen's The Ghost of Tom Joad is another, having been released two days before Thanksgiving in 1995.  Great albums all.  Autumn Albums.  When it comes to Autumn Albums, however, it's doubtful that anything that came before it or anything yet to come will ever match Shore.  Having been released at the exact moment of 2020's Autumnal Equinox, Shore literally is an Autumn Album.  

In and of itself, being the quintessential Autumn Album would not be enough to justify ranking it at #1.  What allows it to land here is the fact that from first cut to last, over the span of 54 minutes and 29 seconds, it is absolutely gorgeous music.  There isn't a weak cut or any filler on the entire album, and from day to day it's difficult to choose what is the album's best song.  Today I'd probably say "Thymia," tomorrow I might think it's "I'm Not My Season," and the day after that it could be "Maestranza."  And just keep repeating daily, adding a new track until you've fully absorbed the record.  Shore is only their fourth album over the course of twelve years, but it's their best.  A wonderful record.

2. Lilly Hiatt - Walking Proof.  Hiatt's previous work has all been excellent, but with Walking Proof she has fully developed a sound and approach that sounds unmistakably her own.  The album features great rockers ("Some Kind of Drug," which according to Spotify was the song I listened to more than any other in 2020, "P-Town") great mid-tempo ballads ("Rae," the title track, "Drawl", several others), and as the Pitchfork review put it, "winds through moments of incandescent joy, gentleness, cathartic noise, and even unease."  

3. Dua Lipa - Future Nostalgia.  I might have this one a little high, but then again I might not.  What I'm comfortable saying is that it reminds me a lot of Madonna's debut, and for me that's high praise indeed.  The album title was well calculated - the record would have sounded new and fresh in each of the past four decades, so you really can feel as if you're delving into nostalgia while wondering if this might just be the sound of the future.  And you can dance to it.

4. Letter to You - Bruce Springsteen.  Speaking of "future nostalgia."  If a couple of these songs sound as old as anything he's ever written, it's because they are - I've been hearing about "Janey Needs a Shooter" for more than 40 years now, and "If I Was the Priest" was one of the songs he sang in his audition for John Hammond all the way back in 1973.  And if one song in particular sounds transparently Dylanesque, well then Bruce can do anything he darn well pleases in this phase of his career.  And if you can have fun deciding which previous album each of these songs would best fit on, well that's OK too.  Overall, Letter to You is as good as anything he's recorded in this century, and better than at least some of the albums he recorded before then.  The E Street Band sounds as good as it ever has, Ron Aniello comes up with a beautiful sound, and "Ghosts" can stand proudly with any Bruce songs you might pick for your own personal pantheon.  It's that good.

5. The Unraveling - Drive-By Truckers.  In my January review of the album, I called it "relentless and unforgiving."  I also called it their bravest album.  They were depicting a world on The Unraveling that felt as if it were about to fall apart.  What we didn't know at the time is that it was.

6.  how i'm feeling now - Charli XCX.  Not surprisingly, there were numerous artists who released "pandemic albums" in 2020.  My favorite was Charli XCX's, because it was so obviously homemade, and perfectly conveyed the fractured nature of the year.  But at the same time, there were several tunes that were as catchy as anything she's ever recorded.  A fractured fairy tale.

7. Reunions - Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit.  Even though I have this album rated lower than The Nashville Sound, the band's previous effort (which I tabbed as the best album of 2017), there's no question that Isbell grows as an artist with each succeeding effort.  The standout track is "What've I Done to Help," a 7-minute magnum opus that poignantly poses a question that we should probably all be asking ourselves right about now.  

8. Shallow Graves - India Ramey.  My favorite country music album of the year, from an artist I had not heard of when the year began.  She called the record a "post-apocalyptic western," and in sound it carries - especially on "The Witch" and "You and Me Against the World" - a sense of menace that would fit right in during Unforgiven or The Revenant. My favorite song is "Montgomery Behind Me," in which she leaves behind a town, a bad relationship and quite possibly the remains of someone who richly deserved his fate.  

9. Run the Jewels - RTJ4.  Not for the faint of heart.  Come to think of it, "relentless and unforgiving" would work as well as a description for RTJ$ as it did for DBT.  Robert Christgau, who gave the album a rare A+, wrote, "the gangsta sonics that power El-P and Killer Mike's inchoate aggressiveness will feel tonic to anyone with both an appetite for music and a political pulse (you can put me down for both).  The album closer, "a few words for the firing squad," matches in its intensity any music that I've heard in recent memory, and well beyond that.  The rest isn't far behind.

10. Sarah Jarosz - World on the Ground.  It wasn't easy to decide which album would fit into the final spot this year.  Jarosz is another artist with whom I was not familiar when the year began, but fortunately there are numerous online publications that focus on the broad category of "Americana."  The album was produced by John Leventhal, who I've criticized at times for softening the rough edges around his partner Rosanne Cash.  That's not the case here - the sound and the accompaniment are perfect for Jarosz' spare vision.

OK, so there it is, and now it's time to play Pazz & Jop - 100 points, divided among the 10 albums, with no more than 30 and no less than 5 awarded to any of them.

1. Fleet Foxes, Shore                                    20

2. Lilly Hiatt, Walking Proof                        15

3. Dua Lipa, Future Nostalgia                     13

4. Bruce Springsteen, Letter to You             12

5. Drive-By Truckers, The Unraveling        10

6. Charli XCX, how i'm feeling now             8

7. Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit, Reunions      7

8. India Ramey, Shallow Graves                   5

9. Run the Jewels, RTJ4                                5

10. Sarah Jarosz, World on the Ground         5

And as alluded to above, narrowing the list to 10 this year was a bear.  Here are some of the albums that I hated to leave off (in alphabetical order):

Ashley McBryde, Never Will - Not quite at the level she showed on her debut, but still strong.

Beach Bunny, Honeymoon - "Promises" was right up there with my favorite songs of 2020.

Bob Dylan, Rough and Rowdy Ways - The epic "Murder Most Foul" was the song of the year.

Chris Stapleton, Starting Over - Country soul.  

Drive-By Truckers, The New OK - Cooley's "Sarah's Flame" right up there with his best.

Emma Swift, Blonde on the Tracks - Right up there with Bettye Lavette's as the best Dylan cover album.  Maybe women make the best Dylan covers?

HAIM, Women in Music Pt. III - Their strongest album yet.

Jayhawks, Xoxo - Still sounding great after all these years.

Kathleen Edwards, Total Freedom - A very nice comeback.

Lydia Loveless, Daughter - I feel like I've yet to fully plumb the depths of this one.

Ondara, Folk 'n Roll Vol. 1: Tales of Isolation - Addressing the isolation we've all felt over the past 11 months.

Soccer Mommy, Color Theory - An album that seemed to foresee the isolation we'd begin to feel a month after it's release.

Sylvia Rose Novak, Bad Luck - Ready for a fight.

Taylor Swift, Folklore, evermore - Don't ever underestimate a force of nature.

Coming soon (?), the songs of 2020.

NFL Memories and "The Football Book"

 A few years ago, one of my Christmas "stocking stuffers" was a coffee table book on the history of the NFL.  Cleverly titled "The Football Book" and published by Sports Illustrated in 2006, the book includes article excerpts from several of the great football writers who graced the pages of SI, including Paul Zimmerman, Peter King, Dan Jenkins and Michael Silver, as well as the great feature writers George Plimpton, Gary Smith, Frank Deford, and S.L. Price.  The book also includes Dr. Z's (how Zimmerman was known to his biggest fans) indispensable All-Decade Team choices, which are guaranteed to be the perfect argument starter. 

But as good as the writing is, the highlight of the book is the photography, which shouldn't come as a shock given that the "Illustrated" part of SI was always key to its enormous success.  The photograph at left was taken by Neil Leifer, who, over the course of a career that spanned several decades, earned the right to be called a legend.  It's a wonderful photo that evokes both the effort and grace that is involved in the game of football, but is also evocative of the atmosphere at Lambeau Field, longtime home of the Green Bay Packers.

What made this photo of particular interest to me is that it comes from the first NFL game that I have a memory of watching.  The game was played on Saturday, December 7 in 1968 (the year the Colts went 13-1, and were then upset by the Joe Namath-led New York Jets in the Super Bowl).  My dad drove over to a friend's house to watch it, and for some reason brought me with him.  I'm not exactly sure why I remember all this, but that's the strange way my mind works sometimes.

Albums of the Year: Finalists

With the help of Spotify, there's no question that I listened to more new music this year than ever before.  On the one hand, that's a great thing.  On the other, it did make me wonder if there was such a thing as "too much music."  It's my own fault, but I found myself too often reaching for the shiny new object (i.e. that week's new releases), and not spending enough time doing a deep dive into those albums which I enjoyed the most.

By the end of the year, I think I'd figured it out.  But there are still going to be a lot of 2020 albums that end up on my "subjects for further research" list.  

This list is the list from which my year-end Top Ten will come.  That will be, and this is a promise that will be kept, sometime during the holiday break - and definitely sometime before year's end.

My picks for the best of 2020, with further refinement to come:

Ashley McBryde, Never Will

Beach Bunny, Honeymoon

Bob Dylan, Rough and Rowdy Ways

Bruce Springsteen, Letter to You

Charli Xcx, how i'm feeling now

Chris Stapleton, Starting Over

Courtney Marie Andrews, Old Flowers

Drive-By Truckers, The Unraveling

Drive-By Truckers, The New OK

Dua Lipa, Future Nostalgia

Emma Swift, Blonde on the Tracks

Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Fleet Foxes, Shore

HAIM, Women in Music Pt. III

India Ramey, Shallow Graves

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, Reunions

Jayhawks, Xoxo

Kathleen Edwards, Total Freedom

Lilly Hiatt, Walking Proof

Lydia Loveless, Daughter

Ondara, Folk 'n Roll Vol. 1: Tales of Isolation

Run the Jewels, RTJ4

Sarah Jarosz, World on the Ground

Soccer Mommy, Color Theory

Sylvia Rose Novak, Bad Luck

Taylor Swift, Folklore

Taylor Swift, evermore

Summer 2020 Album Diary: "Either/Or," Elliott Smith (1997)

"Either/Or" is enjoyable enough as music, but it's impossible to separate the album from the circumstances of the artist who created it.

For anyone unfamiliar with Elliott Smith, he died in 2003 from two stab wounds to the chest, and it doesn't appear to have ever been fully determined whether it was suicide or homicide.  His life had not been an easy one.

A lot of the album is reminiscent of some of Sufjan Stevens' work, but after a couple of listens I'm not sure it's anywhere as musically interesting.  The standout track is "Cupids Trick," which takes the same general approach but adds a dash of mystery to the proceedings (not to mention some additional instrumentation).

Summer 2020 Album Diary: "The Belle Album," Al Green (1977)

When Greil Marcus reviewed The Belle Album for Rolling Stone in late 1977, he wrote "...we may someday look back on The Belle Album as Al Green's best..."  After more than half a decade of hit singles (and outstanding albums) that one could rightly call "legendary" without engaging in hyperbole, that was a heady claim to make.  There were no hit singles from this one, and I honestly don't recall ever having heard any of the album's songs over the course of the 40+ years since its release.

The shocks I felt when listening to the album for the first time were all happy ones.  At first, it felt a little disorienting to hear synthesizer and clavinet on an Al Green record - this was the first album he recorded without longtime producer Willie Mitchell at the helm, and the first without the fantastic crew of Memphis musicians (Al Jackson Jr., Wayne Jackson, several others) who came to represent the "Al Green sound."  And then, lo and behold, there's Al Green himself playing a quite mean acoustic guitar!

And when the album's fourth song, "Georgia Boy," rolled around I realized that it was simply foolish to have waited so long to dive into this one.  This certainly fits my definition of a great album.  Whether it's his best, as Marcus speculated might be the case in 1977, is a question worth contemplating.

Summer of 2020 Album Diary: Pacific Ocean Blue, Dennis Wilson (1977)

The point of this project is to write, at least a little bit, about a notable album from the past that I've never listened to all the way through, until setting up a Spotify account.

Kicking off the series is Dennis Wilson's "Pacific Ocean Blue," released in the late summer of 1977.  It was the summer of Star Wars.  I was working six days a week at McDonald's, getting ready to begin my senior year of high school.  My musical tastes were beginning to expand a bit, mostly with the help of the Rolling Stone Records review section.  1977 was the year I bought my first albums by Talking Heads, Blondie, Ramones and Elvis Costello, but my purchases that year also included Hotel California, Rumours, Aja, and admittedly more than a few albums that are probably best categorized as "forgettable."

I almost bought this one. It received an excellent review in RS by Billy Altman, who called it "a wonderful and truly touching album."  Because I remember this sort of thing, I do remember picking it up in the record store, and perusing the packaging, and mulling it over.  For whatever reason, I never ended up walking out of the store with it.

Listening to it now is a bittersweet experience, because we know how his story ended - Brian would end up being the tortured Wilson brother with a happy ending, not Dennis.  But this is excellent work; you can really hear the promise behind Wilson's songs.  You can hear the influence of The Beach Boys, but this is not a Beach Boys record.  His gravelly voice has a lot of depth, and on songs like "Pacific Ocean Blues," "River Song," and "Rainbows," you can hear both artistic and commercial potential.  You can definitely hear why the album has gained supporters in the decades since its original release.

Albums of the Half Year: 2020

Here we are in July, which seems impossible.  There are times when I can't believe we're coming up on four months since the shutdown began; other times it feels as if the time has flown by.  My hair is the longest it's been in my entire life.  We celebrated my 60th birthday in April, but needless to say the big party we were planning never quite got off the ground.  If it's possible to have a daily out-of-body experience, that's what the first six months of 2020 felt like.

That feeling could be applied to the year in music as well.  The year that is now half over has seen the biggest change in my music listening habits since the mid-1980s, when the vinyl record bins in music stores began to make way for the CD racks.  I'd already started buying a lot fewer CDs in the months leading up to 2020, for the simple reason that most of the record stores (yeah, I still call them that) in Sacramento have closed up shop.  With the exception of a handful of CDs I bought in the Fall, most of my purchases were MP3 purchases, which went straight into the hard drive and the iPod.

In February, at the urging of my sons, I finally made the leap to the streaming world, and signed up for a premium Spotify account.  The floodgates opened, and haven't closed since.  Accustomed to physical media that can be held onto, it's been strange.  On the one hand, I haven't bought a single CD since the year began.  On the other hand, I've listened to more music in the past six months than, quite possibly, any other time in my entire life.  There are times when the sheer volume of availability is overwhelming - what should be listened to today?  An old Joni Mitchell or Beach Boys album that I've never heard all the way through, or the new releases by Run the Jewels or Bob Dylan?  Or maybe the incredible quarantine playlist from Questlove, which then just sends me down another deep rabbit hole?  But if you're going to have a problem, then I suppose this is a good one to have.

By my count, I've listened, at least once, to 45 newly released albums all the way through.  Quite a few of those are records that demand greater attention, and may very well end up in a year-end Top Ten.  But for now, I've selected twelve albums that stand above the rest.  When, God willing, we look back on this time from a space of normalcy, these are the ones that I'll remember for speaking to the moment.

In alphabetical order:

Honeymoon, Beach Bunny.  Sounding like the GoGos filtered through "Rocket to Russia," this has been my go-to album when a respite from the real world was most needed.  The hook-to-minute ratio is off the charts.

how i'm feeling now, Charli XCX.  Recorded entirely in quarantine, revealing once again that with this artist, there is a lot to be found under the surface.

The Unraveling, Drive-By Truckers.  When I wrote about this album in February, I called it their bravest yet.  Little did I know how prescient it would be.  

Rough and Rowdy Ways, Bob Dylan.  His first album of original tunes since 2012, and worth the wait.  He gave us a taste in the early spring with the almost 17-minute "Murder Most Foul," a musical chameleon - it can be anything you want it to be (sort of like Dylan himself).  The rest of the album doesn't quite stand up to that lofty standard, and it will take me a while to fully figure it out, but for now I'm comfortable saying that it's somewhere between "very good" and "epic."

Walking Proof, Lilly Hiatt.  Trinity Lane, her last, was outstanding - but Walking Proof is a quantum leap above anything she's ever done.  The entire record is instilled with a sense of confidence on every song - it's probably my #1 album of the year, so far.

Reunions, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit.  He and his band just keep getting better and better.  And without question, the absolute funniest musical artist to be found on Twitter.

World on the Ground, Sarah Jarosz.  It's hard for me to describe what it is that I find so appealing about this record - there's something about the music that just feels filled with mystery.  

Future Nostalgia, Dua Lipa.  It may be going too far to call this one of the best dance records since Madonna's debut, but then again, it may not be.

Bad Luck, Sylvia Rose Novak.  Country punk?  Outlaw country?  Americana rock?  Call it what you will, but it's a great album.  

Folk 'n Roll Vol. 1, J.S. Ondara.  Armed with a great backstory, Ondara has written the diary of the first two months of the quarantine, right up until May 25.  Here's hoping that Vol. 2 deals with the aftermath of that dark day.

RTJ4, Run the Jewels. Quoting Robert Christgau here, who gave the album an A+: "Who knows whether this would feel so right absent a historical moment when trying to distinguish rage slavery from righteous anger is a waste of emotional wisdom?  With trap on its opiated treadmill, the gangsta sonics that power El-P and Killer Mike's inchoate aggressiveness will feel tonic to anyone with both an appetite for music and a political pulse."

Color Theory, Soccer Mommy.  An emotional maelstrom, from the very first chords.

And what the heck, here's a few Honorable Mentions that could find their way closer to the top before this dumpster fire of a year is over: Punisher, Phoebe Bridgers; Danzig Sings Elvis; Fetch the Bolt Cutters, Fiona Apple; Saint Cloud, Waxahatchee; Women in Music Part III, HAIM; Chromatica, Lady Gaga; Invisible People, Chicano Batman; Never Will, Ashley McBride; Homegrown, Neil Young; Lamentations, American Aquarium; Gigaton, Pearl Jam; Open Book, Kalie Shorr; Saturn Return, The Secret Sisters; We Still Go to Rodeos; Whitney Rose; Your Life is a Record; Brandy Clark; Alphabetland, X.

Happy Summer, everyone.  Here's hoping the great sounds continue.

Top 50 Songs of the Decade, #2 - "Seasons (Waiting on You)," Future Islands

There have been a lot of great and/or memorable musical performances on late night television over the years - Elvis Costello beginning one song and then storming into "Radio, Radio" in December 1977, Patti Smith delivering a shattering performance of "Gloria" in April 1976.  More recently, there were incredible performances from Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar on SNL, and Billie Eilish just last year.

But however you rank the greatest late night TV performances, this one certainly has to be near the top of the list:



I think this is what they mean when they talk about leaving it all on the stage.  What makes the performance particularly notable is Letterman's reaction to it.  He was nearing the home stretch of his legendary late night career by this point, and on most nights was so grumpy and/or disinterested that it was difficult to watch.  But his visible joy following Samuel T. Herring's performance was in itself a joy to watch.

And well earned that joy was.  This is a great song, plain and simple, and one of those songs that sounds as exciting and fresh on listen #100 (or 200, 500...) as it did on first listen. 

Top 50 Songs of the Decade, #2 - "Seasons (Waiting on You)," Future Islands.

Top 50 Songs of the Decade, #3 - "Slow Burn," Kacey Musgraves

I've commented on this phenomenon elsewhere, but every now and then, you hear a song for the first time and it just takes your breath away.  The chills run up your spine, and you just want to keep listening to the song over and over.  And when it's the first song on an album, sometimes it takes a while just to get to the second song.



"Slow Burn" is such a song.  When I heard it for the first time, I thought that Kacey Musgraves had captured the Holy Grail, creating a song that was not really country, not really pop, but transcended every category one could conceivably assign to it and reach a level that this artist - great as she has been over the course of three albums - had yet to achieve.

She will be around for a generation.  Let's just hope there is a music industry waiting for her when we emerge on the other side.

Top 50 Songs of the Decade, #3 - "Slow Burn," Kacey Musgraves.

Top 50 Songs of the Decade, #4 - "Ya Hey," Vampire Weekend

Usually the first thing that grabs me with a song is the music, but on this one it was these lyrics, near the end of the song:

Outside the tents
On the festival grounds
As the air began to cool
And the sun went down
My soul swooned as
I faintly heard the sound
Of you spinning "Israelites"
into "19th Nervous Breakdown"

A little explanation be in order.  First of all, I've loved both "Israelites" and "19th Nervous Breakdown" since I was about 9 years old.  Second, I love to experiment with transitions between songs - so hearing that snippet was like giving candy to a baby.



There is also something about the easy lilt of this song that is irresistible.  For me, at least.

Top 50 Songs of the Decade, #4 - "Ya Hey," Vampire Weekend.