What Am I Listening To? – March 2024

Here are my thoughts on the latest from Everything Everything, Hollow Coves, BrhyM, Young Oceans, Norah Jones, RAYE, Kele, Kacey Musgraves, Elbow, Wye Oak, and Jason Wade.

Obsessive Year-End List Fest 2021: Favorite Albums

2020 was a bleak year, and a lot of its best albums either helped to give me hope during an incredibly dark time, or else vent the frustration and fear I was dealing with. 2021’s best are more of a mixed bag, though – that’s just the kind of year it was. Looking back, I’m going to mentally associate a lot of this music with a premature sense of relief and actual looking forward to the future. Can we breathe again? Can we celebrate again? Can we like, do stuff with people again? And then came the unexpected setbacks, the moments that felt like a reprisal of 2020, as yet another wave of some not-yet-fully-defined new threat began to loom over us. A lot of the big, cathartic emotions that various musicians were dealing with then didn’t get fully documented and recorded until this year, and they were all the more poignant for it. Some of them believed we’d all be dancing shoulder-to-shoulder in the streets by the time this music came out, and I can’t blame ’em for getting their hopes up just like I did. But some used the isolation to dig deeper into themselves, to discover new and inventive ways to express their personalities without being on stage, and to reaffirm their connections with their co-writers and bandmates despite being physically far apart. Ultimately, I do believe 2021 was a more hopeful year than 2020, as we started to claw our way back to some sense of normalcy, and that’s the prevailing thought that I want to have on my mind when I look back at the records that impacted me the most this year: We’re not out of the woods yet, but dammit, we’re gonna get there one way or another!

Obsessive Year-End List Fest 2021: Favorite Songs

Normally I kick off the end-of-year list-making festivities with a list of my top 100 songs of the year (with some bleeding in from the year before because I was late to the party), and I go into depth about my reasons for choosing the top 30 out of that 100. I’m gonna do something slightly different this year, and give explanations for the top 20, plus any singles on this list that, as of December 2021, haven’t made it onto albums yet. I figure I’ve never mentioned those in a review or a “What Am I Listening To?” column, so this might be my only chance to explain what got me excited about those particular songs. Pretty much everything else, I’ve likely written about at some point over the course of the year.

And as always, you can follow along with most of these picks (I limit it to one per artist) on my “2021 in a Nutshell” Spotify playlist:

Kacey Musgraves – Star-Crossed: Healing doesn’t happen in a straight line.

Artist: Kacey Musgraves
Album: Star-Crossed
Year: 2021
Grade: B

In Brief: Let’s just call Star-Crossed what it is – a pretty darn good pop record about heartbreak, and the painstaking process of rebuilding one’s confidence and sense of identity after a marriage crashes and burns. I’m pretty sure this is not country music. And despite my general disdain for country-pop, I’m surprisingly OK with that.

What Am I Listening To? – September 2021

Here are my thoughts on the latest from Deafheaven, Maxïmo Park, Colony House, Kacey Musgraves, Dolph Chaney, Thrice, Sufjan Stevens & Angelo De Augustine, and Lovebites.

Obsessive Year-End List Fest 2019: Favorite Songs

2019 was a weird year for me, in terms of the music I enjoyed most. A lot of artists put out genuinely great singles, only to follow them up with lackluster albums, EPs as stopgaps between albums, or really nothing at all. It’s a good thing I was following all of my favorite artists on Spotify, as well as some newer ones I was curious to hear more from, or else I might have not heard a good quarter of this list until 2019, if ever. Usually the vast majority of my Top 100 songs for the year comes from my favorite albums released that year, with some spillover from the year before. While that’s still true in 2019, it’s worth noting that nearly a tenth of my list this time comes from EPs or compilations rather than albums, and close to another tenth of the list is made up of non-album singles, that have yet to be attached to a larger collection of songs (assuming that will ever happen at all). While this speaks to the ability of many of my favorite artists to strike while the iron is hot in terms of getting new music out, it also worries me slightly where the longevity of the album format is concerned. But that’s an issue to discuss when I get to my list of Favorite Albums for the year. My Favorite Songs list, while eclectic and probably whiplash-inducing at certain points, definitely required some tough decision-making because there were so many great songs that spoke to me this year. At the end of the day, whether a song is part of a larger narrative or not, that’s really all that matters – whether the song stands out to me as unique in some way, and makes me want to keep coming back to listen to it over and over again. And everything on this list passed that test with flying colors!

As I do each year, I’ll give some insight into my reasons for picking the Top 30, and you can assume after that point that the ordering is somewhat arbitrary. Many of these songs (limit one per artist) are collected in my 2019 in a Nutshell playlist over on Spotify.

What Am I Listening To? – January 2019

January is always the month when I get to catch up on recommendations from fellow music lovers that I wasn’t aware of in time to evaluate them for myself in the previous year. Thus, if you’re someone who knows me personally, or if you run a blog/YouTube channel that I follow, and you posted some sort of a “Best of 2018” list toward the end of the year, there should be at least one thing you recommended that I decided to check out for myself this month.

Here are my first impressions of the latest from Django Django, Iceage, Lovebites, Myles Kennedy, Kacey Musgraves, Snail Mail, The Nor’easters, Coldplay, Evanescence, Switchfoot, and a compilation from Blurescent Records.