I used to regularly announce my favourite albums of the year. Then I forgot for a few years. Hey, I'm old. Sometimes I forget things.
Let's see. I started doing this in 2013, crowning Vampire Weekend's Modern Vampires of the City by a hair above all-time classics from the National and Jason Isbell. I'll stand with that judgement. But in 2014 I was dazzled by St Vincent, for some reason. I still like it but I really should have gone with the Hold Steady or Lana del Rey. And in 2015, I was likewise enthralled by Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, which is certainly a great record. But let's face it. I'll never be a hip-hop guy. The ones I was really listening to on repeat were by the Staves, Jason Isbell, and Joy Williams.
Then I skipped four years. What did we miss?
Well, 2016 should have prompted an actual essay on "the divorce record" because the two albums that really stood out for me were Miranda Lambert's (she actually did get divorced) The Weight of These Wings and Beyonce's (she just gave Jay-Z some grief) Lemonade. Fabulous records, but Miranda's more in my sweet spot. Some very fine honourable mentions, too, generally from artists with some years behind them: the middle-aged Lori McKenna ("Halfway Home" was definitely the Song of the Year), the elderly (a senior citizen!) Alejandro Escovedo, the ancient (he was pushing 80!) Ian Hunter, and the newly deceased (can't get any older than that) David Bowie and Leonard Cohen.
In 2017, the coast was finally clear for the National to make my favourite album - and for the first time in forever, they coughed up something I merely liked. An A minus, rather than an A plus. This allowed Lorde, Bleachers, and Emily Haines to fight for the prize and I went with Melodrama by the kid from New Zealand. It's not just that she was 20 years old - she actually made me wish I was 20 years old as well, which doesn't normally happen. But that green light, I want it too.
Now 2018 was the easiest choice I've ever had to make. Metric's Art of Doubt just blew me away and it still does, remaining a fixture on my playlists even two years on (I'm normally listening almost exclusively to music released during the last twelve months or so.) I absolutely loved the boygenius EP, I liked Annie Oakley, and Wussy, and Phosphorescent. But this was a total no-brainer for me. I was a little surprised that Metric came up with so many fabulous songs just one year after Emily used up a lot of excellent material on her very fine solo album. But they did, they did, they surely did. And the band has never sounded better.
And in 2019, the National finally - finally! - top my list with I Am Easy To Find. They're only my favourite modern band, it's just weird that it took them so long to top one of my year-end lists. And it was a damn close thing all the same. 2019 was a great year for albums and I especially loved Lana del Rey's Norman Fucking Rockwell. I went back and forth on which one I liked best for the longest time. Additional shout-outs are required for Vampire Weekend, Taylor Swift, Lula Wiles, and Joy Williams. Among others. Great bunch of albums.
Which brings us at last to 2020, year of the plague. Let's start with some Honourable Mentions, excellent work that just missed my Top Five.
The Drive-by Truckers released, not one, but two fine albums in 2020. Who was the last band to do that? It may have been the Beatles in 1965. But they don't quite make the final cut because their former guitar player also put out a record this year that made my Top Five and then Truckers band leader Patterson Hood went and produced an album for some obscure guy I'd never even heard of that went and cracked my Top Five as well. A great year for the Truckers and an even better year for Truckers-adjacent artists!
Two of Canada's finest singer-songwriters returned from long absences with very fine records. Kathleen Edwards hadn't been heard from since 2012's Voyageur - as was widely reported, she'd left music entirely to open a coffee shop on the outskirts of Ottawa. I'm a big fan, and I'm pleased to have her back and I'm very happy with the new record - but I like Sarah Harmer's record even better, and I was somewhat surprised to discover she'd been away even longer. Are You Gone comes a full ten years after her last one. Welcome back, ladies.
I liked Haim's debut but I was rather disappointed with the follow-up. I had no expectations at all for their third record, so I'm very pleased to report that it's really good. And so is the Strokes sixth album - a this point they sound like they're just amusing themselves, like a band that has nothing to prove anymore and is just making these cool songs for the hell of it. Lori McKenna's album is solid - her craft, as always, is impeccable and "When You're My Age" is one of those songs few other songwriters can manage, something that just cuts directly through to anyone's emotional soft spots. And we had noteworthy efforts from many, many other artists. A quick list would have to include the Beths, Soccer Mommy, Torres, Waxahatchee, Matt Berninger, Sufjan Stevens, Best Coast, Torres, Carly Rae Jepsen, Elizabeth Cook, Bruce Springsteen, Lydia Loveless, Fiona Apple, Chris Stapleton, Chuck Prophet, Bright Eyes, Porridge Radio, Christian Lee Huston, and Ruston Kelly. Settling on a final five was pretty desperate work. Which is the way I like it.
But these are the five that did the most for me this year.
5. Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit - Reunions
This is Isbell's fourth album since getting sober. He opens with a rather lengthy (6:40) rocker that's merely okay, probably the weakest thing on the record. But from there, he proceeds to provide yet another outstanding collection of songs, that range over a wide area of subjects that are somehow all quite close to home, family, and friendship. But Jason's been through some stuff and the things he values, he really values, and he's thought pretty hard about all of it. Meanwhile, his craft and his band are so dependable that he begins to remind me just a little bit of Tom Petty, although Isbell is a very different kind of writer and singer. (Isbell does do a great cover of "American Girl" on stage. He also does a ferocious "Whipping Post.") But he's got the same dedication to quality control that I always admired in Petty.
4. Bob Dylan - Rough and Rowdy Ways
He contains multitudes. He really does. He was mad, bad, and dangerous to know when he was a young man. Well, he's 79 now and he just doesn't give a fuck. This is his first collection of original songs in almost a decade and every last one of them is choice. Which is something that doesn't happen too regularly with Dylan albums. It also seems that spending these last few years singing the Frank Sinatra catalogue has had a real impact on his singing - it's as if he now has a much better idea of what the blasted ruin of his voice is still capable of doing. But the songs, the songs, my gosh the songs!
Or how about
From the Dr Frankenstein tale of "My Own Version of You" to the cosmic radio station invoked in "Murder Most Foul," America's greatest songwriter remains the master, quite undiminished, full of piss and vinegar, and completely out of his ever-loving mind. Mad as the mist and snow, as Yeats would have it.
3. Phoebe Bridgers- Punisher
Dylan was 53 years old when Bridgers was born in the summer of 1994, just as the baseball players were going out on strike. I wonder - shouldn't it be hard to get my head around an artist so distant from my own generation? Nah. Really, I don't see why. She's much closer to me than Johann Sebastian Bach, right? I had found myself stepping rather cautiously into her debut album, 2017's Stranger in the Alps - I wasn't sure about her voice, which sounded a little small and pitiful on first acquaintance, murmuring melodies that didn't exactly leap out at me. But some of the lines that came out of that voice insisted on grabbing my attention anyway. (Mostly "You Missed My Heart" - holy hell, what a song.) Then she teamed up with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus for the brilliant one-off boygenius EP, by which time I'd fully assimilated the way she sneaks up on you and, however sadly sometimes, simply has her way with you.
She can do whatever she wants. A huge talent, and utterly fearless.
Phoebe Bridgers "I Know the End"
2. Jerry Joseph - The Beautiful Madness
I try to pay attention. I try to keep up. And every year I dutifully peruse half a dozen year-end Best-Of lists and am alarmed to find dozens of people I've never heard of and must instantly investigate. I've tumbled down so many rabbit-holes following the hint that "if you like this artist, you might also like..." And stuff like this just keeps happening. Who the hell is Jerry Joseph? He's 59 years old, he's been recording for decades, and I never even heard of him. But I follow Patterson Hood on Twitter, and this is why I follow people on Twitter! Hood mentioned late last summer that he'd produced the new album by Joseph, whose skills as songwriter and performer he vouched for. Well, I'll always take Patterson's word on something like that, enough to at least check it out. Needless to say, I'm glad I did. The whole album is outstanding but "Dead Confederate" is something else altogether. It's beyond anything you could possibly imagine. It's sung from the defiant, unapologetic point of view of the god damned statues of the rebel heroes and traitors that are finally being torn down in the land of the free.
And featuring Hood's erstwhile bandmate, Jason Isbell, playing what might the spookiest slide guitar part since Ry Cooder's work on "Sister Morphine" some fifty years ago. Bloody, terrifying music.
Jerry Joseph "Dead Confederate"
1. Taylor Swift - folkore
You can't argue about it anymore. America's Ingenue is all grown up. As an artist, she's at an extremely interesting turning point in her career. Like many young songwriters, Swift repeatedly mined her own biography for raw material. There are, however, only so many interesting songs you can actually get out of your own life, unless the adventures never end. No one can really live that way. Along the way, Swift took quite a bit of heat and mockery for the ways various past loves featured in her lyrics. Joni Mitchell could have told her that while it's okay for the guys, it's just not cool when women do that. The rules have always been different for girls.
Swift is now the same age Mitchell was when she made The Hissing of Summer Lawns, which I regard as her last great album before she began to slowly lose her way. It seems to me that one of the driving impulses of Mitchell's life and career was a very basic need simply to be taken seriously, as a woman and - especially - as an artist. She started out in folk music, a musical form that has always taken itself quite seriously, and drifted gradually towards jazz, which tends to take itself more seriously still. She always had so much to prove, no matter what she did. She was a woman in the midst of a very macho and male dominated musical scene, and it didn't matter nearly as much as it should have mattered that she had more talent in her little finger than Crosby, Stills and Nash had in their entire bodies. Combined. She was still a chick on the scene, however talented. She'd written a hit single (for Judy Collins) before anyone knew her name, she'd had hits of her own - but she may have felt, on some level, that this kind of popularity was beneath her somehow. And eventually the unending need to prove her artistic validity swallowed up the brilliant songwriter she once had been.
I think Swift's folklore is as good as anything Mitchell ever did and I'm much more optimistic about her going forward. Swift's driving impulse, as a woman and an artist, is almost laughably humble - she wants to be popular. She wants people to like her. Like everything in life, this has a downside of its own - in Swift's case, her need to be liked often makes her seem extremely calculating, trying to figure out what people want and expect of her so she can provide it. Swift also emerges out of country music, which remains a very conservative music community, unrelentingly hostile to anyone who would rock the boat, and firm in its belief that women should be seen and not heard. Not even on country radio. That's where Swift came from and she played by its rules. She wanted to be popular. But she was too talented and too ambitious to stay there. She always knew how good she was. When she faced some skepticism about her own songwriting ability after her first albums because she always seemed to work with co-writers, she wrote everything on her third album by herself just to prove that she could absolutely do it that way if she wanted. But she simply likes writing with other people.
She wanted to be a pop star, and she became one. And this placed a new set of expectations on her - she found herself in a place where her life and career were planned, to the day, literally years in advance. She embraced it. She's here to please, though she admitted that she was beginning to tire of the whole treadmill. She was gearing up to spend most of 2020 and 2021 on the road supporting Lover, her (quite excellent) 2019 album when the pandemic cancelled everything. So she wrote some songs instead, many with a new writing partner, Aaron Dessner of the National. The story of how it all happened is itself rather interesting.
Swift, a self-proclaimed huge fan of the National (which gains her enormous credit in my book, of course!) had discussed songwriting with Dessner when they had met once before. Dessner had explained that as all the members of The National live in different parts of the world, the creation process usually began with Dessner, from his studio in upstate New York emailing musical ideas to his brother Bryce (in Paris) and singer Matt Berninger (in Los Angeles.) With her performance plans cancelled, Swift reached out to Dessner to inquire if he'd like to try writing with her. Dessner, who apparently has far more musical ideas that his bandmates like or can use, obligingly sent her some material. Swift returned one of them the very same day as a finished song - "cardigan," the second track on the album and its lead single. She is nothing if not eager to please. They wrote ten songs together that ended up on this album - Swift expanded this method of working to include her longtime collaborator, the marvellous Jack Antonoff, for another five songs. And it turns out they had enough material left over to release a second album a few months later.
It's a different kind of record for her. It's a songwriter's album. There are no splashy pop singles, made to be released ahead of the album and carve out its place on the radio, songs that would come to seem jarringly out of place with the rest of the record that followed them. This is quiet, reflective music - many of the tracks are based on the same kind of piano melodies fans of the National are very familiar with. And the songs seem to be about... other people. Or stuff she just... made up. From the saga of Becky Harkness, to the three linked songs about a doomed high school threesome, to the absolutely shattering "epiphany," these songs really don't seem to have much to do with Taylor's life and loves at all. And this is the best news of all, to my mind. As a songwriter, she's used up her biography, moved on to different subjects, and come out far, far ahead. So many songwriters never manage it. So many never even try.
Taylor Swift "the last great american dynasty"
