Best of 2023:
Anything Can Happen If You Tryna Make It Happen
- “Been to the Mountain”—Margo Price (Strays)
- “The Gods Must Be Crazy”—Armand Hammer feat. billy woods,
E L U C I D, and EL-P (We Buy Diabetic Test Strips) - “Dying in May”—The Clientele (I Am Not There Anymore)
- “Be Your Lady”—Young Fathers (Heavy Heavy)
- “OTHER SIDE OF THE RAINBOW”—EXTREME (SIX)
- “Tight”—Samara Joy (Tight [single])
- “Caution to the Wind”—Everything But the Girl (Fuse)
- “Niigghht”—Memotone (Memotone)
- “lord of the shithouse”—draag me (lord of the shithouse)
- “Dead to the World”—Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds (Council Skies)
- “Creepy Crawlers”—Viagra Boys (Cave World)
- “New Atlantis”—Iggy Pop (EVERY LOSER)
- “Sitting Alone”—Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives (Altitude)
- “Better than You”—Mammoth WVH (Mammoth II)
- “I Wouldn’t Want to Say”—Mark Lanegan (Straight Songs of Sorrow)
- “Friendo”—Aaron Parks (Little Big II: Dreams of a Mechanical Man)
- “I Miss All My Exes”—Jamila Woods feat. Gia Margaret (Water Made Us)
- “We Will Remember”—Gabriels (Angels & Queens)
This mix is also available to stream on Mixcloud, Spotify, and Apple Music.
1. “Been to the Mountain”—I always start off January in the terror that I’m somehow never gonna find any good new music in the ensuing twelve months and that this will finally be the year when my annual best-of mix project grinds to an unceremonious halt. (To be fair, there usually is a bit of a lull until the early spring when more high-profile albums start to be released, so the lull becomes a time when I take comfort in listening to familiar favorites or diving into older albums from established artists that I want to better acquaint myself with.) But luckily very early in 2023, music critics started loudly praising Margo Price’s album Strays, which was released on January 13.
Price had been on my radar at least since seeing all the rapturous praise for her memoir Maybe We’ll Make It (which I still haven’t actually gotten around to yet! It’s on my to-read list, I promise!), so I didn’t need much of a push to at least check the album out. I was hooked from the opening atmospherics of “Been to the Mountain” and downright smitten by the time she name-checks Warren Zevon in “County Road.”
There’s at least three songs on this here 2023 mix that contain A+ impeccably perfect verses, and “Been to the Mountain” has the first of them:
I’ve been a victim and I’ve been a tumor
Used to be a waitress, but now I’m a consumer
I’ve been on food stamps, I’ve been out of my mind
I rolled in dirty dollars, stood in the welfare line
What a glorious couple of lines—the rhymes simple but spot-on, the descriptions of economic precarity rendered vividly but unsentimentally, all adding up to a sort of abridged, woman-centric “Song of Myself” for the 21st century.
And then just a couple lines later she straight-up starts shrieking “Take your best shot! TAKE YOUR BEST SHOT!!” in a high-pitched frenzy that seems more than a little like a dare to not take her seriously, at our own peril. Women rock singers tend to be lauded most when they’re either singing prettily in their upper ranges (a la early career Joni Mitchell) or yowling more gutturally like Joan Jett. By contrast, her screech here, both unhinged and emanating from her upper register, is so easy to either laugh or wince at that it takes ultimate confidence and commitment to really lean into it like Price does here, threading that threat of coming completely unglued through the second half of the entire song. These moments still thrill me every time I listen to the song, yes, even twelve full months later.
2. “The Gods Must Be Crazy”—Brian was on a kick for a while late in the summer listening to Quelle Chris’s album Deathfame, and as we were streaming it on Apple Music one night, we started clicking around on the other related artists/albums that the algorithm was recommending. As soon as Armand Hammer’s album We Buy Diabetic Test Strips popped up, I cackled wildly at the title and immediately pre-saved it so I’d have it in my feed the moment it dropped in late September.
“We buy diabetic test strips” is one of those phrases that I hadn’t really realized had wormed its way into my consciousness after seeing but not intentionally registering it countless times on small rectangular signs affixed to light- and telephone poles around the city. And something about the act of Armand Hammer’s explicitly drawing attention to this minor shared but largely unspoken/unacknowledged facet of the contemporary urban landscape both tickled my funny bone and made my heart surge with gratitude for the fact that there’s still so much fodder in the world for making great art. You just have to be on the lookout for it, even in (especially in!) insignificant, maligned, or otherwise dubious places.
“The Gods Must Be Crazy” is probably one of the more accessible tracks from this wildly, noisily chaotic album, but just because it’s not as outwardly challenging of course doesn’t mean it’s lacking in brilliance. (There’s a reason I grabbed a line from one of billy woods’s verses to borrow as the title for this year’s whole mix!) The flow is so good and the sonics are so satisfying and the jokes are so darkly, gut-punchingly funny throughout.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t also point your attention to their video for “Trauma Mic,” filmed at a goddamn scrap metal junk yard, which I can only assume was as just as gleefully cathartic to film as it is to watch.
3. “Dying in May”—How is it possible that this is the first time a Clientele song is appearing on one of my year-end mixes?! I’ve been obsessed with the band since late 2005/early 2006 when I first heard Strange Geometry, an album that could easily be called one of my own personal Top Ten of All Time were I ever to force myself to make such a list. So, hmm, that being said, maybe that’s why? I really like a lot of God Save the Clientele and Bonfires on the Heath, but really none of their subsequent albums have come close to the perfection of Strange Geometry for me. And neither does I Am Not There Anymore, tbh—though it’s still got a lot to commend it, especially given that they hadn’t released anything since Music for the Age of Miracles in 2017, which I think I probably listened to a grand total of once. (Sorry, guys!)
I just really love the wild krautrock beat and those fever-dream lyrics of death and illness here. I recall first listening to most of I Am Not There Anymore on a long summer walk home across Devon Avenue, and “Dying in May” quite literally stopped me in my tracks so that I could note the song’s title.
4. “Be Your Lady”—The Young Fathers’ album Heavy Heavy was, like Margo Price’s Strays, another one of those early-in-the-calendar-year finds that I listened to, gratefully, a lot through the late winter and on into spring, desperate as I was to feel connected to anything new and vital and of-the-moment. And then I weirdly felt even more validated when I saw on Twitter that actor Vincent D’Onofrio (!!) was very earnestly enjoying the album as well. He seems to have somewhat recently removed himself from X (understandably), so whatever else he wrote about the band is lost to the ether now, but Google at least still has a trace of it: “This, this right here . . . this band is just wonderful. Check them out. Been a long time since I’ve heard something as original as this band.”
Not sure why that comment loomed so large in my imagination at the time!!!
Maybe it was some intuitive connection between the feral unpredictability of the music and his feral unpredictability as an actor? (Speaking of: have you seen that moment in Ethan Hawke’s The Last Movie Stars documentary when D’Onofrio demonstrates, seemingly effortlessly, what it takes for him as a Method actor to cry on cue?! Holy shit.)
At any rate, though Heavy Heavy‘s album opener “Rice” was also a very strong contender for inclusion on this year’s mix, I ultimately just couldn’t resist the way on “Be Your Lady” that Young Fathers are lyrically carrying forward the ethos of Prince’s “If I Was Your Girlfriend” into our celebratory post-gender moment, eschewing the subjunctive if with a full-throated declaration of actual want.
5. “OTHER SIDE OF THE RAINBOW”—Guitars are back, baybee!!!!
I know I spouted off a couple years ago about how guitar solos didn’t die, they just took up residence in Nashville. (See my discussion of “8 AM” by the Marcus King Band here.) And while that remains basically true, there’s been this wild resurgence of interest in electric guitars and epic rock solos again recently. Chalk it up to the fact that so many people picked up instruments in the early days of the pandemic? Or to the fact that the marketing arms of the big gear companies have finally realized how much money they were leaving on the table by not actively catering to women players? Whatever the case, especially after Polyphia’s breakout album Remember That You Will Die and Tosin Abasi’s being tapped to provide the air-guitar licks in Bill & Ted Face the Music, the old guard of heavy guitar players apparently realized en masse recently that they had a window of time to make themselves heard anew.
Extreme’s album SIX is basically two EPs smooshed together—a terrific one up front stuck to a supremely goofy one at the back. (Let us not speak of the seemingly well-intentioned but deeply cringe-worthy “BEAUTIFUL GIRLS.”) That being said, “OTHER SIDE OF THE RAINBOW” is a power ballad par excellence (though Brian and I couldn’t help but giggle imagining that Extreme and the Winery Dogs must have filmed their videos for “OTHER SIDE OF THE RAINBOW” and “Xanadu,” respectively, on adjacent picturesque hillsides just outside Los Angeles city limits).
Don’t just take my word for it, though—be sure to check out Justin Hawkins’s adorably nerded-out appreciation of the track too. (Ignore the clickbaity title and screencap, obvs.)
6. “Tight”—If you’ve not heard of her already and/or if you’re reading this before listening to the mix itself, believe me when I tell you that Samara Joy has got the goods!
She kicked off the 30th season of the Chicago Symphony Center’s jazz series at the end of October, and I am absolutely not exaggerating when I tell you that I was in tears within about 30 seconds of her opening her mouth to sing. The piano player quietly gave her the note and then she launched into a full verse of sweeping a cappella vocalese, during which I could feel the rest of the crowd in Symphony Hall beginning to vibrate, high. She is simply an incandescent talent.
And she’s still so young! She’s just getting started! She’s already got the tone and technical facility of a master; I absolutely cannot imagine what she’s gonna sound like in subsequent years/decades once she lives a little more life. All of which is to say: what sheer chutzpah to be covering Betty Carter at the age of 23!! She did “Tight” at the show that night too, and I think I actually laughed out loud at some point in the middle of it—there was just no other way to process the range of emotions I was feeling: admiration for her audacity, gratitude for being in the room to hear it, awe at her skill, thrill at the straight-up visceral enjoyment of hearing someone so good just absolutely cranking.
She ate the rest of her band alive. I mean, they were all a bunch of well-trained music school graduates, so there was an obvious baseline level of competence there, but even all those young cats looked a little shocked and sheepish to find themselves sharing the stage with someone of her caliber. She was very sweet about crediting them throughout the night for their contributions—she seems to be studiously avoiding anything that would earn her even a hint of the dreaded accusation of being a diva—but come on. Let’s all just confirm the quiet part out loud, shall we.
If she books a date near you anytime soon, please promise me you’ll just buy a ticket and go.
7. “Caution to the Wind”—Everything but the Girl is another one of those bands I never thought I’d be able to feature on one of these year-end mixes; I just figured they were done. I mean, I was happy to put Tracey Thorn’s solo tune “Smoke” on my 2018 mix, and it’s of course a gift to hear her sing in any context, but to get a chance to hear her collaborate on new material with Ben Watt again in this the year of our lord 2023? Well. I just wasn’t expecting it at all.
I love in the interview that they did with Pitchfork earlier this year around the album’s release how Ben tells the story of their son’s reaction to the slow emergence of more beats across the songs’ arrangements:
At the beginning there were no beats on the record. I used to work at home in my office by the front door, putting things together on my laptop. One day I put beats on “Forever,” and [looking at Tracey] you put your head ‘round the door from the kitchen. And then our son Blake came downstairs and said, “Dad, is that going on the album?”
I didn’t read that piece until well after I’d lived with the album for a while, so I wasn’t preemptively influenced by that discussion; the beats really are just that good. Though to be honest, for quite a while I assumed I’d be featuring “Lost” here; I love its strange delicacy, like EBTG are almost doing their own take on a Bjork song with it. But, when that drum fill comes in at 2:08 on “Caution to the Wind,” it feels like drugs, frankly. It sounds and feels so incredibly good that it honestly makes the whole song for me. I love that they even manage to squeeze it in a second time before the end of the track at 3:01 (which always reminds me of an interview with Britt Daniel I read a while back, where he talks about a producer asking Spoon to repeat the bridge from “Rainy Taxi” a second time somewhere in the song, and then Britt just countering, as if it should be plainly obviously, “we can’t, man; it’s the bridge.”).
8. “Niigghht”—I honestly don’t really fuck with Phoebe Bridgers at all. I perceive that she’s very talented and very pretty and very entertainingly opinionated. But I just don’t get it on any kind of deeper level. (I may also simply be too old for what she’s doing.) But the one thing I have always appreciated about her album Punisher is the fact that the first track is called “DVD Menu.” The notion of a DVD menu is such a specific relic of the late ‘90s and early 2000s that, like the phrase “we buy diabetic test strips,” it either makes immediate sense to you as a very particular cultural artifact or it just does not.
Anyway, I only bring all that up to say: this track by Memotone has big DVD menu energy. And I love it all the more for that.
This is another circumstance when I genuinely have to thank the algorithm for bringing this song to my attention. I’d been streaming some broadly defined ambient playlist on Apple and this one really grabbed my attention the moment it shuffled up. (Counterproductively for an ambient track, I guess? Since, according to Brian Eno, ambient music is supposed to function essentially as aural furniture?) But its slow, slightly sinister, looping and repeating groove is something I’m always looking for in music of any genre, that place where repetition transforms into ecstasy.
9. “lord of the shithouse”—And, here’s another win both for Pitchfork and for a title so funny that it actively made me seek out the album.
I’d be curious about the relationship that other former indie kids from the 2000s have to Pitchfork now. It was one of the primary sites I was devoted to online for a big chunk of my 20s; I let it point me in the direction of most of the new music I was consuming at that time in my life; I happily attended the Pitchfork Music Festival here in Chicago for several years running. Then I got absolutely fucking sick of it all for a correspondingly long time and didn’t want anything to do with whatever they were on about (especially after they got subsumed by Condé fucking Nast). I just wanted to listen to Van Halen and Journey in peace and not have to fight to feel cool anymore. But then at a certain point maybe a year or two ago, I went ahead and signed up for their weekly e-mail digest where they send out a round-up of their ten best-reviewed albums of the week, and I felt like that was a pretty OK way for me to keep tabs on what they’re up to now. (Though, to paraphrase Bill Murray as Herman Blume in Rushmore, never in my wildest imagination did I ever dream I would see the day when Pitchfork would indulge DMB’s Before These Crowded Streets with not just a 7.6 ranking but a long, thinky write-up too. Mid-2000s P-fork would never.)
All this is to say, lord of the shithouse got a 7.2 back in August, which was honestly less important to me than how hard I guffawed when I saw the name of the damn thing. Its description as “dense, dissonant DAW symphonies, full of sharp textures and brightly colored elements that burst apart like a crystal shattering on a concrete floor” of course helped things along too, since I do have that place inside myself that just needs to hear abrasively noisy weirdness sometimes. Unexpectedly, though, it was the slower, ballad-esque tracks like “faces of vultures” and “nightclub” that I actually responded to most. I ultimately imprinted on the title track for its devastating opening lyrics: “All I do is work / how can you depend on me? / Clocking in and out / spending money frivolously.” Now that my own day job is 100 percent remote and I can work late hours at my desk at home if I get into hyper-focus mode before a crunched deadline, that is absolutely a thing that Brian has said to me more than once: “all you do is work!” It was healthily chastening to hear the line warbled in the first person in this song, especially given the way the music built up around it is always on the verge of completely disintegrating.
10. “Dead to the World”—I honestly don’t have much to say about this, other than the fact that it’s one of the better Scott Walker pastiches I’ve heard in a while. I tend to be more Team Liam than Team Noel when it comes to the Gallagher brothers in general (perhaps obviously as I’ve previously included Liam’s songs on year-end mixes in both 2017 and 2022), so . . . fair play to Noel on this one. (But also, never forget that Angela Morley, the arranger for many of Scott Walker’s best-known songs from his ‘60s heyday, was trans.)
11. “Creepy Crawlers”—Well, I definitely didn’t expect Viagra Boys of all people to release the definitive satirical statement on alt-right, anti-vax conspiracy theories, yet here we are.
I almost didn’t download Cave World at all; I was worried that trying to duplicate the magic of Street Worms would be impossible, that, no matter how much I loved their overall dirtbag sensibility, one album from them was probably all I needed. But as I listened to the first handful of tracks from this newest album, I couldn’t stop grinning. They’d actually done it! They’d actually managed to retain their audaciously brilliant stupidity while also somehow evolving it into something even smarter (??) and more refined (!!!).
But even after warming to those first four tracks, when “Creepy Crawlers” hit, I rushed to judgment. “Oh, another spoken-word track. They’re trying to recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle of ‘Best in Show.’ Why do bands always try to repeat those magical little moments instead of leaving them as perfect one-offs?” But then when vocalist Sebastian Murphy faux-desperately gulps, “they’re puttin’ in little microchips in the . . . they’re puttin’ microchips in the vaccines!” I knew we were suddenly in very different territory.
And now we come to the second of the three perfect verses that appear on this year’s mix:
When I was younger none of this existed
Everything was fine
Everything was perfect
And now it’s ruined
It’s ruined ’cause you voted on the wrong motherfucker
Because you didn’t believe him
You wouldn’t believe the sources that I linked you
I told you to read
I told you to do your research
I told you man, I told you they’re harvesting babies for adrenochrome
There’s such a sly arc at work here; in the lead-up to that verse, you get a predictably wacky rant about lizard people, adrenochrome, and the turducken-level absurdity of putting microchips in the vaccine and then putting creepy crawlers in the microchips. It all still feels exaggerated and ridiculous, the truly conspiratorial parts of the conspiracy theories underpinning the character’s concerns. But then when that final verse kicks in, you actually hear Murphy channel the truly scary level of fury that gave us, well, January 6. It’s all there: the insulation of suburban white privilege, the false equivalencies between methods and sources for determining the truth, and that, of course, all of this character’s grievances go back to the outcome of the 2020 election. What a stomach-churningly brilliant encapsulation of the truly stupid and dangerous times we’re living through.
12. “New Atlantis”—Well, how do you like that! As I said in my write-up about Iggy’s spoken word piece “We Are the People” back in 2019, there’s a case to be made for calling him the Robert Frost of Detroit. And here he is just straight-up quoting from Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice!”
My instant affinity for this song, though, stems from the fact it’s an unabashed love letter to a big crazy city. I’ve written a lot about my own love for city life, though that love feels ever more complicated as we live through widening financial disparities, state-sponsored violence, and the erasure of so many cities’ truly distinctive qualities thanks to bland and hegemonic architectural and cultural imperatives. But hearing Iggy’s clear-eyed lament for his beloved Miami’s impending ecological collapse really drives home the preciousness, in every sense of the word, of what we all stand to lose as we mourn together through the Chthulucene.
13. “Sitting Alone”—Earlier this summer, Brian and I traveled a truly absurd round-trip distance to see Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives play a show live out in Shipshewana, Indiana. We’ve seen them in concert multiple times before, but we were particularly enchanted by their latest album Altitude, so, since this was pretty much the closest they’d be to Chicago for the foreseeable future, it seemed like a fun excuse to take a little road trip. My maternal grandmother used to take that same drive out to Shipshewana every year with a good friend; they’d go antiquing and poking around for bargains at the various flea markets and would always bring home precious jars of richly spiced, Amish-made apple butter. So even though I’d never actually been to Shipshewana myself, the place loomed large in my imagination as a site of pilgrimage.
And aside from the fun of the somewhat spontaneous road trip adventure, Brian and I were also completely energized by the band’s excellence, which seemed honed to an even sharper point after the enforced rest of the pandemic era (and perhaps also due to the fact that they’ve finally, truly incorporated the style and sound of their newest member Chris Scruggs). Marty’s embodied ideological convictions seemed to force the majority white audience of presumed red-state Republicans to remember that the traditional ethos of country music is one of working-class solidarity, not ruling class triumphalism-by-proxy. We could feel the cognitive dissonance starting to crack the spell of these past years of pop-conservative brainwashing, especially as Marty’s storytelling leaned hard on his memories of everything he learned—spiritually, musically, and, yes, politically—from Johnny Cash, a name that still, justifiably, carries enormous weight and integrity.
Though, on a slightly less somber note, I think I probably responded as enthusiastically to “Sitting Alone” as I did because of the way its chord structure reminds of Jason Falkner’s now classic power-pop tune “Miss Understanding.”
14. “Better than You”—In the history of these mixes, the main criterion for inclusion usually falls into one of two pretty basic categories: songs-as-songs versus songs as metonyms for full albums. It’s “here, I found this amazing song that’s the best thing on the album it appears on, and I wanted to rescue it for you like a precious specimen” versus “this song is just pointing you in the direction of the artist’s full album; I could have easily subbed in a handful of other tracks for this one, so please just treat yourself to the whole thing and think of this one like a mascot or taster, not something that’s necessarily meant to be consumed in isolation.”
“Better than You” is fully one of the latter. I honestly don’t even remember why I ultimately landed on it for inclusion here instead of the handful of others from Mammoth II that I currently have hearted in Apple Music. (“Like a Pastime!” “Take a Bow!” “Another Celebration at the End of the World!”) I spent a lot of happy hours listening to the full album this fall, just marveling at Wolf’s insanely comprehensive musical skill set. (Though I do still wish he would learn to shorten his songs just a touch. All in good time!)
Plus, y’know—music and dads and musical dads and carrying on a musical dad’s musical legacy. Everything he’s doing in his work, and even on social media, to equally represent and distance himself from Eddie Van Halen’s body of work just hits really close to home for me, personally.
15. “I Wouldn’t Want to Say”—So, I’m gonna have to sit down and write a much more comprehensive thing about Mark Lanegan at some point. But for now I’ll just cover the basics that are relevant here.
Yes, he has actually already appeared on one of my year-end lists before—all the way back in 2010 with Isobel Campbell on their duet “You Won’t Let Me Down Again.” But for whatever reason, my obsession with his music didn’t really blossom until this year.
I’d been on an Afghan Whigs kick after How Do You Burn? completely blew me away last year, and when I caught this weird CBS feature on Greg Dulli, I took notice when the interviewer complimented the shape his voice is in and he said “My turning point, really, was singing in a band with Mark Lanegan, who was a perfect singer. I really kind of went to Lanegan school, that’s what kinda turned me around [as a singer].” But even then there was the part of me that thought it might have just been a nice way for him to publicly pay tribute to a friend who had recently passed away. I did remember all the buzz about their Gutter Twins albums, though, and as I dug into those, I was particularly blown away by Lanegan’s vocal performance on “All Misery/Flowers.” (You know I’m really struck by something when I force Brian to stand there and listen to it with me, which I pretty immediately did with that tune after I’d listened to it a few times on my own.) But even that didn’t tip me over into full-blown fandom.
One morning I had the HomePod in our bedroom on shuffle as I was getting dressed for work, and the algorithm got it right once again when it pulled up “Driving Death Valley Blues” from Lanegan’s 2004 solo album Bubblegum. I of course recognized his voice right away and raced to the computer to see what the song was called and where it came from; I just immediately loved the sound of it. And then I was finally down the rabbit hole in earnest.
Bubblegum is an inarguably perfect album, perhaps most immediately noteworthy for its two tracks featuring PJ Harvey, but it’s really just impeccable from top to bottom, from the lyrics to the arrangements to the melodies to the pacing to, above all, his once-in-a-generation voice. The first time I hit that transition from the blood-curdling nastiness of “Methamphetamine Blues” to the exquisite loveliness of “One Hundred Days,” I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing, less from the tonal whiplash and more from the pure gratitude that a song as stunning as “One Hundred Days” exists at all. What a tune.
I was basically content to just sit with Bubblegum and all its myriad subtleties for weeks on end. I didn’t need, or even want, to hear anything else by him while I let those songs really settle into my heart and bones. Though after I’d been raving to Brian about it for long enough, he actually got curious about Lanegan’s more recent output, which led him to Lanegan’s final full-length solo album Straight Songs of Sorrow (and the song “Ketamine,” in particular, with its outrageous gallows humor). So I’d promised Brian that I’d be sure to check out that album out as well, and I put it on one morning as I was taking the train home from a doctor’s appointment. And that’s when I had the wind knocked out of me emotionally yet again, by the third of the three perfect verses parceled out across this mix.
Who knows how many more years there will be?
Before the end of this sad machine
No heirs to my disease
No one else to curse with this gene
Someone said it’s designed for survival
The one I wildly ride
Swinging from death
From death to revival
Where I’ve been and what I’ve done
No, I wouldn’t want to say
I wouldn’t want to say
Much like my “ouch, I know too much” response to the Purple Mountains album that came out in 2019 after Dave Berman’s death, hearing the line “no one else to curse with this gene” after Lanegan’s death, knowing how much he struggled with substance abuse throughout his life, felt like it just sliced me open. His acknowledgment that addiction is a heritable trait, that despite the ferocity of his own substance abuse struggles, they came from somewhere and had a context would be painful enough. But then taking that logic to its natural conclusion and all but confessing that that’s why he never had children is simply the most devastating way to mourn the wreck that addiction made of so much of his life. Much of that wreck I later read about in incredibly agonizing detail in his memoir Sing Backwards and Weep—which I do recommend, though cautiously, and with the caveat that it’s actually best paired with journalist Greg Prato’s truly heroic work of oral history, his self-published book of interviews with many of Lanegan’s key collaborators, simply titled Lanegan.
Anyway, there’s so much more for me to write my way through when it comes to Lanegan’s music, but suffice to say, he’s very quickly entered my own personal pantheon of all-time favorite singers, and the brutal brilliance of “I Wouldn’t Want to Say” hopefully demonstrates at least the tiniest bit of why.
16. “Friendo”—It’s so funny that this song is called “Friendo” (presumably a reference to No Country for Old Men?) because I’m gonna wax poetically about friendship here, specifically how great it is to have friends who are always sending new music my way. My pal Brendon texted me a link to this album at some point earlier this year, and I spent a bunch of really enjoyable mornings walking the neighborhood while listening to it. But even beyond that initial introduction, this album became the gift that kept on giving, because whenever I would put my “recently downloaded” playlist on shuffle, something would catch my ear and I’d check the screen and it would inevitably be something from this album. It got to the point where it became a running joke inside my own head. “Oh, of course this is from the Aaron Parks album. Whenever I hear something cool and am not sure what it is, it’s always from the Aaron Parks album!” Friends who get your musical taste oftentimes better than you do yourself: recommended!
Though the entirety of Little Big II: Dreams of a Mechanical Man really is outstanding, “Friendo” became one of my fast favorites for its trifecta of ultra-cool yet ruthlessly efficient solos. First, there’s that big fat bass solo—and it’s rare enough as it is to hear an acoustic bass solo at all, much less one this gorgeously melodic—leading into a guitar solo that stays true to its jazz idiom while pulling in just enough crunch to make it really feel edgy and propulsive. Your ear almost gets tricked into thinking at that point that the song is just going to ride out the main theme before ending, but then it bursts out again with a funky-as-sin, Bobby Sparks-esque keyboard jam that carries us safely through to the outro.
17. “I Miss All My Exes”—For me, the ne plus ultra of spoken word tracks will always be the Clientele’s “Losing Haringey” (just to sneak in a little extra love for Strange Geometry again, ha!) from way back in 2005. But with the explosion of both professional and amateur podcasts over the past ten to fifteen years (ahem), it makes a weird amount of sense that we’d be getting more of these kinds of atmospheric tracks on albums that aren’t quite songs but aren’t interstitial hip-hop skits either. But beyond all that, I love that this track also gives Jamila Woods the chance to remind everyone that she’s not just a singer but is also an amazing poet as well. (Brian’s students love writing response papers on “Deep in the Homeroom of Doom” and “Daddy Dozens” when he assigns them in his intro writing classes.)
As someone who has been (blissfully) out of the dating game for well over a decade now, I still found myself unexpectedly bursting into tears listening to this track one afternoon when she hit those final lines: “I never left any one of them, not really / I just went somewhere new.”
18. “We Will Remember”—Now let’s talk about a VOICE. You can tell how good Jacob Lusk is by the fact that he doesn’t limit himself to the truly exceptional parts of his range; he’s not afraid to allow himself to sound “ugly.” Witness the difference in his timbre between “Taboo” and the first half of “Professional” on the Gabriels album Angels & Queens, where he goes from a sort of feral Eartha Kitt howl to the smoothness of Nat “King” Cole. For me, that goes beyond mere notions of range to that ever-elusive lack of vanity, where the singer’s approach is not just dictated by the song but truly in service to the song, with all religious/spiritual connotations fully intact.
Because, like, holy shit—if you weren’t in service to a higher power, would you even have the boldness to take on a signature Streisand tune like “The Way We Were”? And to not just take it on, but completely remake it? As not even as a full-on cover, but as a brief interpolation within an original track? I just could not get over the twin poles of my shock the first time I heard this—yes, the audacity but mainly the sublimity of it all, emphatically including the canniness of the arrangement. After Lusk reaches the top of his own incredible vocal capacity, it’s just genius to bring an entire gospel choir in for one last burst of power to punch those three words “we will remember!” to their peak before disappearing from the sonic landscape of the song again. This is highly skilled, turn-on-a-dime artistry operating in stealth mode; they collectively make it sound so easy and so very unforgettably good.
Other favorite musical moments from 2023:
Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s “People of the Loon”; Family Stereo’s “Take Care”; The Hand’s “Love Potion (#2183)”; Imarhan’s album Aboogi; The Japanese House’s “Friends”; Jon Batiste’s “Movement 18’ (Heroes)”; Lou Reed’s “Open Invitation”; the Metropolitan Jazz Octet’s The Bowie Project, esp. their take on “Heroes”; mxmtoon’s album rising, esp. the song “frown”; Róisín Murphy’s Hit Parade; Spoon’s “Silver Girl” (y’all, I would have put the song on this mix, but you don’t need me to tell you yet again a.] how good Spoon is or b.] how much I love them); Xhosa Cole’s Ibeji (speaking of spoken-word tracks, esp. “Ig Live 20 – 04 -2021 feat. Jason Brown”); this incredible video of Billie Eilish and Finneas talking through how they wrote and recorded “What Was I Made For?”; the David Johansen documentary Personality Crisis: One Night Only; the moment in the Little Richard: I Am Everything documentary when he says something to the effect of, “Go back to the hotel and bring me my sparkly suit!”; hearing Kenny Barron play his song “Rain” live at Symphony Hall with Dave Holland on bass; catching the first night of The Walkmen’s reunion run at the Metro; seeing the fantastic revival of Tommy at the Goodman Theatre; seeing Living Colour completely rule the stage at the Hard Rock Casino in Gary; sitting in the third row to see Andy Summers play a light and loose solo show; and seeing Ringo Starr (a whole, live Beatle!!!!!!) in concert with his incredible All Starr Band.
Bonus Track!
For Apple Music users, Brian has once again shared his own playlist of favorite songs from 2023. You can stream it here.
Queen of Peaches 