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Screencap from Apple Music Replay 2023: You played 8,263 songs, one was your anthemScreencap from Apple Music Replay 2023: "Top song: Sleep 1, Sigur Ros, 124 plays"

My favorite music of 2022

Lots of good stuff this year. Here’s a playlist:

My very favorites

Additionally, here are a few albums and singles I wanted to call special attention to. They’re presented alphabetically becasue I’ve choosen to ditch the “best of” framing I often go with; I’m not writing music criticism here, and I have no editor telling me what to do. I don’t even know how many things I called out, so this isn’t a top-ten list, either! It’s just What I Loved in 2023. Mostly captured for me, but if others get something out if it, all the better.

Album: Animal Collective: Time Skiffs ✅

Their best group of songs since MPP, for my money.

Album: Big Thief: Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You ✅

A rare double record that never overstays it’s welcome, but rather creates a world I want to live inside, not unlike the White Album or Wildflowers.

Album: Destroyer: Labyrinths ✅

After nearly two decades of dabbling, I have finally become fully Bejar-pilled.

Song: Gabriels: Remember Me

If you’re not moved when the full strings kick in at about 2:30, I don’t know what to tell you.

Song/Video: Ghost: Spillways

I have no commentary on this band or their schtick, but I do know a well-written sugary pop-metal jam when I hear it.

Song: Goose: Dripfield

The vapors of this song have seeped into my bones.

Song: Hammered Hulls: Abstract City

We all need a bit of classic Dischord sound in our lives, and this tune checks that box with authority.

Albums: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s entire 2022 output, specifically Omnium Gatherum and Changes

I am intimidated by this band. They are very Extra in the best sense of the word.

Song: Steve Lacy: Bad Habit

R&B from another planet. I dig. A lot.

Album: The Mountain Goats: Bleed Out

John Darnielle is a national treasure.

Album: Aofie O’Donovan: Age of Apathy ✅

I’ve really been enjoying Aofie’s work since I fell down a deep Live From Here well several years ago. She truly brings all of her unique talents as a songwriter, vocalist, arranger and guitarist together on this record. (Related: this Tiny Desk concert is delightful.)

Song: Angel Olsen: Go Home

Haunting.

Album: Beth Orton: Weather Alive

Haunting, but in a different way. So great to have new music from Beth Orton.

Album: Plains: I Walked With You A Ways

This record gave me a lot of reminders of my mom’s early-90s pop country radio phase. (I mean this as a compliment, obviously.)

Song: Maggie Rogers: That’s Where I Am

Another single that grabbed me by the lapels and demanded my full attention from its first notes.

Album: Will Sheff: Nothing Special

I couldn’t describe this record better than Sheff himself did in this wonderful interview with Fluxblog’s Matthew Perpetua:

My experience of art is like the wind in the trees. You blink and you miss it. A little bit of it is like “Did you guys hear what I heard?” It’s a very quiet, subtle thing that gets under your skin.

Album: Sister Ray: Communion ✅

If I had to pick a “favorite” record of 2022, it would probably be this. Those that know me and my tastes will have no problem figuring out why.

Album: Soccer Mommy: Sometimes Forever ✅

A nearly perfect distillation of my late-90s record collection. I mean this as a high, high compliment. Truly another one of my absolute faves on the year.

Album: Spoon: Lucifer On The Sofa

Their best since probably 2007’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. All killer, no filler.

Song: SRSQ: Winter, Slowly

The first time I heard that little whammy-bar vocal effect on the chorus (starts around 0:50), something in my brain slipped loose and my thoughts still aren’t thinking right.

Album: Bartees Strange: Farm to Table ✅

This is truly an Important Record, a call-to-arms, a statement of purpose.

Song: Tenci: Two Cups

Tenci came onto my radar after seeing them open for Hop Along in 2021, and I’m really glad they did.

Album: Sharon Van Etten: We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong ✅

Much like the Destroyer record, this was the one that converted me from “hey, SVE is pretty cool” to a full-fledged fan.

Album: Immanuel Wilkins: The 7th Hand ✅

A gifted arranger who can still layer sheets of sound with the best of them.

(✅ indicates that I’ve purchased the album on vinyl, for accountability’s sake. Support the musicians you love, folks!)

Playlist available on Apple Music, Spotify and Last.fm.

My favorite albums of 2021

Once again, I pushed myself to listen to lots of new music this year. A full six of my top ten records were by artists who are either new or new to me… seven if you count Aeon Station, who are technically a “new” band. That’s pretty good, I think!

10. Dan Campbell: Other People’s Lives

I had foolishly dismissed The Wonder Years as kiddie emo that Wasn’t For Me (I was wrong!) until I read this piece on Campbell’s reasons for writing and releasing this record. Campbell has that rare gift for making the extremely specific feel universal.

9. Ani DiFranco: Revolutionary Love

I always have and probably will always have a soft spot for Ani DiFranco, and this record’s “Ani as funk bandleader” vibes really agree with me.

8. Julien Baker: Little Oblivions

She still manages to bring the same level of emotional devastation, even with full band arrangements on many tracks and a more produced sound.

7. Lunar Vacation: Inside Every Fig is a Dead Wasp

Right in my sweet spot: vaguely shoegazy indie with female lead vocals. (See also: Snarls from last year’s list.)

6. Grace Vonderkuhn: Pleasure Pain

An absolute ripper of a rock-and-roll record from my favorite Wilmington, DE-based power trio, and a huge leap forward from their last record.

5. Geese: Projector

There’s no way a bunch of teenagers made this record, right? Either way, Geese have spent a bunch of time with their dad’s Talking Heads records and their older sister’s Strokes records and turned out this impossibly tight, ambitious and mature record.

4. Aeon Station: Observatory

I could write a book about this record, which I’ve been waiting for, in a roundabout way, for about 15 years. I hate that it came out under these circumstances but I’m glad this record is finally available to the public, because it is a triumph. (I am still very eager to hear the Charles Bissell portion of what was to be the follow-up to The Meadowlands, of course.)

3. William The Conqueror: Maverick Thinker

An incredible Scottish swamp-blues record that sounds like a lot of things I love but also not quite like anything I’ve ever heard before.

2. Katy Kirby: Cool Dry Place

Hard to overstate how much this record came out of nowhere and smacked me right between the eyes. It has an emotional resonance for me unlike any record since maybe Bark Your Head Off, Dog.

1. Japanese Breakfast: Jubilee

Reading Crying in H Mart this summer was… a lot, but it helped me understand this record for the celebratory masterpiece it truly is. If joy truly is an act of resistance, this record is as punk as it gets.

Honorable Mentions:

Playlist available on Apple Music and Spotify.

Best of 2020 (The Albums)

I’ve done some sort of year end, “best of” list as long as I can remember. This probably hasn’t been the “best” year of music over that span, but it certainly has been the most important, to me. We’ve all had a trying year, to put it mildly. These are the albums that helped get me through it.

The Albums

10. No Thank You: Embroidered Foliage

A delightfully tight, punk-adjacent indie rock record. Would have fit perfectly on Kill Rock Stars' mid-90s roster.

9. Fiona Apple: Fetch The Bolt Cutters

It takes a lot of work to make something so meticulously crafted sound so loose and “messy.”

8. Laura Marling: Song For Our Daughter

A near-perfect singer/songwriter record.

7. Ellen Siberian Tiger: Cinderblock Cindy

As I noted on Twitter, this record stopped me in my tracks and lit my hair on fire.

6. Lianne La Havas (S/T)

The cover of “Weird Fishes” is perfect, and somehow better than the original, but this record deserves way more than to be remembered as “the one with Weird Fishes on it.”

5. Snarls: Burst

This seems like it was grown in a lab specifically to check my boxes: dreamy, almost-shoegazy mid-90s indie vibes with wonderful female lead vocals.

4. Waxahatchee: Saint Cloud

This was a slow burn for me, but really worth the time… just a perfect record for Saturday afternoon, Sunday morning, or almost any other time.

3. Empty Country (S/T)

Was never a huge Cymbals Eat Guitars fan, but this gem from former CEG frontman Joseph D’Agostino’s new project is a pastoral masterpiece. It’s made waiting for that new Wrens record a liiiiiitle bit easier.

2. HAIM: Women In Music Pt. III

The Fleetwood Mac comparisons work for me, not not necessarily because of the sound (although there are plenty of late-70s Laurel Canyon vibes here); it’s more the sheer relentlessness of the quality of the hooks in every. single. song.

1. Hum: Inlet

Dropped out of nowhere in the middle of summer and swallowed me whole. I can’t do justice to describe this perfect soundscape of a record, but Sebastian Sterling can.

Also great

The Playlists

Ten Years in 17 Bullet Points

  • got laid off
  • did the self-employment thing
  • bought a house
  • learned to code
  • had another kid
  • took a job
  • ran a 5-miler
  • took another job
  • did a featured speaking thing
  • got promoted to management
  • made a blog
  • Saquon Barkley cooked TJ Watt on a wheel route in the Big Ten Championship Game
  • did another featured speaking thing
  • became a Swim Dad
  • filled my rings for 250 consecutive days
  • started therapy
  • turned 40

I never bothered to make a Best of 2019 music list, which is something I’ve done since my teenaged years, but I did make a “best beers I had for the first time in 2019” list, so there’s that.

Twenty Nineteen

2019 was a rough year. I doubt I’m the only one who feels this way, for reasons personal, professional and/or political. In the intrest of focusing on the positive and shining a light towards more of what I want in 2020, here are two achievements that defined my 2019:

My first hires as a manager

Thanks to the largest single project we’ve ever tackled, we were able to add two full-time members to the Arcweb design team in 2019. These were my first two hires as a manager.

Hiring forced me to be thoughtful about what the roles actually required, rather than just defaulting to a number of years of experience or a list of design tools as prerequisites. It also gave me a chance to think about the existing team as an entity, and consider what it needed to thrive and grow.

It was of utmost importance to me to run a fair, inclusive hiring process. This meant not stopping once I had found a candidate who could do the job in question, as counter-intuitive as that sounds.

I was especially focused on not putting too much burden on the candidates with countless rounds of all-day interviews and design tests and such. To facilitate this, I needed to learn to trust my hiring team and take their counsel.

I am exceptionally proud of the hiring process as a whole in both cases, and I look forward to what Arcweb’s newly-augmented design team can accomplish in 2020.

“Hiring” a therapist

I’ve been seeing a therapist since early last year. For reasons that are not that interesting or relevant, I stopped seeing her early this year. To find a new therapist, I didn’t just pick a name out of an online listing and cross my fingers. Rather, I ran an interview process.

I made a list of candidates using Psychology Today’s wonderful website. I made some exploratory phone calls and, armed with what I had learned from my first therapy experience, I scheduled three in-person sessions. I treated these sessions as interviews (I was transparent about my process with each candidate), and used them to determine whether they were right for me and my specific therapeutic goals.

This was… scary as hell. It’s hard enough to open up once, but to three different people, not knowing whether you’ll continue the relationship? But the results were worth it. Committing to a process led me to finding the perfect therapist for me, rather than satisficed with an earlier candidate who was “good enough.”

NB: I am very lucky and privileged to be able to access mental health care. Many are not. If you believe therapy is out of reach for you, take a look at this calculator. The help you need may be more in reach than you think.

My year in music, 2018

My 2018 in music can be best summed up in five words: “Bark Your Head Off, Dog.”

Hop Along’s third album took a moment to get lodged in my brain, but once it did, it was a force of nature. I can’t recall the last time a new record took over my life like this, standing up to repeated plays for hours, weeks, months on end, refusing to wear out its welcome. Every spin revealed a new favorite song, a nuance somehow unnoticed in the hundreds of previous plays.

I’d be quite surprised if this record doesn’t end up occupying a place of pride in my Favorite Records of the Decade list.

The Shortlist:

(Playlist also available on Apple Music.)

How my listening habits changed in 2018

Two new developments changed the way I listen to music in 2018:

Spotify

In March, I ditched Apple Music (which I had subscribed to from day one) and signed up for Spotify.

Why? For years, I had believed that Apple Music’s integration into the OS was worth putting up with its decidedly less polished UX and lack of any meaningful social of curation features. I had also dabbled with Spotify before and remembered not loving it.

But with the gentle encouragement of Merlin Mann, I took another look at Spotify and was hooked. The curated playlists are wonderful and meet a lot of my “I’m not exactly sure what to listen to” use cases. The Amazon Echo integration rules, and has allowed me to create an ersatz Sonos multi-room speaker setup.

The only drawback to Spotify is the nascent state of their Apple Watch app. Specifically, it’s really just a controller, and does not allow you to download music to listen to without your phone. But minus this one feature, Spotify wins for me in every conceivable way.

Vinyl

I know, I know. I’m That Guy. I am every stereotypical middle-aged dad. I am an extra from High Fidelity. I know. It’s fine.

I got a record player last year and have spent much of 2018 filling out my record collection. I won’t bore you too much with how It’s Different and There’s Just Something Warmer About Vinyl, but it’s all true. It also scratches my long-ignored collector itch; the buzz I got when I found original pressings of both Chronic Town and Hatful of Hollow in my local record store’s bins was indescribable.

I know. I’m sorry.

2018 diversions

Most year-end reviews tend to focus on things that are were newly released in that year, but I’d like to note a few old wells I fell down this year.

All Hail West Texas

I stumbled across the wonderful I Only Listen To The Mountain Goats podcast sometime early this year. I had been familiar with “All Hail West Texas” prior to this podcast, but the cover versions (and John’s thoughtful commentary on the genesis and meaning of the songs) led me back to the original artifact.

Frightened Rabbit

I’ve dabbled before, but I hate, hate, hate that it took Scott Hutchinson’s tragic death for me to finally get all the way into Frightened Rabbit.

Hejira

Joni Mitchell is arguably the coolest person to ever be born on this planet and this is the Most Joni Mitchell record in her expansive catalog. While plumbing the depths of this record, I found a bunch of early- to mid-80s performances of this material and they somehow made me love it even more.

The Last Waltz

Speaking of Hejira-era Joni Mitchell, I watched The Last Waltz for the first time this yea, thanks to urgings by the Celebration Rock podcast and Hanif Abdurraqib. Putting aside whatever contention may exist around the making of the film itself, the performances strike the perfect balance between ragged looseness and turn-on-a-dime tightness that The Band were know for their entire career.