Just like last year, I’ve decided to post my top 10 albums from 2020.
Disclaimer: I spent most of my musical thinking in 2020 looking back musically and creating playlists for my August wedding. If you want to experience what my wedding sounded like, here’s what we listened to while sipping cocktails, while eating dinner, and breaking it down on the dance floor.
And here’s the playlist of my favorite songs from 2020.
10. Bob Dylan
Rough and Rowdy Ways
This is not Dylan at his best, but even Dylan at his mostly mediocre brings the force of his many multitudes of experience, as he himself tells you. Dylan’s voice is rough from his rowdy days, and his lyrics are saturated with references to his contemporaries and his equals. The main reason that this album is on my list is the melancholy, meandering track Murder Most Foul which takes you on a tour of the last 60 years since the assassination of John F. Kennedy – which happened the year after Dylan’s debut album. If you’re not already a Dylan fan, this album won’t make you one, but just give it a listen for old-time’s sake.
Top song: Murder Most Foul
9. Phoebe Bridgers
Punisher
Phoebe Bridgers has been a favorite of mine ever since my friend Harrison Matheny raved about her and played me songs from her first album Stranger in the Alps. Beyond the fact that the album opener, Smoke Signals, reminds me of Twin Peaks, Phoebe brings the heat and the heart on songs like Motion Sickness and Georgia. All in all, it was a wonderful debut album and the expectations it created for her follow up were deservedly high.
Punisher was worth the wait. Emotions are braced and embraced throughout the album which starts by plopping you down in front of the TV, ripping some hits on the ol’ bongaroo, (that’s how you say that, right?) and taking you for a spin around the cosmos to different countries and planetary bodies before returning you (not so safely) back to Graceland. When I come to the end of the album, I am once again struck by the startling similarity between its final note and the last scene of Twin Peaks.
Top songs: Garden Song, Kyoto, ICU, I Know the End
8. Sufjan Stevens
The Ascension
Sufjan has been a favorite artist for the last decade for me, so it would be hard for this album not to make my list. Most won’t find this album approachable based on the 80 minute runtime alone. In many ways this album is the culmination of much of Stevens’ sound since 2010 with The Age of Adz, Planetarium, and Aporia mixing and matching in syncopated synths and vocal manipulation. Despite my skeptical approach to this album, I enjoyed the soaring ballads like Tell Me You Love Me, anthems like Landslide, bangers like Goodbye To All That, and classic Sufjan long-songs like The Ascension and America.
Top songs: Run Away With Me, Tell Me You Love Me, Landslide, Goodbye To All That, The Ascension, America
7. Fiona Apple
Fetch the Bolt Cutters
Here’s an album for those of you who are FED UP with things. Fiona is raw, loquacious, direct, and singing from her heart surrounded by the cries of her chorus of canine companions. She doesn’t mince words, and she will not be silenced – even if you try to “kick her under the table, she won’t shut up!” The album meanders through the process of how she has gotten to where she is in life, and how she intends to not run in the relay-race of hatred. This love even extends to her offering affectionate words to women who are with her ex-lovers. If you are tired and want to recapture some of your own fire, this Lo-Fi barn burning album might be just the thing to get you lit.
Top songs: I Want You To Love Me, Fetch The Bolt Cutters, Under The Table, Heavy Ballon, Cosmonauts
6. Adrianne Lenker
songs
Big Thief, lead by the seemingly indomitable Adrienne Lenker, is the only band with two albums on my top ten list last year (disclaimer: most of this sentence is reused from last year). Well, this year featured yet another dreamy, simple solo effort from Lenker. Some of my favorite songs from the last several years have come from Lenker’s solo records, especially her 2014 project Hours Were the Birds. While the music on this new record songs is sparse and incorporates the sounds of the nature around her, Lenker’s lyrical story telling is intimate and imaginative in the ways that is hard to capture in words outside of the songs themselves.
Top songs: two reverse, heavy focus, zombie girl, not a lot, just forever, dragon eyes
5. Bill Callahan
Gold Record
Brought to you by the artist that topped my 2019 list, Gold Record comes in halfway through this year’s list. Gold Record features Callahan’s unmatched story telling ability that is highlighted in songs like Pigeons where he introduces himself as Johnny Cash, tells a story about being a limo driver dispensing advice to a couple of newlyweds, and signs off as Leonard Cohen – what’s not to like about that? (this song came out the month before my wedding last year, so I might be a little biased…) Other highlights come in his revised version of Let’s Move To The Country that fills in a couple of the blanks left in his previous version that appeared on the Smog album Knock Knock, wrestling with growing older on 35, and his meditation on family in The Mackenzies.
Top songs: Pigeons, 35, The Mackenzies, Let’s Move To The Country
4. Waxahatchee
Saint Cloud
I first heard Waxahatchee when she opened up for Courtney Barnett at Stubbs BBQ down in Austin in 2018, and if I’m honest with you, her set didn’t really stand out all that much. It could just be because she was overpowered by the burn-the-house-down energy that Barnett brought right afterwards. So when I approached listening to Saint Cloud I didn’t really have high expectations. However, Katie Crutchfield and her band have really outdone themselves with this album. It is one of those albums that you just put on, and enjoy all the way through. If this album was porridge and my name was goldilocks (which I have been called on more than one occasion) this would be the porridge I’d pick. Its not too similar to other albums in the folk genre, but it’s not too “out-there” to be unapproachable. This is a go-to album for driving in the car, and one of those albums that I’ve most shared with friends this year.
Top songs: Can’t Do Much, Lilacs, The Eye, Arkadelphia
3. Kurt Vile
Speed, Sound, Lonely KV (ep)
Though not really a full LP, this EP by Kurt Vile just hits me in my musical soft spot. I’ve long been a fan of Kurt’s laid back stylings and his meandering, revealing lyrics that drop like rain down a window pane. I mean; “you’re out there running just to be on the run…” who hasn’t felt that at one time or the other? The other thing that shot this album to no. three on this year’s list is his simple, sentimental duet with John Prine, “How Lucky,” that takes on that much more power since Mr. Prine passed last year. It’s a stroll down a street by a couple of friends reflecting on their fortunes with gratitude, and that just makes for a nice song. It’s the type of song that makes you wish you were their friend, or had the chance to sit as a fly on the wall while they created it. It almost seems like the passing of a baton in a way, but maybe I should just leave it there.
Top songs: Speed of the Sound of Loneliness, Gone Girl, How Lucky
2. Tame Impala
The Slow Rush
Are you surprised that The Slow Rush is number two on my list? Well, you must not have hung out with me much this year… ok, well I guess that makes sense that you wouldn’t know…
You would NOT be surprised by it’s place if you live near the tennis courts that me and my wife have gone to religiously over the course of the pandemic. Although this album might not be have won as many awards as their 2015 album Currents – but who cares about that? Maybe that album won those awards because it was the first time people encountered Impala’s synthy, beat-driven, high-flying, emotionally charged, lyrically opaque band. The Slow Rush is everything I want from a band like Tame Impala. The blown-out drums, the driving baselines, the high-pitched squeal of electronics, and the altered vocals invite you into a groove that you’d have a hard time resisting the imperative of a head-nodding good time. And it’s not just the music that gets you… it’s lyrics like: “because what we did one day on a whim, has slowly become all we do,” on the opener and, “but strictly speaking I’m still on track,” from the emotional center of the album that keep you engaged and introspective as the music crashes around you.
Note: as I write this review up in my study, I’m listening to the album and my wife just called up the stairs to ask; “Is this Tame Impala??” (which she does every time I listen to the album) and when I confirmed it for her she followed it up with, “I love this album!” So there you go – a double endorsement.
Top songs: One More Year, It Might Be Time, On Track
1. Fleet Foxes
Shore
Fleet Foxes released this album on September 22, 2020, and by Spotify had sent me my annual reminder to spend more time with friends and less time listening to music in their yearly December recap this album had secured every one of my top spots: most listened to album, top song, top artist, etc. Shore was the only album this year that I couldn’t get enough of. (or if you’d prefer: ‘of which I could not get enough.’ – no one like you, grammar Nazi.) It fit the moment perfectly for me. I’ve enjoyed Fleet Foxes for years now, but wasn’t really a big fan of their last album, Crack Up, which seemed a bit solipsistic and less approachable than I’d hoped. Shore suffers from none of those things. The album invites you in and embraces you with it’s broad, shimmering chorus of voices and familiar notes of melancholy reminiscences. (note: have you ever tried to pronounce the word “reminiscences”? I dare you.) The album, as its name suggests, evokes the feelings of seeing land in the distance when you’ve been lost at sea for a long time: the feeling of finally feeling land beneath your feet. I’m not sure how it accomplishes this, but there is a hope that is shared and preached in dulcet tones throughout the album. Where I feel like Sufjan has gained (and lost) much by a continual overhaul of his musical stylings, Pecknold and the Foxes have found new life by embracing their ‘sound’ and continuing to plunge new depths and reach new heights in the same location. Anyway, there was never any doubt which album was going to be at the top of my list year. Similar to last year’s Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest, the choice of this year’s top album was the easiest part of putting this list together.
Top songs: Sunblind, Can I Believe You, A Long Way Past The Past, For A Week Or Two, Young Man’s Game, I’m Not My Season, Going-to-the-Sun Road, Cradling Mother, Cradling Woman, Shore
Missed from 2019
Andrew Bird
My Finest Work Yet
I just wanted to take a hot-sec to shout out an album that I missed in last year’s list. It would be hard for me to overstate how much I enjoyed listening to Andrew Bird over the last year in Quarantine. Bird is one of those artists that I will forget about for a year and then re-discover with great delight. There are few people who write as imaginatively as Bird (for example his song Anonanimal that starts off with: See a sea / anemone / The enemy / See a sea anemone / And that’ll be the end of me.) and in [His] Finest Work Yet this is on full display. If my musical opinions matter to you at all, (and even if they don’t) you should check out this album as a good entryway into the world of the bird-man himself.
Top songs: Sisyphus, Bloodless, Olympians, Manifest, Don the Struggle