Music!!!!!

I’ve been tinkering and updating my website lately. And catching up with my RSS feeds. And here’s my friend gRegor with a post I might have an opinion about. He wrote:

Recommendations are always welcome! What are some of your favorite albums of 2023?

Also I was looking at when I met gRegor and it was in the innocent pre-pandemic days of December 2019. We were so innocent then.

Here’s a photo:

Anyway, as to his post–he alludes to Pablo’s 1000 albums in 1000 days project. Ambitious! In his own he writes:

I’m keeping it simple for now, so not going to commit to 1000 albums or posting about each one I listen to, but I am sure I will share some of the high/lowlights.

Recommendations are always welcome! What are some of your favorite albums of 2023?

One of the things I do is that every year I start a new playlist with songs I’ve discovered or are in heavy rotation. It might be things that I hear on the radio (yes, I listen to the radio). It might be music that appears in media–an example of that was when I heard Jidenna’s Long Live the Chief in Luke Cage. It might be from music history videos from Trash Theory, this year Wet Leg’s Chaise Longue meets that criteria (see CHAISE LONGUE or: How Wet Leg Buttered The Indie World’s Muffin). So it’s not so much albums that I listen to as I use adding a song to my playlist as a potential starting point to see their other music or other music related to their era.

Some standouts from this year:

1. Sarah Shook and the Disarmers has impressed me as a brutally frank country artist that puts me in the mind of the best of Dwight Yoakam
2. Stew & The Negro Problem‘s Florida is not a new one but the refrain of “Florida / Florida you kill me” guts me every time. Selected lyrics: “Cali gave us The Beach Boys and Charles Manson / Oklahoma gave us Leon Russell and Hanson”
3. Kitty is an artist I’ve been following a long time. “Baby Pink” is great – it came out in 2020. I also have “Thanks Kathryn Obvious” which is low-fi rap and includes the line “I just came for the fries with the carne asada:
4. Another one Trash Theory turned me onto is The Tourists’ cover of “I only want to be with you” which I had somehow never heard. It’s the band The Eurythmics were before they were The Eurythmics
5. And in songs from my youth that I forgot existed but love dearly: Translator’s “Everywhere That I’m Not” is an absolute fave. The earnestness of the refrain gets me. It’s all about longing, which was what my teen years were all about.
6. Lana Del Rey’s “Not All Who Wander Are Lost” is another sad song that hits me hard. Who doesn’t appreciate pop stars who quote Tolkien anyway?
7. In the obsessive category: “Down To Earth” by Peter Gabriel from the WALL-E soundtrack went on super heavy rotation for me a few months ago. The movie and its themes of planetary recovery and the chance for humanity to fix its damn problems gets to me. Managing to be hopeful as it does it is infectious to me. And yes, I’m using the word infectious deliberately. Here’s to hope!
2023 fee fie phō fun so far. I reserve the right to add (or more rarely, remove) to this playlist: