My Top Music Moments in 2020—And Any Other Year
Good morning.
Apologies for skipping a newsletter last week. I was planning on taking this week and next week off, but it’s been a busy finish to the end of the year at work and I wasn’t able to pull together something for last week.
Instead, this week I’m going to do what I intended to do last week. It’s something a little different for the end of the year. Back at my old blog (which feels approximately 100 years old), at the end of every year I used to do my own “end of year” roundup of my favorite albums from the year. Except, my selections were never limited to just the calendar year—it included albums released in any year that happened to resonate with me in that particular year.
Times have changed, though, and I don’t listen to albums in the same coherent and compulsive way anymore. These days, I’m much more likely to put on a podcast than I am to put on a record. Let’s say I’ve officially entered my “adult-talk-radio-listening phase.” When I was younger, I observed how adults (my parents included) elected to listen to talk radio or news in the car rather than albums. I dreaded the day when that would happen to me, and vowed that it never would. But now, here I am at 35 and we have podcasts, which help fill up the time and silence in a way that I habitually gravitate towards. Instead of music, I get information or opinions, things that, at first slowly and now suddenly, have more value to me than just listening to music and imagining things.
But I still listen to new music—or try to. And now, in perhaps a sign of the times, there are moments in music that stick with me, rather than comprehensive statements that come in the form of an album. So, what I’m going to do with this week’s newsletter is run through the musical moments from this year, or any other year, that stuck with me the most.
Fair warning: My tastes err on the side of “dad rock” and lean very heavy on the 1970s. OK, there, I warned you about my bad taste. Now it's on you for actually reading on.
The True Top 10:
“When I’m Over You” - Elvis from From Elvis in Nashville (2020/1970)
This track is from the box set Elvis in Nashville that was released this year, which pulls from Elvis’s 1970 recording sessions in Nashville that resulted in three albums worth of material. My favorite moment in “When I’m Over You” is basically the song’s first 15 seconds. It opens with faint studio chatter before an electric, country-picking guitar flies in, followed by bass and drums that hit you right in the solar plexus and immediately make you smile. This is the kind of song that, in its first crucial seconds, steps into a room and fills it up entirely—an effect that could be partially attributed to the subtle but powerful organ that rides under the rhythm section. Or, it could be Elvis’s soaring, inimitable delivery of the titular line. In his review of the box set, AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine describes the music as “so good and so relaxed,” which may sound rudimentary but I can’t think of a better way to explain this song and its opening seconds.
“last great american dynasty” - Taylor Swift from folklore (2020)
I’m not a Taylor Swift fan, so I feel weird putting a moment from this song on here. But folklore was possibly the biggest release of 2020, so the album felt kind of inescapable. I won’t pretend to know Swift’s catalogue inside and out, but the songs I gravitate towards are the ones that start quiet and slow and build to an undeniable chorus on the back of a muffled drum beat (think “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” or “long story short”—what I see as the sister song to “last great american dynasty” on folklore’s sister album evermore). The moment on this song that stuck with me the most, though, was when the chorus builds to its final refrain at about the 3:13 mark. Swift’s vocal enters the mix in a near-falsetto, lofting the phrase “I had a marvelous time ruining everything.” I had plenty of fun mimicking and mocking the way the phrase was delivered during this year of sitting at home (just ask my girlfriend). But, to me, the sign of a good song can sometimes be how well it stands up to being made fun of. That moment, at 3:13, is the perfect vocal placement and perfect vocal delivery. It’s a decision (and a moment) that is unimpeachable.
“Pocahontas” by Neil Young & Crazy Horse from Rust Never Sleeps (1979)
Neil Young’s catalog is immense and full of plenty of records and songs you can spend years poring over. For instance, I spent a lot of my time from the ages of 19 to 22 poring over his “Ditch Trilogy” of albums from 1973-1974. And, honestly, I could’ve done that for a lifetime. Rust Never Sleeps was an album I never spent a ton of focused time with until this year. I grew up listening to Live Rust, which features many of the songs on Rust Never Sleeps, with my parents so I knew a lot of the songs from this period of Neil’s catalog in the context of that album. But after listening to the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young podcast “So Far” over the summer, I started spending a lot of time with Rust Never Sleeps, especially “Pocahontas.” I won’t pretend to know what Pocahontas is about, but what stays with me after every listen is the fourth verse that starts at 2:31. The lyrics go “And maybe Marlon Brando / will be there by the fire / we'll sit and talk of Hollywood / And the good things there for hire / And the Astrodome / And the first tepee / Marlon Brando, Pocahontas and me / Marlon Brando, Pocahontas and me / Pocahontas.” I could speculate for countless hours about what those lyrics mean. What haunts me most is the image or idea of figures from a twisted American mythology all sitting around a fire and the fact that it thrills me to think about. The word “Astrodome” fills me with nostalgia for my youth—for the big sports monuments of that time that I worshipped, that helped me understand the world. What does that say about me? I think I’ll probably listen to that verse and stare out the window another ten thousand times over the course of my life.
“LazyEaterBetsonHerLikeNess” by Liv.e from Couldn’t Wait to Tell You… (2020)
I wrote about Couldn’t Wait to Tell You in the August 5th edition of the newsletter, so the avid readers out there will already know that this record was one of my favorite new releases of the year. The album overall is a singular listening experience: songs float in and out of each other; moods change within songs and from track to track; there is a hazy, druggy, but not intoxicated, buzz that vibrates through the entire record. And that buzz is immediately palpable from the opening notes of “LazyEaterBetsonHerLikeNess.” The track hums and crackles like a slowly dying summer fire from its very start, and the hypnotic guitar hook that provides the melody for the entire song is like the lapping of very small waves on a very small body of water.
“Yellow Is the Color of Her Eyes” by Soccer Mommy from color theory (2020)
Soccer Mommy’s latest full-length album was one of my favorite releases from this year. It was one of the albums I listened to on repeat right before and right as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe. For those not familiar with Soccer Mommy (aka Sophia Regina Allison), her music is archetypal early 1990s alternative rock. And if that doesn’t make sense, just listen—you’ll get what I mean pretty quickly. All of the songs on color theory are worth your time, and the album coheres well together as a full musical statement; that is, all of the tracks feel of a piece with each other and the entire record is sequenced in a way that is satisfying and lends to starting the whole thing over as soon as you finish. But my favorite song is “Yellow Is the Color of Her Eyes.” And my favorite moment on that song is the coda that comes at about 4:37. The song gives itself fully over to a new melody driven by a lightly-plucked electric guitar that was teased earlier in the song. Soon that delicate melody is washed over by feedback and the delicate guitar is replaced by a distorted one playing the same melody but in a style that sounds like Axel Rose or Mick Ronson on quaaludes. If you can listen to that section of the song without feeling like your heart is going to explode, then you may want to check your pulse.
“Coming Down Again” by The Rolling Stones from Goats Head Soup (1973)
Goats Head Soup is the often-overlooked album the Stones released after their run of masterpieces from 1968-1972 (Beggar’s Banquet, Let it Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main Street). I’ve been a longtime Stones fan (see me, aged 16, smoking cigarettes and listening to Exile with the car windows down after my PSAT) and even I overlooked this one for a long time. But 2020 was the year I truly spent time with the record and discovered its many pleasures. In fact, the album-opener “100 Years Ago” may now be my favorite Rolling Stones song of all time. But in a strange paradox, the Keith Richards track “Coming Down Again” was the one that actually stuck with me the most. It could be the fact that this song (as you can guess by the title) has the distinct feeling of someone or something falling apart. And if 2020 had any kind of palpable feeling, it was of things falling apart. There are many moments in “Coming Down Again” that could be praised: the cooly tinkling opening piano bars with the bass dancing right after it; Keith’s stretching and withdrawn vocals on the verses; Charlie’s drums stumbling in at about 0:56. But the one that jumps out every time is when the song comes out of the chorus and back into the verse at 2:24 and Keith says, “Slipped my tongue, in someone else’s pie” and then the wah-wah guitar warbles and seems to echo out into space for eternity, even if it's only a matter of one or two seconds. The compound effect of the fact that whatever Keith is saying sounds like a disgusting double entendre, mixed with the remorse of his voice and the pull of the guitar grounds me back into the song each time I listen to it.
“Stone Me” by Margo Price from That’s How Rumors Get Started (2020)
Margo Price’s latest record was one of my favorites of the year. In fact, I said so in the August 26th edition of this newsletter, and so I’ve already detailed the merits of the album as a whole as well as its individual tracks. So, here, I want to call out my favorite moment on what I think is now my favorite song on the album. “Stone Me,” like a few songs on That’s How Rumors Get Started, has a Tom Petty meets Stevie Nicks vibe to it’s melody that makes the song immediately familiar to a listener even if you’ve never heard it or any of Margo Price’s work before. The song, as far as I can tell, is about a woman owning up to and admitting to her mistakes and not giving a damn about what the person on the receiving end of the lyrics thinks. And so I love the part in the chorus at about the one minute mark when Price sings “Call me a bitch / Then call me baby.” Price’s delivery of the word “bitch” is particularly inspired—she clips the word and stresses its hardness, but in doing so indicates how petty and useless the word is. Then in the next line, her voice turns soft, and seems to revel in the irony of the person she’s addressing then calling her “baby.” It’s one of those line pairings in a chorus that digs into your head (I can’t be sure, but I think this is called an “earworm”—you do some research and I’ll do some) and one that I heard all year long.
“Portland” by The Replacements from the Don’t Tell a Soul reissue (1989/2008)
The Replacements are one of my all-time favorite bands. When their oral history, Trouble Boys, came out back in 2016, I devoured it in the course of a weekend. But “Portland,” an outtake from their much-maligned 1989 album Don’t Tell a Soul, was a song I’d somehow missed until this year. But it’s everything you’d want from late-period Replacements: a growling, hungover-sounding Paul Westerberg vocal; jangly, reverby 1980s guitars; and a slightly polished country shuffle. It would be easy to say that my favorite portion of this song is its opening thirty seconds, when Westerberg starts the first verse with the lines, “Shared a cigarette for breakfast / shared an airplane ride for lunch / Sitting in between a ghost / and a walking bowl of punch.” But, what I love most about “Portland” is when the chorus first hits and Westerberg howls, “It’s too late to turn back, here we go.” Howl is perhaps too strong of a word; his vocal delivery is more like a pained cry, a call for help—all remorse, longing, and self-hate. But it’s one of Westerberg’s softer vocals and the way the guitars strum and the bass throbs reminds me for some reason of the tenderness of the Beatles’s “Two of Us” from Let it Be. It’s one of those moments, and one of those songs, where you feel the sense of something being over, or having gone wrong, or where a thing that once seemed retrievable is now firmly out of reach.
“They Don’t Know” by Kirsty MacColl from the They Don’t Know single (1979)
This entry is another one I wrote about in a newsletter earlier this year. It may be a cliche to say, but “They Don’t Know” is a gem of a song in the truest sense of the word: It is a shiny object that seems to have always existed, yet you can’t exactly picture it being made. The track is barely over three minutes long, is a piece of perfect pop, has a dreamy piano part, and features what has become one of my favorite guitar solos. At 1:36, basically halfway through the song, the guitar tears through the B section, taking the track to unbearable (in the best way) heights that can only last for about 16 seconds before dissolving back into the verse. Listening to a song like “They Don’t Know,” with a guitar solo like that, was a way to add a dose of effervescence when needed during a hard year.
“Can I Belive You” by Fleet Foxes from Shore (2020)
Fleet Foxes’s latest record Shore was met with widespread praise for its overall simplicity and generosity. That is, after two rather sprawling and challenging albums in Helplessness Blues and Crack-Up, Shore represented a more straightforward release. Helplessness Blues remains my favorite Fleet Foxes record, but overall I tend to like the band at their most straightforward. “Battery Kinzie” is my favorite song on Helplessness Blues, and that is one of their most rollicking and hard-charging rockers (if you can call any Fleet Foxes song a “rocker”). And “Can I Believe You” is a spiritual successor to “Battery Kinzie.” But “Can I Believe You” hits harder, especially when Pecknold enters the mix at 37 seconds and belts the track’s titular line while an impossibly clear electric guitar strums underneath his vocal. The energy of that moment is undeniable, and I wish I had a car so I could’ve driven to this song and belted along with Pecknold. But I will look forward to the inevitable car ad that features “Can I Believe You.”
Bonus Entries:
“Not the Same Anymore” by The Strokes from The New Abnormal (2020)
I wrote about The Strokes, at length, for the millionth time back in May. I wasn’t as high on The New Abnormal as many others. (I still think Comedown Machine is better.) But I can’t deny the moment at 59 seconds when “Not the Same Anymore” moves from the verse into the “chorus.” The Strokes’s trademark churning guitars hit like a well-timed movie cut and it’s the closest I’ve ever come to time traveling. It sounds like 2001 all over again; I’m younger and hearing the Strokes for the first time; and no other band sounds like this, no other band feels like this.
“Althea” by The Grateful Dead from Go to Heaven (1980)
This summer I watched the four-hour Grateful Dead documentary Long Strange Trip for the sixth time. I’ve basically watched it twice every year since it was released in 2017. After my most recent viewing, I realized that I didn’t know much about the song “Althea” from their 1980 album Go to Heaven. “Althea,” like most Dead songs, was a live favorite (the documentary has a memorable scene where live versions are compared). But as far as studio versions of Grateful Dead songs go, this is one of their best ones. There are multiple, wonderful guitar solos on “Althea,” but the best one begins at 3:30, and it was one of my favorite music moments in 2020.
“My Lady’s On Fire” by Ty Segall from Freedom’s Goblin (2018)
Speaking of the Grateful Dead, “My Lady’s On Fire” sounds like indie rocker Ty Segall’s ode to the band. If you listen to “My Lady’s on Fire” right after “Althea” you might just mistake Segall’s opening vocal delivery for Jerry Garcia. And, sure, I’m biased because I love the Grateful Dead, but I love the first 42 seconds of this song because of how well Segall managed to channel their overall vibe in less than a minute of music.
“The One” by The Lemon Twigs from Songs for the General Public (2020)
The Lemon Twigs are a weird and wonderful band from Long Island. For example, their 2018 album, Go to School can be described (as AllMusic did) as a “musical following the loose storyline of a chimp raised by human parents.” If you haven’t listened to any of their music yet, I highly recommend checking them out. The Lemon Twigs are experts at so many musical styles, but “The One” shows their mastery of 1970s power pop—more on the Raspberries side of the scale than Big Star. When the first chorus comes in at 23 seconds, the melody becomes both aching and driving in a way that doesn’t get old, no matter how many times you listen to it.
“Freedom” by Wham! from Make It Big (1984)
Wham!’s “Freedom” from 1984 shouldn’t be confused with George Michael’s “Freedom ’90,” which I think is the more well-known song. The 1984 version of “Freedom” is pure fun and lord knows we all needed to find that in our own ways throughout this year. “Freedom” is full of so many hooks and is such a musical song (see the smashing piano part at 3:12), but what I love most about this track is the way the guitar rises in the mix at the very end. The track ends with overlapping vocals accompanied by trumpet fanfare. However the mix balances enough so that at about 4:48 you can hear an astonishing, jangly, country-picked guitar part that you suddenly realize had been happening lower in the mix throughout the entire song. It’s a joyful part that will leave you smiling and then searching for and following throughout the track every time you listen to it again.
To all of you who read this far: thank you. If you want to listen to all of these songs in one place, I made a little Spotify playlist for you all. I don’t know why I put this list together, but it was something I wanted to do. And what’s the point of having a Substack if you can’t do whatever you want to do from time to time.
And to all of you who read along this year: THANK YOU! It’s been a lot of fun putting together this newsletter every week (well, almost every week). I’ve learned a lot, and it’s helped me to deepen my knowledge of the machinations that are shaping the industry I’ve worked in for the past 10 years. My sincere hope is that this newsletter has been useful for you and that maybe you’ve learned one or two things as well.
I’ll see you all in 2021.
Correction: An earlier version of this post misspelled Kirsty MacColl as Kirsty McColl.