Yikes! I have several of these year-end things I want to do, but within mere hours they will become obsolete. Prepare for a flurry of semi-obsolete wrap-ups. -SL
I tried to listen to a lot of new music this year, both new as in “recently created” and new as in “new to me” (hello Steely Dan, sorry it took this long).
I spent the first month or two of the pandemic trying to find the punk/anarchist/antifascist music that would motivate me while lifiting weights. That’s on this Spotify playlist if you want to take a listen:
But it turns out that I mostly wanted to listen to female singer-songwriters once I calmed down a little bit. Here is my top 20 of 2020 playlist. I cheated a little and have a few songs from 2018 and 2019 on there, but nothing older (sorry, Steely Dan lovers). These are in “mixtape order” meaning that it’s not a ranked list, but I tried to put them in an order that would be fun to listen to. Most songs have a decidedly 2020/apocalyptic feel, but not all of them. Some I just like.
Bevedog’s Top 20 2020
And here’s the track-by-track rundown you didn’t know you needed:
The Greatest, Lana Del Rey: The most 2020 song of 2019.
Psychic Warfare, AJJ: A lot of good stuff on this folk-punk album including the more obvious pick, Mega Guillotine 2020.
Until Olympius Returns, The Mountain Goats: From Songs for Pierre Chuvin, the recording that Mountain Goats founder and frontman did on his own, on his legendary Panasonic tape recorder during the early weeks of the pandemic. They also released a studio album and what amounts to a live double album (or is it a double double album), but this is my favorite Mountan Goats recording of the year. It’s worth reading his liner notes on the Bandcamp site, which end “Hail the Panasonic! Hail the inscrutable engines of chance! Hail Cybele!”
The Swimming Pool Song, Laura Jane Grace: I love Laura Jane Grace’s voice and the lyrics here are very of this year.
Dylan Thomas, Better Oblivion Community Center: I listened to so much Phoebe Bridgers this year (see below), and a lot of it was recorded before 2020. This track from 2018 was my most-listened-to song on Spotify this year, so it gets a timeliness pass.
Joe Strummr, Four Fists: Another 2018 song, this is the theme music from Robert Evans’ podcast It Could Happen Here, which I plan to write about soon.
Delete Forever, Grimes: This is a cool, hummable song about heroin.
Souvenir, Boygenius: Another Phoebe Bridgers supergroup track from 2018. I liked this song so much I made up lyrics for a new verse based on a guy I used to know at the Magic: the Gathering shop I used to go to here.
Olympia, WA, Molly Tuttle: Molly is a bluegrass artist and great guitarist. I don’t care much for bluegrass, but I enjoy her voice and musicianship and there was a stretch this fall when I listened to this Rancid cover multiple times a day.
May the Odds Be In Your Favor, Meet Me @ the Altar: This song kind of isn’t in the same groove as the rest of the songs on this list but this pop-punk/emo trio is fun, and you gotta love a song that starts out “I’m doing my best!”
Everything’s Terrible, Danny Denial: I mean, the title says it all.
dominique, Ela Minus: Quarantine lyrics with music that reminded me how much I love I Am the World Trade Center’s 1998 album, The Tight Connection.
Wildfires, SAULT: Beautiful, heartbreaking, all too current music about the police murders of Black people.
Picture of My Dress, The Mountain Goats: From their more conventional studio release this year, Getting Into Knives. I recently pointed a friend of mine to The Mountain Goats’ This Year and she said that John Darnielle sings like he has a trumpet mute stuck in his throat. Here’s a nice country song where he sounds like he took the mute out.
Orange and Blue, Sara Jarosz: Speaking of Darnielle, this was his top streamed song on Spotify according to a post he made somewhere. It’s a beautiful song, and Russ Blackmar will particularly like it because it’s a love song about the Denver Broncos (it’s not).
The Steps, Haim: This song just bangs.
Helpless, Molly Tuttle: Another cover by Tuttle, I was listening to this song a lot in early August when our dog Luna suddenly got seriously sick and we had to have her euthanized. The song isn’t really about loss in that way, but it is about longing, and I certainly felt helpless at that time. Missing Luna every day.
Can’t Do Much, Waxahatchee: Waxahatchee is like The Mountain Goats, in that the “band” is one singer-songwriter—in this case Katie Crutchfield—with whatever other musicians they are working with right now. Another country song, I love the line, “My eyes roll around like dice on the felt .”
Mirrorball, Taylor Swift: Lush and catchy, this is one of those songs I play on repeat. I don’t know how much to take it to heart about Swift herself, but I love these lyrics: “And I'm still a believer, but I don't know why / I've never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try / I'm still on that trapeze /I'm still trying everything to keep you looking at me.”
I Know the End, Phoebe Bridgers: Bevedog’s artist of the year rounds out this playlist of 2020 with an explicitly apocalyptic tune that ends in screaming.
In addition to that playlist and those artists, I listened to a fair amount of stuff that didn’t really fit the mixtape model: metal, soundtrack music, jazz, experimental, synthwave, ambient, vaporwave. Incidentally, the Wikipedia entry on vaporwave is an example of why I love Wikipedia as a literary genre:
Vaporwave is a microgenre of electronic music, a visual art style, and an Internet meme that emerged in the early 2010s.[23] It is defined partly by its slowed-down, chopped and screwed samples of smooth jazz, elevator, R&B, and lounge music from the 1980s and 1990s. The surrounding subculture is sometimes associated with an ambiguous or satirical take on consumer capitalism and pop culture, and tends to be characterized by a nostalgic or surrealist engagement with the popular entertainment, technology and advertising of previous decades. Visually, it incorporates early Internet imagery, late 1990s web design, glitch art, anime, 3D-rendered objects, and cyberpunk tropes in its cover artwork and music videos.
Vaporwave originated as an ironic variant of chillwave, evolving from hypnagogic pop as well as similar retro-revivalist and post-Internet motifs that had become fashionable in underground digital music and art scenes of the era, such as Tumblr's seapunk.
Bevedog’s Artist of the Year: Phoebe Bridgers
It’s gotta suck to release your eagerly-awaited second album in June of 2020. Tour canceled, appearances curtailed or limited, etc. But Phoebe Bridgers made the best of it, promoting Punisher in her night-sky jammies from home (love her commitment to that bit) or venturing out in her skeleton costume. She seems to have a thing for uniforms like the Better Oblivion Community Center polos or the embroidered jackets for boygenius.
I think that '“live in the studio” is one of my favorite ways to hear music anyway. It strips away some of the studio nonsense but lacks some of the noise and sloppiness of concert performances. I compiled a partial playlist of her performances on YouTube this year. This playlist is really good and you should click that link.
They are all my favorites, but here’s her duet with Courtney Barnett on Gillian Welch’s Everything is Free. Barnett is also great and love her guitar playing & tone.
OK, that’s music for 2020! I’d love to hear your faves or your recommendations. I’m planning to write about podcasts and books in two more year-end posts.
Looking forward to digging into these later. My song of 2020 is this song from 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFo8d6x1IvU . very much a singer/songwriter, female voice kinda thing.