Category Archives: Music

Dirty Work

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This is kind of a sprawling piece, reacting to about a month’s worth of popular music and film. Unfortunately, to finish the piece, I’ll need to discuss the films Highest 2 Lowest (now available on VOD) and One Battle After Another (now in theaters) in-depth – if you’re cautious about spoilers, I recommend both films highly and to come back later.

Last month, my wife convinced me to attend Japanese pop artist Haru Nemuri’s concert at the Chop Shop in Chicago, one of few U.S. tour dates celebrating her new album, ekkolaptómenos. Nemuri’s music defies easy genre description, but “noise pop” with influence from riot grrl and nu-metal song structure would summarize it quickly. Her show was energizing, built on creating the crowd she wanted by encouraging a lot of audience participation and coming down from the stage to sing with us. Nemuri thanked us for being a safe audience for anarchism against fascism and bigotry, a place where the audience celebrated vulnerability, calls to free Palestine, with knowledge that touring in the U.S. under Trump is, to say the least, difficult.

We are past the phase of “interesting times” and find ourselves in violent times, with the United States government escalating violence domestically, at our borders, across the ocean in places like Gaza, even (cw: political violence) online. Like the violence of school shootings or civilian violence against public figures, these are largely not new campaigns, but they are escalating under current leadership. Not all art, or even good art, must respond to this moment – though if a film like Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another or an album like Geese’s Getting Killed can do so, it does feel like a lightning bolt, doesn’t it?

While Getting Killed lacks One Battle After Another’s outwardly political theming, its wigged-out bombast is very much a companion. Life feels surreal, apocalyptic, absurd, and Cameron Winter’s wild vocals and abstract, absurd lyrics feel apropos as the soundtrack to painful nonsense. The arrangements themselves are upbeat, textured rock songs, sort of in that New York art rock T. Rex/Television space (you can find drummer Max Bassin citing both bands here) that stand out against the more patio-friendly rock of bands like Cindy Lee and Wednesday (both of whom I like a lot!)

Getting Killed manages to catch the zeitgeist of a freaked out world by giving it an escapism that isn’t so clean that it’s a processed, predigested foodstuff. I found Cameron Winter by accident four days before its release – I drove home from Chicago from that Haru Nemuri concert listening to new releases, and Winter’s (also great, more acoustic) solo album Heavy Metal happened to be the twelfth or thirteenth album in the lineup. After ten or so disappointments in a row, Heavy Metal shocked the system by being something new, a casual, intimate songwriting with an astonishing vibrato and voice. Getting into Geese a few days later only to see “they have an album releasing tomorrow” was a funny surprise, and it’s been a rush to get into them alongside so many other people.

In contrast, Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl has failed to meet the moment and displays that she does not have the quality control she once had. I did try to listen to The Life of a Showgirl – I have to agree that it’s flat out bad, the low whisper-singing on the verses and the octave jumps into the choruses more often actively annoying than they are familiar vehicles for verses, even on supposed highlights “The Life of Ophelia” and “Opalite.” And, yeah, I think “Eldest Daughter,” “Actually Romantic,” “Wood,” and “CANCELLED!” are embarrassing songs for a woman my age to release. But I say “tried” to listen to this album because so often, it’s just flat out boring music, and any distraction from the dog asking to go out and pee to a Discord ping is easy to pursue to escape listening carefully. Unlike many Swift agnostics, I think she’s had quality control issues as far back as 1989 – I’d happily drop the back half of that album. This is the first time where I can’t find anything as good as “The Tortured Poet’s Department” or “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart” to highlight*. She only hit this new Drake-like insistence on releasing absolutely every scrap with Lover and the Taylor’s Version saga.

*i can at least be nice enough to say “ruin the friendship” caught my ear, but i can’t say i remember it after listening two or three times either

Someone asked for what reason Swift decided to write The Life of a Showgirl’s songs about fame, sex, high school, and mean girl shit when she frankly sounds so bored by it. There is, as made evident by her contemporary artists, more than enough to write songs about. I actually tend more toward Grace Spelman’s take, which is that writing about the peak of fame, exhaustion at touring, and being alienated from reality is a great subject for songs, but Swift’s approach lacks that personal touch. Instead, people are forced to project onto these vapid, self-annihilating songs as a derailment. Swift has been the subject of a lot of projection about her politics for years now, with her fairly limited political statements and her billionaire status. Suffice it to say I find it somewhat unproductive to care about what someone who doesn’t share their politics believes in private when they’re flying their private jet to go to the 7-11 or writing odes to reviling cancel culture.

The “bigger issue” I’ve seen proposed most consistently is that these songs lack any creative energy or mission – they feel like they were released to propagate the Taylor Swift machine. Swift continues to chase craven marketing stunts and alternate editions with exclusive tracks (the most recent count I saw put it at 32?) to up the price of participation in her album cycle from your monthly streaming subscription. Promotional materials for the album utilize AI generated imagery, and I complained enough on The Horizon Line about the way The Release Party of a Showgirl screwed up the theatrical rollout of new films. A recent Defector slam, Kelsey McKinney’s “No Good Art Comes From Greed,” quotes Dostoevesky to justify linking all of The Life of a Showgirl’s poor lyrics to her mercantile assembly line approach to releasing new music. McKinney declares “To create something, anything, good, takes time and desire,” that making art fast and for survival is going to lead to bad art.

This same idea is espoused in Spike Lee’s newest joint Highest 2 Lowest by Denzel Washington’s protagonist David King. A remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, Lee transposes the story to the record industry, David King replacing Toshiro Mifune’s shoe magnate with a mega-producer executive, Quincy Jones meets Jay-Z, mogul with an ear for hits. His wife (Ilfenesh Hadera) laments that King no longer seems enthusiastic about the music business, saying that when he listened to something good, he used to grin ear to ear while explaining why his was late to their dates. King seeks to buy back his record label Stackin’ Hits before it can be sold off to conglomerate ownership. He does this through a gambit of debt and promises,which are put in peril when he gets a ransom call from a kidnapper who claims to have his teenage (?) son. The film’s teaser trailer largely consists of a monologue King gives about the pressures that stack on star musicians before concluding on the sentence “All money ain’t good money.”

While many of the broad beats are the same as the Kurosawa film, Lee has altered the story, especially in the second half. If you haven’t, it’s worth seeing Highest 2 Lowest for yourself. The film is not perfect, certainly not as great as Kurosawa’s masterpiece, but it’s an exciting ride with an electric Denzel Washington performance, maybe my favorite performance of the year so far. In order to continue this piece, I need to discuss the film’s ending in depth – spoilers after the jump here until after the embed of “Trunks.”

I’m going to run down a synopsis of the back half, not because I assume you haven’t seen it if you’re reading this, but because I’ve interpreted the ending somewhat differently from other audience members. When King goes on a walk after the rescue of his chauffeur Paul’s (Jeffrey Wright) son (mistaken for King’s) and the loss of the ransom money, he puts on a playlist of songs by artists who’ve approached him for a record deal. He hears “Trunks” by an artist named Yung Felon (A$AP Rocky), and grooves smiling to it for about twenty seconds before remembering lyrics from the song Wright’s son overheard while captured, and believes he recognizes Felon as the kidnapper’s voice. He and Paul decide to take things into their own hands. King finds Yung Felon recording another song, “Both Eyes Closed,” and gives him advice on how to improve the track with some adlibs and stronger lyrics – after a back-and-forth about how it’s too late to give artistic feedback now, King and Paul apprehend Yung Felon, though Paul is blinded in one eye.

Yung Felon puts in a guilty plea deal, conditional on a conversation with King – this is a mirror to the end of High and Low, a last request as the kidnapper has received a death sentence after multiple murders. Before this conversation, we see a music video for “Trunks,” Yung Felon still in his orange jumpsuit, women twerking around him, and cuts to David King grinning and dancing joyfully. It cuts hard into the conversation – Felon proposes a record deal at Stackin’ Hits, saying that a collaboration between the now-valorized King and the man who took his ransom would be the biggest hit in the world. King informs him he’s no longer at Stackin’ Hits, looking to start something new – Felon insults him and asks why on earth he’d pursue “focusing on the music, when what’s more important than the money?” King rejects him, saying “All money ain’t good money.” He then goes to watch an audition by a young woman his son has recommended to him, a Best Original Song Nominee type ballad titled (for no clear fictional reason) “Highest 2 Lowest,” and King mugs his way through really listening to it before giving the monologue from the teaser.

Unlike some other viewers, I take this ending to be at least somewhat morally complicated. The fact remains that King relishes enjoying Yung Felon for nobody, and he is effectively in the spotlight for his family at the presentation of “Highest 2 Lowest.” For my reading, the part of him that is reveling in the power of music is lit on fire by “Trunks” and Yung Felon in a way that isn’t performative, isn’t aspiring to respectability or a better nature, and the performance of listening to “Highest 2 Lowest” (including being kind to the sort of performative, corny joke like “My father was a rolling stone – pun intended!” that nobody her age can honestly find funny, no?) is with lips pursed and head tilted, shouting “come on!,” never showing that beautiful Denzel smile until the song has hit its enormous conclusion and certainly never showing that same, dazzling grin.

Biased, I know, I’m biased – I’m bumping “Trunks” and “Both Eyes Closed” in the car, two of Rocky’s best tracks in years, and I would probably just as soon never hear “Highest 2 Lowest” again. But this is a film that, if not intentionally, can be read to admit that sometimes, great art comes from bad people with cheap motivations. King can never, realistically, take Felon’s proposal seriously – it would destroy his family, his relationships, and in reality, even 2-4 year prison terms can end a rapper’s career with an inability to tour or stay in the zeitgeist, let alone the twenty five Felon’s staring down. To make art with his family, who act like characters from a Lifetime original movie (and, arguably, have the actors to match,) he will have to settle for ballads Obama would forgo putting on his summer playlist to make room for charli xcx’s 365.

I understand the impulse to defend the production of art as a sacred, virtuous act, that the tainting of the grove with impure motives or methods will somehow lead to a decayed work. Even beyond the usual “is this TV show my friend” conflation of consumption as activism, artists and critics alike are broke, with fewer jobs, less revenue, fewer investments, and near-zero support from the state to produce work. The fact is that for most of us, there is no real financial motivation to create, and we do it purely for the love of the process itself. Even without getting into anticonsumerism and full political stances, the rejection of selling out often comes from a self-enforced acceptance that the sky is only the limit for those who start with the silver spoon, and the rest of us are really in it for the practice of making itself.

That desire also ends up being a double-edged sword. Returning to One Battle After Another, its focus on left-wing revolutionaries has led to many championing it as an invigorating call to action, a Truly Revolutionary Movie for our times. Backlash followed, not just from right wing commentariat sensationalizing hypothetical violence, but from farther-left radicals describing the film as both antirevolutionary and full blown COINTELPRO infiltration of leftist movements. I would describe it as none of the above. While I do think it has valuable thoughts about how we treat our allies and the people we aim to serve, as well as a willingness to believe in the titular battle after another, it’s less about What We Should Do and more what we choose to do in violent times. (The next paragraphs, through to the Twitter embed, contain light spoilers for the first two acts of One Battle After Another.)

I’ll save more on the film for another time, as I don’t care to double the length of this piece, but there’s a continuity between One Battle After Another and Paul Thomas Anderson’s previous Thomas Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice. Both films follow stoned post-radicals trying to navigate fascists and reunite with their loved ones. Unlike Inherent Vice, One Battle After Another’s Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) was not just a hippie but an active revolutionary in his past life as Ghetto Pat, explosives expert for the French 75. But after the movement is compromised by Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn,) he’s effectively in exile raising his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) while others have continued the work without him

Bob’s infirmed himself with copious substance use, social isolation, and a likely failure to get therapy after the departure of Willa’s mother, the revolutionary-turned-rat Perfidia Beverly Hills. When Lockjaw comes back, Bob’s utterly unprepared for the moment, though he at least trained Willa enough to get her to go along with one of his ex-75 compatriots. We see him link up with his daughter’s karate Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio Del Toro,) one of the year’s best characters. He’s the semi-mystical leader of his own subversive movement protecting illegal immigrants from immigration enforcement, and his movement stands in contrast to the password-keeping, scrambling, seemingly unhelpful remnants of the French 75. Even Bob has to rely on a personal relationship to get any assistance – the 75 doesn’t even seem to offer general advice over the phone.

This dynamic, along with the portrayal of Perfidia, has led to some of the better conversation I’ve had about a “political” film in some time, with productive conversations about “opsec” and providing community care, about the film’s out-of-time timeliness, about how this film depicts and looks at black women, and thankfully quite a bit about the filmmaking itself. I’ve managed to dodge a lot of the worst bad faith criticism of the film in my personal interactions – people are pretty thoughtful in their praise and frustration! I think the film is still my least favorite of Anderson’s films since Magnolia, but it’s a Real Movie, one that rewards analysis without becoming a monolith of praise, one that is enriching and is enriched by thoughtfulness.

ocean waves, bob. ocean waves.

But I have watched some of the hyperbole about the film from the roadside, both positive and negative. It’s this same puritanical desire to have every work that is Genuine and About Something to be itself Pure and All-Good, and either defend the film from any criticism or diminish its very praiseworthy elements. I have a harder time begrudging this for One Battle After Another, which I consider a great and also enriching film, as compared to some objects of hyperbole from the past couple years. Still, this hyperbole helps no one – it, in fact, 

I hate to drag a specific film, but Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist got halfway there before derailing itself, and it merited this same sort of hyperbole and mission-like theater attendance. Sam Bodrojan’s “Don’t You Want Some Good Fucking Food?: On The Brutalist”  actually dislikes the film more than I do, but is instructive for how it collapses in on itself, especially in the back half. I laugh reading her describe the way the film hides from looking at architecture despite its subject, focused more on the creative process and the compromises of its characters than the beauty of what they make. I cherish the way she deconstructs the film’s non-statement on Israel, summoned in the second act and film’s finale but ultimately not coherent. But The Brutalist is a film I like more for having read Bodrojan’s words on the subject, not less. It got me to engage with the film’s themes and details in a way that I received in the theater but hadn’t fully interpreted – that processing with someone else’s ideas is one of art’s magic tricks.

Someday, my great paean to criticism itself as essential to enriching art, my argument that “critic-proof cinema” is hermetic and eventually lifeless compared to that which you can stick your hands in and muck about with and Elevate To Greatness, will be laid out for you to read. In the meantime, I’d like to argue that timeliness and political correctness can be great assets in art, but are not the sole purpose of art. Art exists to speak to our times – art exists to make us dance – art exists because someone very good at something wanted to make money on it. Even Taylor Swift has successfully done the latter, in my book – “Anti-Hero” is pure commercial pop drivel, sexy babies and monsters on the hill, and it also has an unforgettable, glossy, delightful chorus. Political, ideological, and motivational purity are not at the heart of “what makes good art.” Find whatever drives you to make something – just make a point of making it well.

P.S. Shortly after hitting publish on this piece, I read Madison area writer and film programmer James Kreul’s piece on One Battle After Another – it’s exactly the kind of criticism I’m praising at the end of this piece, and I think you should read it!

R.I.P. D’Angelo

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Three of the most perfect albums ever recorded. D’Angelo’s voice and instrumentation are so precise, so delectable, ethereal. He could croon like Al Green, float like Marvin Gaye, scream like James Brown. His harmonies tower like columns. But then that Native Tongues influence keeps his beats contemporary, hip-hop, not just stuck in the past but still somehow looking to the future. His songs are time travelers, back to the future, blasts from another history. Even the other neo-soul greats, Badu, Hill, The Roots, even the alt hip-hop D’Angelo claimed as inspiration, none of them could replicate the ease of his grooves or the stratospheric height of the call and response between his vocals.

Debut albums are often honed and distilled versions of years of previous work, a collection of years of songs that represent the artist coming into their identity and really solidifying their sound. But they rarely show the confidence D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar displays, the comfort in extended jams by a solo musician, the willingness to luxuriate in a sound rather than deliver every great idea in three minutes or less. D’Angelo cited Prince as a direct influence on his choice to sing and record all the instrumentation himself – I would argue Prince wasn’t this comfortable drifting off of pop for more than a song or two until much later in his career, saving most of his extended jams for his most uptempo songs.

Brown Sugar had hits and acclaim, and then writer’s block hit until D’Angelo’s first son was born in 1998. Voodoo makes its home in the same sort of extended jams as Brown Sugar, but the lyrics are more explicit, more about black life, more about sex. When we did Maintained Madness’s original Songs of the Decades tournament, it was “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” that we picked to represent D’Angelo’s work, a song with releases that cusp Y2K with a video too hot for polite company. The soul music had been honed into a mission, representing a celebration of life and an argument for R&B outside pop music, unvarnished and clear-eyed, music for adults. 

Usually, I put the limit around “working artists” around ten years between works. But someone like D’Angelo is the rare champion who you never count out. His struggles with addiction, fame, and hypersexualization extended the development of Black Messiah to nearly fifteen years after Voodoo solidified him as one of the most essential musicians alive. Songs from Black Messiah have existed in different forms since 2002, and they started leaking as early as 2007. Questlove joked in December 2011 that the album had become the “black version of Smile,” for which the (incredible) The Smile Sessions archival collection had released a couple months earlier.

When D’Angelo released Black Messiah in December 2014, it was in direct response to the Eric Garner and Michael Brown rulings, moved forward from a spring 2015 date out of political urgency. When the lyrics are social critique, they focus more on systemic oppression and the way cycles of activism and protest are controlled for and diminished – songs like “1000 Deaths” and “Charade” are written from a wider lens than the personal struggle of something like Voodoo’s “The Line.” But, just as essentially, D’Angelo never stops celebrating life and music, never reduces worth solely to contribution. A song like “Sugah Daddy” or “Betray My Heart” is nourishment. And then, that conclusion, “Another Life,” is earth-shattering stuff, a whole universe of sounds in one last jam session.

It’s been a little over ten years since Black Messiah, and I’d say there’s been no better album since. Raphael Saadiq claimed D’Angelo was working on a fourth – I’m sure whatever does exist will be released, maybe completed by collaborators like Questlove and Q-Tip. Two of his three children are adults – he never married. His privacy was essential to his process, and I’m unsurprised he didn’t share his illness, but the sudden nature of this loss is a deep wound. I loved imagining him tooling around surprise club appearances, seeing friends with new ideas, an eternal tinkerer who’d share another masterpiece when it was ready to see. The way people describe Bowie, Lynch and Prince as people they imagined were eternal, D’Angelo is a man out of time – I cannot be grateful enough for his gifts.

GOOD KID MAAD CITY

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good kid, m.A.A.d. City
Kendrick Lamar
2012

I wrote about good kid, m.A.A.d. city back in 2013 on my old blogspot – I gave it a 4/5, and the details beyond that are lost to time. Instead, what I remember is the first time my brother put Kendrick Lamar on in the car, playing “m.A.A.d. city” and “Swimming Pools (Drank)” for me, to which I said, “Jesus Christ, this guy has the worst voice I’ve ever heard, turn this shit off!” In the twelve years since, Kendrick hasn’t stopped doing voices and making silly noises – if anything, he became one of the first to break out of the very 00s conception of “great rap” as smooth, clean, always sounding cool and in-character with his willingness to scream, gasp, try on accents, use voice filters, and so on. I still think it was probably a bad first impression.

Kendrick’s rapping over a collection of great beats, largely by producers who hadn’t yet released a more iconic beat than the one which shows up on GKMC. He veers between beats which emphasize a jazzy, soulful vibe (like on “Sherane” or “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst”), beats which capture the more recent trap-adjacent gang beats (like “Backseat Freestyle” or “m.A.A.d. city,”) and beats which lean into pop production (like “Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe” and “Swimming Pools (Drank).” He’s synthesizing twenty years of history in an album and only introducing explicit nostalgia once or twice – nothing hits harder than the almost parodic beat switch on “m.A.A.d. city,” a full-blown g-funk pastiche that highlights how much he’s avoided that exact sound while telling this Compton gang story.

GKMC occupies an interesting space in Kendrick’s discography – it’s his first unquestioned masterpiece, an album that has only grown in esteem since its release, and yet it’s also been overshadowed by his follow-up To Pimp A Butterfly, pretty inarguably the most acclaimed rap album of the 2010s. That album is Kendrick’s great poetic project, centered on a spoken word poem eventually placed in conversation with archival recordings of Tupac. He’d win the Pulitzer for the next album, DAMN., which balances ambitious structural poetry and intense political commentary with radio friendly pop.

By contrast, GKMC is much more cinematic in its structure. It relies heavily on skits which tell a pretty clear narrative story, albeit a nonlinear one, about a young Kendrick going out with gang-affiliated friends and getting involved in gang violence. After the narrative concludes on “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst,” there’s a coda in “Real” and a sort of pop credits song in “Compton.” The album has a few explicit story songs – two of the first are “Sherane A.K.A. Master Splinter’s Daughter” and “The Art of Peer Pressure,” which highlight the album’s ability to use specificity rather than the abstract to bring forward thematic depth. This is hardly new, but there are times the album is trying to gesture at the universal or existential, and these moments often grab less than just the story of Kendrick meeting a girl.

Almost nobody in rap has a more detailed collection of Genius pages than Kendrick Lamar, so I won’t do the work of dissecting the thematic range of this album. To be honest, that also isn’t a huge part of the album’s appeal to me. Kendrick has ascended to a top shelf rapper with GKMC, but compared to where he’s heading, he still too often gets caught up in showing off, making refrains of wordy, somewhat obvious images. The criticisms of Kendrick as self-appointed martyr have to start here, at least by the verse ending line “I was straight tweakin’, the next weekend we broke even/I made allegiance that made a promise to see you bleedin’/You know the reasons, but still I’ll never know my life/Kendrick a.k.a. “Compton’s Human Sacrifice,” on “m.A.A.d. City” – but they should probably start earlier, too. At some level, Kendrick doesn’t have his balance of subtext down yet, and focusing too much on this album’s thematic depth has always set it at odds with how I think it’s best enjoyed.

Kendrick Lamar at Bonnaroo, 2013

The fact is that no matter how wordy the choruses get to be, he has already mastered the sonics of lyricism. His choice of words on paper is occasionally precocious – but in the ear, it flows so smoothly. He creates rhythms and grooves in the flow other rappers can’t come close to matching. This is the masterstroke of fan favorite “Money Trees,” which is simultaneously a recap of the four previous tracks, a song which skates through all their thematic concerns with confidence, and yet never feels redundant or overstuffed because it’s just pure pleasure. He’s playful on this song without having to lean into a stunt or high concept, and while the high concept of a song like “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” obviously captures the critical opinion, there’s a reason a song like this became such a fan favorite.

Now. That’s not to say I don’t love “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst.” This song combines every strength Kendrick’s taken advantage of throughout the album. The first half of the song uses the specificity of story songs to bring out an incredibly well-observed series of grievances and reflections. Three verses from three perspectives reflect on the battle between wanting to be taken seriously and remembered vs. the insecurity and threat being captured offers. Maybe none are better than Keisha’s sister’s verse, where she lays into Kendrick for the judgmental, inexperienced verses of his mixtape/studio debut section.80, frustrated with Kendrick trying to profit off her late sister’s life and projecting his own judgments on her. Kendrick reuses that structure on “Reincarnated” on GNX, Kendrick’s newest album and maybe his most purely pleasurable album thus far. “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” has two beats that are as strong as any on the album, and these stories continue to offer the same control of voice that keeps Kendrick’s verses sonically textured and rhythmically complex. It is, without much contest, the most ambitious song on the album, and it shines.

Kendrick has remained rap’s greatest storyteller, both on and off the mic. His victory in the war on Drake came from his ability to control the narrative, even as people rightfully question his willingness to continue to work with abusive men as credibly dangerous. He’s walked this narrative of the rap poet laureate along the way, but for many people, what he lost after good kid maad city was his ability to just also make fun, accessible music, writing more for critics and intellectuals than for the streets he purports to write about. I feel like GNX is a full circle moment for that reason, eschewing the cinematic storytelling of good kid maad city and focusing fully on delivering great songs, some of them just silly and fun, some of them more emotionally resonant. I love Pulitzer Prize Winner Kendrick Lamar, but I can’t imagine fans of this album aren’t glad it finally feels like he’s home again.

KEY TRACKS: “Money Trees,” “m.A.A.d. city,” “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst”
CATALOG CHOICE: To Pimp a Butterfly, GNX
NEXT STOP: Alligator Bites Never Heal, Doechii
AFTER THAT: The ArchAndroid, Janelle Monae

THE BLACK PARADE

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THE BLACK PARADE
My Chemical Romance
2006

Maybe the second “new” album I actually listened to by my own choice (after Green Day’s American Idiot a couple years prior,) The Black Parade appealed directly to my classic rock-ist sensibilities, to my nerdy teenage angst, and to my taste in the women who also liked the album. At the time of release, critics quickly compared it to the bombast and pop art classicism of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I liked that as a dork who thought The Beatles were the greatest band in the world and who kept Queen’s Greatest Hits compilation in the rotation for four straight years of high school.

But, to be honest, I’m not sure that comparison actually means anything other than “Welcome to the Black Parade” being anthemic and dramatizing the parade. It’s not that these bands aren’t part of My Chemical Romance’s DNA – if anything, their most Beatles-y song is “I’m Not Okay (I Promise,)” a mall goth perversion of “She Loves You” that steals the “Yeah, yeah, yeahs” for its own chorus. The melodic guitar solos of Ray Toro certainly sometimes bear comparison to Brian May’s for Queen, especially on songs like “I Don’t Love You” and “Dead!” Anyone who was claiming “rock was dead” in the 2000s just didn’t like the aesthetics, because the musicianship was obviously still carried forward.

But those comparisons are, based on my own teen self, an attempt to separate My Chemical Romance out of the pop emo they came from, to elevate them out of their subculture. The Black Parade album is, for the most part, a sibling to Fueled by Ramen’s roster, just as glossy and carefully written, just as poppy and pleasant. A song like “This Is How I Disappear” is just a perfect pop song, harmonic and huge, danceable and soaring in the chorus. These songs musically slip perfectly into emo night alongside Paramore, Fall Out Boy, and Panic! At The Disco songs of this era.

But unlike those songs, Gerard Way has a project, and that project is grief. This album’s lyrical content and vocal delivery are what separate the ambition of The Black Parade, generally understood as a rock opera (complete with two almost-showtunes in “The End” and “Mama”) about a dying man looking at his life and disease. But it’s a messy one, not nearly as plotty as rock operas like Tommy or The Wall, and the songs are allowed to operate mostly independently. Again, this feels like an overemphasis on appeals to classic rock authority rather than allowing it to exist as a more modern concept album, just a collection of meditations on a theme. The teen fans of message boards and Tumblr accelerate this from another direction, the desire for lore and OCs as sources for fanart. To be fair, “The Patient” as a character wasn’t invented by critics or fans, but by Way himself, who before My Chem was a comics writer. I think it’s telling, though, that his narrative structure here is so different from his comics work, not even so much episodic as epigraphic. 

Coming back to it as an adult, though, I’m just so taken with the musicianship. The band identified their time at the Paramour Mansion composing and recording the album as a troubled one both creatively and mentally, but you wouldn’t know it from the harmonic interplay throughout the album. A song like “House of Wolves” really highlights how the moment Bob Bryer’s drumming needs to be showier, everyone else is happy to pull back and serve the rhythm. A song like “The Sharpest Lives” feels like the entire band is one instrument, a sonic wall behind Way’s vocal. When Toro and Iero come together for the “Dead!” solo, it’s a firestarter, and over just as soon as it starts. This is a band that has come together to serve Way’s great songs, and everybody gets a chance to shine. While Danger Days was always a perfectly fun follow-up, this remains their peak of consistency and ambition. I’m glad they’re back touring again, but I almost would rather remember them here.

KEY TRACKS: “Welcome to the Black Parade,” “Sleep,” “Famous Last Words”
CATALOG CHOICE: Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge
NEXT STOP: From Under The Cork Tree, Fall Out Boy
AFTER THAT: Sam’s Town, The Killers

brat

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brat
Charli XCX
2024

Monoculture is fried. That’s rarely more apparent than looking at the Billboard Hot 100, where I’ve tracked Chappell Roan slowly clawing her way since May toward the top 10, which has for weeks now been a few songs I’ve heard a lot (“Not Like Us”, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” and “Please Please Please”, “Birds of a Feather”) and the “different America” country of Morgan Wallen, Benson Boone and Teddy Swims. There’s a Hozier song, “Too Sweet,” that’s been lodged there for weeks, and I’ve had conversations joking about Hozier that never mention it (it’s pretty good!) Songs by major artists like Cardi B, Doja Cat, and Travis Scott seem to hide on the charts for months without me ever knowing they exist.

The friends I have who do keep up with new releases are largely hooked on Chappell Roan, Four Tet, or Charli XCX’s new album brat, the last of which has so far peaked outside the top 40 with the Lorde remix of “Girl, so confusing.” It’s not bizarre that Charli XCX isn’t a chart-topper – it’s actually incredibly impressive that her arena tour is selling out 70% of all tickets given her previous sales history. But “The Algorithm” (or, more accurately, the four or five different algorithms) is feeding me new takes and memes on brat daily. It’s the biggest album since Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. if you’re on My Internet.

Part of that is that I’m queer. Charli’s association with hyperpop artists like SOPHIE, 100 gecs, and Rina Sawayama keeps Charli front of mind for queer pop music despite being straight herself. Among gay icons, she’s quite different from the more wholesome discopop yearning of Carly Rae Jepsen (straight,) the ethereal otherworldliness of Bjork (undefined), or the relatable fanfiction decoding of Taylor Swift (despite what the Gaylors will tell you, straight as far as we know.) Her music is about driving fast, doing party drugs, and having good sex – at least, when it’s not about the comedown.

Charli XCX, producer A.G. Cook, and fiance/collaborator George Daniel discuss album closer 365.

Executive producer A.G. Cook anchors a dance-forward collection of electronic beats alongside a host of collaborators, including Hudson Mohawke, Easyfun, Gesaffelstein, and Charli’s fiance George Daniel. Some of it is on the accessible, dancy side, like the city walk friendly “360” where Charli declares she’s “so Julia.” It’s unsurprising that “Apple” has gone viral on Tiktok given its bouncy vocals and the delightful trip to the airport in the hook. Other songs are down in the pit, like the driving beat of “Club classics” or the groove of “B2b.” brat is cohesive without being repetitive, ensuring something like the piano riff at the end of “Mean girls” or the harmonies on the hook of “Talk talk” create a texture for listening through the full album.

What makes brat so remarkable is its more emotional side – and I actually don’t think it’s consistent throughout the album. Songs like “Sympathy is a knife” and “I might say something stupid” match similar songs on Charli (2019) and how i’m feeling now, somewhat abstract about an emotional experience, expressing something that marries style and substance. This is a traditional pop vulnerability, as it expresses a relatable feeling with a very pointed form of artistry. “Sympathy is a knife” and the album closer “365” are probably the most obvious instant classics from the album on the more serious side.

It’s in the back half, opening up with “So I”, that Charli abandons abstraction entirely. Charli’s elegy for SOPHIE is incredibly direct about their relationship, emotionally vulnerable about how Charli actually wasn’t always an especially good friend, vulnerable about not wanting to sing the songs that survived. It maybe never gets more startling than on “I think about it all the time,” a bouncy, delightful melody very explicitly about Charli meeting her friends’ baby and questioning her career against opportunity for motherhood. This isn’t dressed up poetically, isn’t guarded in platitudes. It’s more direct than most people would be with their own therapist. The “Girl, so confusing” remix with Lorde defusing their “beef” and hearing Lorde just as directly address their relationship and her own battle with fame and anorexia exposes just how radical this style feels.

When people describe lyrics as “anecdotal,” they usually just mean that they describe an experience you can relate to – that story is still usually told using the rhetorical devices of storytelling, with entertaining jokes, clever rhymes, strong imagery. They do not usually just involve phrases like “She’s a radiant mother and he’s a beautiful father/And now they both know these things that I don’t” to end verses. It’s beyond conversational, because if you had a conversation with someone this unguarded you’d usually be uncomfortable. This kind of radical transparency isn’t 100% new, especially as you dig into album-oriented artists’ deep cuts. But even within the context of a great pop album like brat, it feels revolutionary. If brat is an all-timer (it’s been a month, folks – I’m not ready to commit to that yet!) it’ll be one that marks transition into an authenticity you can’t mistake for another submission from the tortured poet’s department.

KEY TRACKS: “Sympathy is a Knife,” “Girl, so confusing,” “I think about it all the time,” “365”
VERSION: the three more songs so it’s not version – the three songs are all really good!
CATALOG CHOICE: Vroom Vroom, Charli
NEXT STOP: 1000 gecs, 100 gecs
AFTER THAT: Chris, Christine and the Queens

MACK THE KNIFE – ELLA IN BERLIN

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MACK THE KNIFE: ELLA IN BERLIN
Ella Fitzgerald
1960

I was not aware this album had a reputation when I snagged it out of the discount bin at Strictly Discs – I liked the idea of having some Ella on vinyl and it was cheap. I knew “Mack the Knife,” “Summertime,” “Too Darn Hot,” “How High The Moon.” I still have the $7.99 sticker on my record sleeve. I’d really only listened to the Cole Porter and George Gershwin songbook albums, and while I thought Ella was an undeniable singer, I can’t pretend I really knew her well.

The first side of this album fit into my prior understanding of Ella. It’s largely midtempo, with “The Lady is a Tramp” kicking into higher gear in the second half. There’s some humor, especially on “Lorelei” and “The Lady is a Tramp,” songs that get to show her bright, fun side. The ballad “The Man I Love” is gorgeous, plaintive, intense. “Summertime” is a song she’s always owned, but here she’s able to give it a more playful heat than her classic recording with Louis Armstrong, the full string and brass section giving it a little too much ornamentation. Her Berlin rendition is more seductive, deeper until it’s higher, and the Paul Smith Quartet is light on their feet in adding improvised little flourishes rather than full breaks.

It’s side two that set my brain on fire, though. From the very beginning of “Too Darn Hot,” games with the audience start happening. She’s playing with the tempo and tone to have the kind of fun she’d never be allowed in the studio with a full orchestration. By the time she hits the first “Kinsey Report,” the band’s hot and they’re not interested in buttoning up again, hitting the interludes between songs with games that make her laugh. She starts growling, moaning, joking. They deliver the last song Ella knows on the set, “Lorelei,” with a relatively straight face, but it’s still hotter than the first side.

This album is most recognized for the next recording, the titular “Mack the Knife.” Ella opens the song by admitting she’s never sung it before and doesn’t really know the words. She changes the first line and never gets perfectly back on track. You can hear her laugh on “Sunday morning.” But then you hit “Oh, what’s the next chorus?” and she doesn’t ever even try to come back. It’s delightful to hear her simultaneously not know the song, make up something that fits the meter, and make it sound absolutely gorgeous. She jokes, “Oh, and now Ella! And her fella! We’re making a wreck! What a wreck! Of Mack the Knife!” before hitting an unbelievable scat sequence. She’s turned the song into a cat toy, batting it around and always keeping the joke on the ridiculousness of knowing the music this damn well and not having the words.

But, honestly, that doesn’t hold a candle to what she does next to “How High The Moon.” She actually jokes that the words may be wrong, but she gets through all of them before the band kicks into hyperdrive. I’d never heard scatting like she does on “How High The Moon.” The band follows her into entirely different songs (“Tisket-A-Tasket,” “Heat Wave,” , including the part where she effectively just starts buzzing. I didn’t know at the time that this was just what her version of “How High The Moon” had sounded like for a decade, had been recorded that way before, down to “the words may be wrong” – I’m as goggle-eyed as the audience even now. I’m not going to pretend that I’m an expert on scat or jazz more broadly – what I know is I heard this and I felt it was the most perfect recording of music I’ve heard then or since. Music is where you find it, and, for me, the iconic Ella live album will always be the one I happened to pluck from the discount bin.

KEY TRACKS: “Summertime,” “Too Darn Hot,” “Mack the Knife,” “How High The Moon”
CATALOG CHOICE: Ella Fitzgerald Live at Mr. Kelly’s, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook
NEXT STOP: ‘Nuff Said!, Nina Simone
AFTER THAT: Odetta Sings Dylan

ANTI

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ANTI
Rihanna
2016

2016 is both the year the Rihanna superculture goes supernova and the last time she released new music. Riding the success of a cancelled 2015 album and Anti, Rihanna appears on Drake’s Views, Kanye’s The Life of Pablo, Future’s Hndrxx, Kendrick’s DAMN, and launches the Fenty Beauty company – that last one marks her transition from musician into billionaire (derogatory.)  She’s released three total songs since the official launch in 2018, two of them for the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever soundtrack and performed the Super Bowl Halftime Show and at the Oscars. That’s the only music she’s performed in that time – no surprise appearances, no concerts, no festivals.

I note all this because the supposed conceit behind Anti was to release an album she could perform as she aged out of her 20s. She looked back at songs from the start of her career as America’s Aphrodite and felt they had been burned out, that she wanted songs that would be “timeless,” an idea she modeled after “FourFiveSeconds” with Paul McCartney. That self-awareness and intention indicate an artist working to manage her own career, taking creative control, refusing to just go through the motions. I think in touring Anti, it’s possible she found that it wasn’t the form of the music itself that burned her out.

There are genres Rihanna’s never attempted before or since on Anti. Most of the album still reflects her current general sound, shaped by PartyNextDoor, Kanye collaborators Jeff Bhasker and James Fauntleroy, and trap producers like Hit-Boi, Boy-1da, and Mustard. But there’s also the Tame Impala cover of “Same Ol’ Mistakes,” the doo-wop love song “Love On The Brain,” the sliding dub of “Consideration.” While there is a clear decision to get off autopilot, this album does sound like “Bitch Better Have My Money” and “American Oxygen,” the singles from the first version of her eighth album.

Rihanna at the 2016 VMAs, winning the Video Vanguard award.

Some of these experiments work better than others. The ballad “Never Ending” gives her acoustic backing and positions her as a more mid-00s singer-songwriter, a song that uses strong harmonies to place her voice in a unique setting. It’s a more natural use of her voice than “Love On The Brain,” which sounds better in isolation than any placement next to proper doo-wop. But it’s also a bit of a facade – while Rihanna is credited as a writer on every song except “Same Ol’ Mistakes,” once you see the credits, you recognize “Never Ending” as a Dido song adjusted for Rihanna’s voice. It’s still lovely, and it’s a thoughtful way she could take a post-pop career.

This album wouldn’t be here without the Rihanna fastball pop, though. The first eight tracks (and bonus track “Sex With Me”) are as great as anything she’s done. “Needed Me” takes a chopped up Mustard beat and trades in venomous relationship control. There’s a killer quality to a lot of Anti, an understanding that Rihanna can convincingly take the dominant role in every relationship she describes. It’s maybe never more fun than in “Desperado,” a song which wields a nasty bass line under what actually might be one of the more “meet me in the middle” heartbreak songs on the album. Even a mealy-mouthed Drake verse can’t spoil “Work,” the album’s massive single, where Rihanna lets the vocalization hit the album’s most playful.

It feels so funny to be writing this and separating the names Drake, Mustard, Kendrick, Kanye, and Rihanna without drawing a battle map. Mustard had spent four years going through a contentious divorce and producing a couple songs a year before producing “Not Like Us.” When Rihanna was still making music, these men were all on top of the world. They were collaborating, and their collaborators were all collaborating behind the scenes, too. I know there are a million reasons 2016 feels a world away, but remember when the corniest thing about Drake was his interactions with Rihanna and Nicki Minaj? When Kanye’s big controversy was the dumbass “Famous” video? Knowing what we know now, maybe Rihanna didn’t just get burned out by the music itself. 

KEY TRACKS: “Kiss It Better,” “Desperado,” “Needed Me,” “Sex With Me”
CATALOG CHOICE: Good Girl Gone Bad, “Rude Boy”
NEXT STOP: Ctrl, SZA
AFTER THAT: Take Me Apart, Kelela

REIGN IN BLOOD

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REIGN IN BLOOD
Slayer
1986

Any amount of distraction or sonic interference is enough to frankly destroy Reign in Blood. Slayer’s breakthrough album does not function as background music. Rick Rubin’s mix works when you’re locked in, but any amount of distraction drowns out every 220 bpm riff with Lombardo’s blast beat drums and Araya’s shouted vocal. It becomes noise. All the texture will drop away. When I started relistening to write this, I thought, “Oh, this isn’t very good anymore.” Then I put the laptop away for a minute and could hear it again.

I don’t actually like Rubin’s mix, but I’ve lived my whole life in its aftermath. Reign in Blood is credited as being the crossover moment between thrash and death metal, signaling the point at which metalheads could retreat into a deeper subculture while Metallica gravitated away toward more melodic hard rock. I’m not a person who cares too much about subgenres, to be honest – I follow them only to the extent the artists themselves discuss them, and music is usually more interesting at the borders anyway. What I can recognize is that this album was still deeply influential on the death metal and screamo I could never get into in high school, where drums and vocals drowned out the melodic instruments.

Every time I return to the source and give it my full attention, I can understand why. In a decade where the average metal song was between five and ten minutes long, Slayer doubled the tempo and still put twice as many musical ideas into two and a half minutes. The drum part is so forward in the mix because it creates continuity between all the very dramatic changes in riff and melody. Stop paying attention and it creates the effect of a twenty six minute song – keep your eye on the ball and the nine tracks become twenty.

The fact that some members of Slayer and Rick Rubin have turned out to be reactionary chuds over the years is only surprising to those in denial. While reading “Angel of Death’s” lyrics and controversy section on Wikipedia should be enough to convince you that they’re earnest about just depicting an evil man and not endorsing Joseph Mengele, it’s also revealing that they don’t really have anything to say about him. Throughout the album and its (excellent) cover art, the satanic imagery, the descriptions of brutal ways to die, the absolutely braindead “Criminally Insane” lyrics – this is trolling, meant to create a cumulative effect. It’s theater, grand guignol building toward an epic finale.

Everything builds to that tenth song, “Raining Blood,” which overwhelms the rest of the album in terms of groove, brilliant riff songwriting, portentous storytelling. The opening rain effect and tom drum with the siren guitar – I mean, this is just the coolest shit in the world. The solos are the album’s most discordant and insane, and they fly over the album’s chunkiest straight-ahead speed. The two ways to listen to the album, for me, are in its entirety, front to back, or just to listen to that last song.

KEY TRACKS: “Piece by Piece,” “Jesus Saves,” “Criminally Insane” “Raining Blood”
NEXT STOP: Arise, Sepultura
AFTER THAT: Dead Rituals, Swamp Witch

ROOM25

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ROOM25
Noname
2018

Fandom is hard in the online era, man. Noname is someone I so badly want to root for, who does so much cool shit, who also thinks J Cole is corny and who is vocal about injustice in America, whose raps are so funny and so thoughtful ninety percent of the time. Her Noname Book Club is a genuinely really cool project! That ten percent where she gives Jay Electronica a supremely antisemitic Black Isrealite verse on Sundial, though. Noname is a gaze into the mirror of being perpetually annoying online, and while I’m not sure I’d like her half as much if I didn’t follow her on Twitter before she deleted, I also know I wouldn’t sigh as hard at the fact that I love this album.

Room25 is the debut album, and it came from a place of transition into real adulthood. She’d moved from Chicago to L.A. – she’d started having sex – she needed to pay rent. That sense of obligation maybe helps birth its tossed-off introduction, a 1:35 song fragment that feels like it started halfway through. “Self” is maybe the best the album ever gets, though – the freeflow pleasure she has on “Mister money man, Mister every day he got me/Mister weather me down, Mister me love, Mister Miyagi,” is one of the greatest rap moments of the last decade. It has that same sticky teeth feeling of the best beats by The Neptunes, the best Big Willie Style hooks, the best playground songs.

But, then again, maybe the best moment is “Blaxploitation,” which combines jokes about bad feminism and exhaustion with trying to have good politics and darker outrage about the state of the world. In terms of the album’s mission statement, “Prayer Song” and “Montego Bae” are maybe the most representative combinations of sex and politics, some lines phenomenal (“If you wanna help me to put me inside the cuffs/Put the cigarette in my back/Keep the hospitals overrun-run-run-run, Chicken Little/How my city gonna run off shits and giggles?”) and others corny (“America the great, this grateful dead and life for me/Apple pie on Sunday morning, obesity and heart disease”.)

Not being able to put my finger down is kind of the appeal of Room25. At its best, it’s one of the absolute great rap albums of the 2010s and an all-time great rap debut. There’s nothing quite like it and I’m not sure you could regulate it on purpose. That 10%, though.

KEY TRACKS: “Self,” “Prayer Song,” “Montego Bae”
CATALOG CHOICE: Telefone, “Song 32,” “Song 33”
NEXT STOP: Everything’s Fine, Jean Grae and Quelle Chris
AFTER THAT: Ho, Why Is You Here?, Flo Milli

RUBBER SOUL

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RUBBER SOUL
The Beatles
1965

Every kind of Beatles fan is annoying. Sgt. Pepper’s fans are annoying and can’t fathom thinking “She’s Leaving Home” repetitive and saccharine. Fans of McCartney’s solo work are annoying in that they’ll do everything in their power to avoid talking about “Eleanor Rigby” again so they’ll fill your feed with “Monkberry Moon Delight” and “Temporary Secretary.” Fans of the early years will pretend that the covers of “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” aren’t fucking awful. Hearing “Imagine” in a public space is grounds for tribunal against whoever put it on the playlist.

I’m all of these fans. I’ve been all of these fans all my life. When The Beatles would come up when I was in high school, eyes would turn to me. I was neurotic about them – they meant a lot to me. I’d stay up on school nights reading the Wikipedia page on every track from The White Album. I’d teach myself to sing every word of Please Please Me and Abbey Road. I wrote an entire scene for my dramatic show choir in Beatles song titles. I’d send lyrics to girls I’d never be brave enough to ask out. I was, to put it kindly, insufferable to the point of meriting euthanasia.

The album that’s always been right toward the top of my list is Rubber Soul, the first album they made without already having tour gigs lined up. The willingness to imagine music that might be hard to recreate live sets them on their pop art odyssey throughout the rest of the decade. This is the first of their albums where I’d argue the arrangements and harmonies occupy such a full sonic range that they feel swaddling. The quilted maximalism sounds so different from the jangly rock band they’d been in the studio for the three years prior, an arms race kicked off by The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and amped up by Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys.

The Beatles members (from left) John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney and George Harrison on the terrace of the Hotel Duomo. Milan, 24 June 1965.

Many of Paul’s best basslines can be found on Rubber Soul, from his forward melodic contribution to “Michelle” to the perfect harmonic underpinning of “Nowhere Man.” Ringo’s drumming is as keyed in and unshowy as he always manages to be. In general, the album offers few of the showier instrumental interludes of their cited highlights – there’s no “Taxman” or “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” guitar solo, no “The End” or “A Day in the Life” drum fill extravaganza. Rubber Soul is led by its vocal harmonies, dominated by the interplay between voices.

I’d argue that’s largely because the majority of the lyrics continue in Help!’s trajectory, getting more and more anecdotal and folksy, touching on more mature themes than the silly love songs they came up singing. I’m not going to pretend that these lyrics are especially intricate – the storytelling on “Girl” or “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” are major steps forward for The Beatles’ discography, but this is the year after Nina Simone has released “Mississippi Goddam,” the year Bob Dylan launches stratospheric between Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home, the year Otis Redding releases the original version of “Respect.” But there are some evocative images that match the musicality – “Nowhere Man” is evocative and sad without identifying a clear subject, and its soaring guitar part captures that ennui. “I’m Looking Through You” identifies the nothing that it takes for people to grow apart more directly, turning this complex feeling into a lovely pop song. 

Rubber Soul is the firing gun for album oriented rock. Rubber Soul is begot by listening to Bob Dylan and The Byrds, and incorporating that folk approach begets The Velvet Underground and Pet Sounds and Aftermath, which beget Queen and Led Zeppelin, which etc. etc. I’d argue album oriented rock simultaneously represents many of the most important advancements in recording equipment, pop cultural taste for artful arrangement, and the replacement of jazz as America’s dominant musical form, and I’d also argue it’s a morose trap for white scolds of all ages.

There is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I know I’ve grown out of rockism as The One Way. This album’s given me gifts beyond my taste. “In My Life” is not a complex sentiment – just a beautiful, sincere, evocative one. “I know I’ll often stop and think about them/In my life, I love you more.” A kindness that seems so admirable – to love and honor the people you’ve loved and lost, the people you’ve been and outgrown (even if they were insufferable,) while still choosing the future.

KEY TRACKS: “You Won’t See Me,” “Nowhere Man,” “In My Life”
CATALOG CHOICE: Abbey Road
NEXT STOP: Bringing It All Back Home, Bob Dylan
AFTER THAT: Odessey and Oracle, The Zombies