Favorite Music of 2024 pt 1
My annual disclaimer: This is a list. So it’s gonna do what lists do, namely: list things. Years ago, I resolved to try to do a better job of waving the proverbial flag for things I love rather than loudly critiquing/hating things I don’t. This is part of that resolution as well as just me trying to document what moves me musically in a calendar year.
Strap in. Get yourself the beverage of your choice. This may take awhile.
I wanna note, perhaps self-righteously, that for the top dozen-plus of these picks, I have either bought a physical copy of the album or paid to see them in concert (or both). I stream just like everyone else, but:
End of lecture/sermon/posturing!
You can listen along while you read, if you’d like, right here. It’s creeping up on 3 hours of music….
FIRST! THE ALBUMS I LOVED THAT CAME OUT IN 2024.
(Allegedly unranked. You’ll see songs I loved from each album in parentheses AND italics for your skimming convenience.)
Waxahatchee / Tigers Blood
Work responsibilities landed me on Temple University campus1 in the fall of 2018. We’d spend our days filming a variety of students and faculty who were using our company’s product at the time. Which left us with our nights unspoken for, during which we’d make sure we got some good food2 for dinner. One night I found my way over to The Fillmore to see Aussie guitar rock by Courtney Barnett with opening act Waxahatchee, who I’d heard of but had never heard.
Barnett was fantastic. Fiery. Noisy. Straight outta the garage. And Waxahatchee was…unmemorable. I left the show feeling like I didn’t need to do any follow-up listening. And I didn’t.
Until 2020, when she came out with her breakthrough Americana-tinged album, Saint Cloud. This one, with its country-esque leanings and Brad Cook3 production and newfound tone/voice, spoke to me. She (Waxahatchee is basically just a stage name for whatever music Katie Crutchfield creates) shed some of the dirge-y, sullenness of her earlier work and opened up. Not coincidentally, this was her first album written and recorded after getting sober. The clarity was there. Great lyrics came to the forefront, like:
Real love don’t follow a straight line / It breaks your neck / It builds you a delicate shrine
The instrumentation was straightforward—some acoustic guitars, some tremolo-ing electric guitars, a swell of organ, a chime of piano, unfussy drums—and deliberately unshowy. Like a lot of Brad Cook-produced work, the song sits at the center, unreliant on (no, fundamentally averse to) production smoke & mirrors. I loved it and even loved its expanded/deluxe edition, where she brought to light two utterly perfect covers—Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia” and Dolly’s “Light of a Clear Blue Morning”, the latter of which really sings true in light of Crutchfield’s recent experience with sobriety.
So…fast forward to 2024. Waxahatchee’s pre-release single, “Right Back To It” (featuring indie rock’s Dude of the Year, MJ Lenderman), comes out first and blows my mind, continuing to fulfill the artistic arc and promise of Saint Cloud. Could this next album really be as good as Saint Cloud? Could it?!?
Yes. Emphatic yes.
Here’s to second chances. I went to see Waxahatchee for the second time in my hometown of Salt Lake City with opening act Good Morning at The Depot. The room was filled—with people, yes, but also with energy and, I swear, support? In a way I don’t believe I’ve felt before, without a note even being played, the room gave off a vibe of….how do I put this….”Katie, we’ve got you!” Not just the pure adoration and devotion of a Taylor Swift concert or the deity worship of a Prince show. No, this was something else. Maybe tipping towards the parasocial….but it felt like we were all at a homecoming for a dear friend. Nevermind that Salt Lake was just another night on a long, long tour. In the room, it didn’t feel like that. When the band finally came out, they launched into Tigers Blood’s first track “3 Sisters.” The room swelled, an inter-human congregational version of the Grinch’s heart. When the drums kicked in, I found myself crying—not, like, bawling, but the sweet and fulfilling kind of tears when your heart overflows—which continued right into the second song. I can’t explain exactly why. The room + the songs + the moment all added up to something cosmic, I suppose. And my eyes reacted the only way they knew how.
(Right Back To It4, 365, 3 Sisters, Evil Spawn, Light of Clear Blue Morning)
Hurray for the Riff Raff / The Past Is Still Alive
I already wrote a bit about Hurray for the Riff Raff here, coincidentally not dissimilar to the Waxahatchee arc—an initial experience in which I concluded that “the hype machine is overactive on this one” and dismissed the artist too soon, only to later come around in a big way.
Musically, instrumentally, this album is right in my wheelhouse, produced—like Tigers Blood above—by Brad Cook and, thus, feeling very much alive and wild. You can almost feel the desert wind blow flecks of sand across your face, smell the sagebrush, taste the smoke of the locomotive. In an era when a lot of the most popular music is crafted wholly on laptops with 1’s and 0’s, it’s a relief to hear real people in rooms together making music like this. Earthy. Rich. Real.
And, lyrically, Segarra is on fire. Still able to draw blood with just a phrase, but also with a softness and compassion that ebbs and flows. They’re processing the past, trauma, grief, belonging, coming of age, poverty, queerness, addiction. In some ways, they give a travelogue—yes, geographically, but also emotionally and psychologically, politically, queerly—of America, from a point of view many of us (or at least I) don’t often hear from: a trans person.
To their credit, their trans experience is woven perfectly in, so rather than being the only story, it informs the story of Alynda Segarra’s personhood, whatever the official designation. To an outsider like me, their truth rings in lines like:
”I was born with a baby boy soul” (from “Snake Plant”)
”You’ll never know the way I miss Miss Jonathan / She was beaten in the street and then I never saw her again / She opened up my mind in the holes of her fishnet tights.” (from “Hawkmoon” about a trans mentor)
”Meet me down in the Castro, we'll pretend it's 1985 / Before we were a twinkle in our great-grandfather's eyes” (from “Colossus of Roads”)
”I always feel like a dirty kid / I usеd to eat out of the garbage / I know I should probably gеt over it / But somehow it feels I'm still in it” (from “Hourglass”)
But besides the way they impart their truth, testifying of what it’s like to be human in their skin, there’s also just some classic poetic outbursts, in the pseudo-poet5 mode of Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, bubbling with cinematic detail and rich language, with lines like:
”You told me your big secret on the FDR / I couldn't hear you over choppers and the buzzing cars” (from “Alibi”)
”Will wе go like the woolly mammoth? / Or the dеar dodo? / Gone like the Bachman's warbler / Disappeared like the melting snow
Little Mariana fruit bats / Or the bridled white-eye bird / Or will we keep on running /Like the sound of the buffalo herd?” (from “Buffalo”)
”And I was in love with my American footprint / Tracks of blood left out in the snow / Salt lick beacon, burnt by electrical fencing /Half moon rising, headlights down below” (from Ogallala)
I could go on forever. Just grateful for art that reaches into my heart for places I already knew, while also opening places unfamiliar to me. For art that’s brave enough to tell its stories—the sad, the happy, the big, the small, the unique—with….well…artfulness.
(I mentioned more than half of the songs from the album above…)
Father John Misty / Mahashmashana
Seems like it’s a year of reflection and the past informing the present. So we’ll start this blurb, like the previous two, with a throwback.
In 2018, I wrote the following about Father John Misty’s album God’s Favorite Customer. I’m sure you all vividly remember it, frequently quoting from it in prominent social situations. But, just in case, I’ll reprint it for reference:
—FJM and I? We’re the ultimate in hot/cold. I didn’t get into his early sad-guy acoustic J. Tillman stuff at all. But then I unreservedly loved his debut album as FJM, Fear Fun. And yet his next two albums did nothing for me. Well, “nothing” is putting it mildly. They actively turned me off6. The schtick, the meta-this/meta-that/ironi-whatever? It made me nauseous. So it was with zero expectation that, upon the recommendation of a trusted friend who knew my waning interest in the FJM persona, I checked out God’s Favorite Customer. And, I mean, the sarcasm and irony are still in there, but somehow this time...it’s different. Some great, great songs, for one. Maybe I’m just an Every Three Albums kind of guy?
Since then, FJM put out 2022’s Chloë and the Next 20th Century, an album that—true to the Every Three Albums pattern—didn’t resonate with me even a little bit. Ambitious (a concept album + using orchestral and big-band-ish touches) and not short on weirdness…you’d think I would’ve found my way. But I didn’t. It felt too self-satisfied and smarmy and even campy for me.
So, here we are, two years later, with FJM and I revisiting our tumultuous relationship and, guess what, I absolutely love Mahashmashana. I’m so predictable7. This one has some orchestras and self-satisfied smarm too! It’s indulgent8! It’s pompous! The title alone feels so….simultaneously douchey (rockstar embraces eastern philosophy9!) yet also…is he making fun of the rockstar embracing eastern philosophy? Or both?
I don’t know. Or care. I just really like it.
(Screamland, I Guess Time Makes Fools of Us All, Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose)
Cindy Lee / Diamond Jubilee
Hats off to Cindy Lee (the drag performance/songwriting identity of Patrick Flegel). If you’ve heard the backstory, go on and just listen to the record again. If you haven’t, the quick summary is: Diamond Jubilee was initially only released via a janky Geocities website. Not streaming anywhere. If you wanted to hear it, you had to download the WAV files from Lee’s website. People were BURNING THE WAV FILES TO CDS like it was the early 00’s. Eventually, you could listen to the version someone uploaded to YouTube. Even more eventually, the album became available on (non-burned, official) CD or vinyl. But still no streaming, to this day. And that—plus its eventual placement on the Polaris Music Prize shortlist and Pitchfork’s top 3 albums of 2024—is just the marketing side. Remarkable to have people talking about an album that’s so deliberately….unavailable. If it wasn’t good, they wouldn’t.
As for the music side, it’s a sprawling 32 songs clocking in at over 2 hours. And by “sprawling” I mean that one moment it has echoes of the ghosts of a second-tier 60’s girl group haunting a 00’s boys locker room (complete with the shower reverb!), another moment its sounds like an unacknowledged Ennio Morricone lovechild bastard scoring one of Quentin Tarantino’s old video rental store co-clerks’ homemade movie. Overall, it shows a love of buzzy lo-fi homemade bedroom chamber pop, in the tradition (but not fidelity) of Brian Wilson and Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. The Pitchfork review nailed it: “a foggy transmission from a rock ‘n roll netherworld with its own ghostly canon of beloved hits.” It has bits of psych-rock, bits of classic rock, plenty of garage, some anachronistic synths, spectral harmonies, sudden shifts like—as Pitchfork suggested—an AM radio dial being unexpectedly whirled. Plus lots of fantastic, nimble guitar playing.
I’ve found the best way to enjoy it, for me, is just to surrender and let Cindy Lee own the aux cord for a couple hours. Give in to KCLP (Cindy Lee pirate radio).
(Diamond Jubilee, Kingdom Come, Dracula, Flesh And Blood, Golden Microphone)
AS ALWAYS, SOME MADISON ARM REGULARS
Bonny Light Horseman / Keep Me On Your Mind/See Me Free
Until further notice, Anais Mitchell10 is in possession of the key to the city. She has earned it and then some.
We went to see BLH in Colorado last summer and it was a perfect reminder of the magic that can happen when three great musicians make magic together, no light show, no pyrotechnics, no backing tracks, no dancers. Just songs and soul (same with the album, much of it recorded live in a pub...so live in fact that you can hear the patrons now and then, and not, like, Frampton Comes Alive cheering attendees….just the regulars for that particular pub.)
(When I Was Younger, I Know You Know, Old Dutch, Keep Me on Your Mind)
Laura Marling / Patterns In Repeat
Laura Marling is this generation’s Joni Mitchell. I suppose I mean that stylistically and also because of the uniqueness of her sound and still, maybe most importantly, because she leaps Joni-like from traditional folkie to more ambitious song structures and ideas. But also because Marling comes across as WHOLLY & UNAPOLOGETICALLY unconcerned with and unimpressed by what her male contemporaries are doing. She has a story tell. Her way.
(Patterns, Child of Mine, No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can, and one of my favorite choruses ever on Caroline)
Alan Sparhawk / White Roses, My God
I already wrote a bit about how I came around to this strange and hypnotic expression of grief here. This one stands out for how spartan it is, both musically and lyrically, in comparison to some of the more lyrically-dense albums mentioned above (and below).
(Get Still, Can U Hear, Feel Something, Somebody Else’s Room, as well as his collaboration with Perfume Genius in which the two reimagine the Low classic Point of Disgust, worth noting that Sparhawk also lent Father John Misty his wall of noise for another of my favorite songs of the year, Screamland, AND! he has a great song out with Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross called Vaster Than Empires)
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings / Woodland
Reliable. Steady. Consistent.
Perhaps it’s unfair to throw such descriptors on an artist. It could diminish the actual effort and craft and sweat and tears that go into the brush-to-canvas creation of art, particularly art that has—thus far in their career—seemed to become instantly canonical in the folk/americana world. Welch & Rawlings have a gift for writing timeless new songs11 that feel as if they’ve always existed, that nod to the history of the genre while also feeling somehow fresh. They understand their roots and rejoice in their own leaves.
(Empty Trainload of Sky, Hashtag, North Country, The Bells and The Birds, What We Had)
The Smile / Wall of Eyes + Cutouts
What a drag it must be to be a member of Radiohead.
Their albums are, for the most part, incredible and legendary. A few of them are modern masterpieces, critically lauded and crowd-adored. And, still, every single guy12 in Radiohead, at different points13 of their career14, has talked15 about how difficult16 it is to make a "Radiohead album." How laborious and painful they are.
Which explains why Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood (read that Jonny Greenwood footnote17 again) feel so free in The Smile—no meticulous Radiohead brand to live up to, just making music without having the pressure of it being a "Radiohead record." Which of course sounds pretentious while also being true. The patented Radiohead Attention To Detail is both a curse and a blessing, a feature and a bug.
Look at the cadence of the last three Radiohead albums
2007 In Rainbows
2011 King of Limbs
2016 A Moon Shaped Pool
That’s 4-5 years between each album. And a blaring 8 years (and counting) since the most recent one.
Meanwhile, check out what Thom Yorke has been up to since the release of Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool.
2018 Suspiria soundtrack
2019 Anima (solo record)
2022 The Smile’s debut, A Light For Attracting Attention
2022 The Smile live album, Live at Montreux
2024 The Smile’s second album, Wall of Eyes
2024 solo soundtrack Confidenza
2024 The Smile’s third album Cutouts
That, my friends, is the sound of freedom, of stepping away from the shackles holding you back. That is Jonny Greenwood’s wish fulfilled: putting out albums twice as often.
I go back and forth.
My tabloid-fueled, drama-laden first theory: Jonny and Thom hate the other guys (unlikely, given that Colin is Jonny’s brother, but also LOOK AT OASIS!) or are at least are very, very tired of them.
Or, more likely…
…a massive part of the allure of The Smile is that Thom & Jonny can write all these new songs and go play them without the audience wondering why they’re not playing Radiohead classics like “Paranoid Android” or “Weird Fishes” or “Fake Plastic Trees.” They can go out and just play these The Smile songs without having to worry about filling the set with the crowdpleasers. They don’t have to deal with giant arenas and stadiums and the circus that is a full-scale Radiohead tour. Less of the big stadium tour trappings. Just the music on its own terms.
In 15-20 years, I don’t think a new listener would be able to sniff out the difference between late-era Radiohead and The Smile. Except that one might give off a whiff of relief.
(Don’t Get Me Started, You Know Me!, I Quit, Friend of a Friend)
Wow. That got really long, really fast. What can I say? I love writing about music. I have, like, DEEP THOUGHTS, MAN.
Stay tuned for pt. 2. Coming…whenever.
No, I did not see Marc Macon or Eddie Jones, though you can rest assured my eyes were peeled, just in case.
We were contractually obligated to eat a cheesesteak, which we did at Joe’s. It was very good. And I’m not interested in getting involved in the Best Cheesesteak In Philadelphia discourse. Have at it. All I know is that I ate a very good one.
We also got roast pork sandwiches at the famous John’s Roast Pork, which was also quite good, though my main memories of the sandwich are: we got them at closing time and thus had to eat outside and it was freezing and then, at some point, my coworker Chris quietly stood up, walked maybe 7 steps towards the road and emptied his stomach not-quietly.
The best food was actually a Mexican food joint, of all places. Irony being that I don’t remember the name and tried looking it up on a map, but couldn’t find it. Oh well, believe me when I say that this restaurant that I can’t name and you can’t ever go to was delicious.
Formerly of Megafaun. Works with Bon Iver, Hiss Golden Messenger, and more. Tragically a Lakers fan but otherwise a standup guy.
Ladies and gentlemen, my most-played song of 2024 according to Spotify’s record keeping. A few notes:
-I’m surprised it beat out all the Weezer songs I had to listen and re-listen to for our Blue Album/Pinkerton show.
-To be fair, the song came out in January, so it had the most time to accumulate listens.
-STILL, it’s really good and I still love it.
This is not a dig. I just know that Dylan has, on more than a few occasions, bristled at the idea that he was a “poet.”
It is worth mentioning that, in true Paul fashion, I have revisited these albums and, while they still wouldn’t make any of my ultra-prestigious End of Year lists each album boasts (emphasis, in FJM’s cocky case, on BOASTS) some songs worth hearing.
Speaking of predictable, did you know that the last four albums Father John Misty put out have come out on the same day as Kendrick Lamar albums. Purely by chance, particularly once you consider the fact that a couple of the Kendrick albums were surprise drops.
Only two songs clock in under 5 minutes. The longest one—the first song/title track, which, to these ears, owes some vibe debt to George Harrison’s “Isn’t It A Pity”—is nearly 10 minutes long.
Before this album, I usually gravitated to FJM’s poppier side, you know, 3-4 minute songs with good choruses and meme-able lyrics. But this album broke my will and suddenly I’m into the verbose lingerers.
As a Beatles fan, it must be said, I have an irrationally high tolerance for rockstars “discovering” eastern philosophy and the touchiness thereof.
What a run of artistic creation. A hot streak.
The original album Hadestown to Young Man In America to the Broadway (Tony award-winning) production of Hadestown to Bonny Light Horseman to Big Red Machine to her self-titled album…on a tear, just basically this kid in folkie form.
A playlist of my favorite Welch/Rawlings tunes (and some covers) that sneaks in just under 4 hours, el oh el.
Bassist Colin Greenwood:
It's quite psychologically draining sometimes, you know.
Drummer Phil Selway:
All of us are extremely competitive. We're kind of competitive with how we work on Radiohead stuff.
Guitarist Ed O’Brien
The thing is, it really did take us too long to get these recordings done. We've had our rough times in the studio in the past, but after four weeks most of the material would have been recorded. This time it seemed like it just goes on and on.
For a band like us, track listing is a massive, massive task. (Radiohead famously almost broke up over the song order on Kid A)
Probably our biggest criticism of ourselves is we think too much. We all went to university and have never thought there was anything wrong with thinking too much.
Thom in 2019 to the New York Times:
We’ve been playing together since we were 16, 17. You have telepathic vibes. You’ll never find that anywhere else. Obvious, but true. That familiarity is a good thing, and it can be a bad thing some days.
Guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood in 2021 to NME:
I’m the most impatient of everybody in Radiohead. I’ve always said I’d much rather the records were 90 per cent as good, but come out twice as often, or whatever the maths works out on that. I’ve always felt that, the closer to the finish, the smaller the changes are that anyone would notice.
I’m the most impatient of everybody in Radiohead. I’ve always said I’d much rather the records were 90 per cent as good, but come out twice as often, or whatever the maths works out on that. I’ve always felt that, the closer to the finish, the smaller the changes are that anyone would notice.