Each year, I compile a playlist of songs which were meaningful to me over the preceding 12 months. My 2022 Mix can be found below via Spotify.
Big Thief – “Change”: It sounds hyperbolic, but I truly believe Big Thief’s current output is close in scope to The Beatles at the height of their powers. It’s an immense privilege to live through and witness this band. Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is a landmark album in the way the White Album was, teeming with playfulness and curiosity and what is obviously a deep love the band members have for each other and the world around them, and it’s performed with so much life. I find the opener really touching, especially the words Adrianne Lenker iterates, of cosmic change: the sky, leaves, a butterfly; space, the deep sea, a suitcase. But in a beautiful sleight of hand, she shifts the scope from existential to personal (if these aren’t already the same thing?): “Still, what I find/Is you are always on my mind.”
Joyce Manor – “Christmas Card”: I saw Joyce Manor play Sled Island this year, a band I never thought I’d have the opportunity to watch live. Their sophomore album, Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired, is a long-time favourite, but I previously struggled to connect with their music beyond that record. Re-familiarizing myself with their catalog before the show, I realized their third album, Never Hungover Again, is one of the greatest emo/pop punk albums ever written, and I had dismissed it for years. I made up for that lost time, keeping this one on repeat all summer and into the fall. That’s largely because I keep wanting to hear those bombastic opening notes of “Christmas Card,” and its profound sense of defeat and loss. They’re the perfect emo lyrics: abstract enough that they can be applied to anyone’s situation, and specific enough that it feels like it couldn’t better apply to anyone than you. “Could never make it past that part/and now I guess we never will.” Tough to imagine anything that hits harder than that.
Bomb the Music Industry – “You Still Believe in Me?”: There are years in the past where I would have put The Beach Boys’ “You Still Believe in Me” on a list like this. I love this Jeff Rosenstock tribute for the same reason I love “Christmas Card.” It’s a complete abandon, going from zero to 60 in the opening seconds, performed and sung as if the band’s lives depend on it. I spent some time this year thinking about the public tragedy of Brian Wilson. It’s explored in the middling Love & Mercy, but I also spoke with a few people during the year about their experiences seeing Wilson in concert, sat at his piano like a marionette, which seems like an anxiety Rosenstock shares. But it bears repeating: this is the man who wrote “You Still Believe in Me,” which Rosenstock correctly identifies as being as close as popular music ever got to approximating the feeling of love, and nothing can ever take that away from him.
The Microphones – “The Moon”: I started to think seriously about getting a tattoo this year, a significant reversal of thought from growing up, when my parents’ influence convinced me tattoos were decisions which would always eventually lead to regret. But I spoke about a matching tattoo with my wife, and of a themed tattoo with a close friend, and I found myself moved by the idea of embedding these people and ideas into myself, a physical representation of feelings which have long been ingrained in my heart. And I thought about the elephant on the cover of The Microphones’ The Glow, Pt. 2 as the representation of the role of music in my inner life, given very few albums have shaped me in the way this one has for more than a decade. I imagine the words underneath the art: “Like the moon, my chest was full.” I got that first tattoo to match my wife’s in October, an experience which spilled over with emotion to a much greater degree than I anticipated, catching me off-guard. I find myself so torn by the contrasting extremes of my experience: the excruciating pain and anxiety against the overwhelming joy of seeing an intangible part of me made manifest.
The National – “Quiet Light”: I travelled for music once this year, going to the Edmonton Folk Music Festival for my first time to catch The National. It was my second time seeing them, after Sasquatch 2018, and my wife’s first. Their live sound is so massive it feels like an out-of-body experience, as the sound vibrates through you, an effect whose power couldn’t even be blunted by the awful live setup at Gallagher Park. But while I’ll always feel transported by, say, “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” the National work which I find impacting me most is increasingly I Am Easy to Find, a collection of songs far more meditative and insular than the band’s previous work. In some ways, listening to this while driving back to Calgary from the concert, mind swimming, was a more profound experience than the show itself.
Low – “Days Like These”: Speaking of transporting, full-body live music experiences: it felt as if the opening vocal melody of “Days Like These,” performed by Low at the #1 Legion in downtown Calgary, lifted me out of my body, the highest point of what ended up being my favourite show of the year. It is a wonder that three people can stand before the world and create sounds like this. I feel so fortunate to have had the opportunity to see them live, shortly before suspending they their touring due to Mimi Parker’s deteriorating health. She died Nov. 5.
Radiohead – “There There”: I thought of putting “Desert Island Disk” on this mix instead earlier in the year, but this Radiohead cut ended up feeling much more resonant. I think this is a pretty chalky take, but “There There” has got to be on the shortlist for Radiohead’s best song. It’s quite the mantra to repeat (“Just cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there”), as one futilely attempts to divert themselves off the course set out by the siren’s song.
Big Thief – “Spud Infinity”: I loved listening to and quietly singing along with this Big Thief album while driving this year, with my wife asleep in the passenger seat. I’ve changed my mind a few times on what my favourite track on it is, but I think “Spud Infinity” is what I settle on, a rollicking, joyous song with a philosophy which I was surprised to connect with as much as I did. There’s a humour but also a real spirituality in some of Lenker’s lines here: “Ash to ask and dust to dusk,” “When I say infinity I mean now,” in a swell of emotion.
Bright Eyes – “We Are Nowhere And It’s Now”: An old favourite which remains effective. It’s a pretty straightforward conceit, of being without direction, rudderless. But it all turns on that first chorus, which is such a burst of untapped, unconscious desire: “A 10-minute dream in the passenger seat while the world was flying by.” A fixed gaze as your world moves towards and away from you, in the rare place between dream and reality. Like Llewyn Davis’s cat watching the blur of its once and future home through the subway window. An inexplicably wonderful moment.
Adrianne Lenker – “Zombie Girl”: I think about this one like the previous song, but it’s instead a disoriented stupor of sleep as Lenker moves out of that liminal dream space, overtaken by longing and emptiness. As aching and raw as anything Lenker has done before or since.
Alvvays – “Pharmacist”: Blistering, as a wall of sound, as if My Bloody Valentine were transported to 2022. But it’s the chorus which really hits me, as the barrage relents and Molly Rankin’s refrain echoes one which has rattled around my own head for much of the year: “It happens all the time, it’s alright/I hear it happens all the time.” It’s the coping mechanism of framing our problems in the context of others’, as if the universality of suffering in any way blunts its pain. SOTY.
Black Country, New Road – “Concorde, “”The Place Where He Inserted the Blade”: My song-of-the-year runner-ups. The former is a devastation with every beat and syllable, the pithy asides ending each verse doing little to mask the anguish of this Sisyphean attempt to fulfil his desire, even if the hit is only fleeting: “For less than a moment/we’d share the same sky.” The latter is similarly rapturous, particularly that saxophone melody that floats under the chorus, and the Arcade Fire-esque backing vocal line into the outro. I find those desperate cries at the end to be so beguiling: “Show me the fifth or the cadence you want me to play/show me where to tie the other end of this chain.” Good morning!
Sidney Gish – “Presumably Dead Arm (617 Sessions)”: I can’t help but feel that at this point of my life — with a wife, a mortgage and a dog — I should be immune to this kind of thing. But I’m still a teenager at my core, and Sidney Gish’s music, filled with wit and tenderness, completely disarms me. I fell in love with her album No Dogs Allowed near the start of the year, but didn’t hear this song, her masterpiece, until a few months later. I find it endlessly relatable and quotable and with so much lyrical and melodic nuance. I know her lilt when she sings, “My brain’s a toddler roller-skating down a hill/I took a spill and ran into a tree/And suffered minor injuries” is going to live in my head until I die. It felt affirming and essential as I navigated this difficult year.
Taj Mahal – “Tomorrow May Not Be Your Day”: The end-credit song of Licorice Pizza, Paul Thomas Anderson’s beautiful coming-of-age period piece on magnetism and fate. This Taj Mahal song perfectly soundtracks the electric finale, the fatalistic convergence of two lines to a single point.
Art Garfunkel – “Waters of March”: And, the end-credit song of The Worst Person in the World, Joachim Trier’s film about a woman who, despite her human failings, is decidedly not the worst person in the world. I identify strongly with Renate Reinsve’s character in that movie, and was really struck by her final moments on screen, punctuated by Jobim’s list, presented free of value judgements: A beam, a void, a hunch, a hope; afloat, adrift, a flight, a wing; a girl, a rhyme, a cold, the mumps. The mud, the mud. That’s all it is, and all it needs to be.