The Killers won everyone over by writing songs that
chronicled and glorified the reckless hedonism of Las Vegas nights. When they
turned the spotlight on small towns and rural America on Sam’s Town, a lot of the early believers—critics included—turned on
them for being overly self-serious. What was really happening, though, was that
The Killers were growing up. Fast-forward to 2017 and Wonderful Wonderful, and this band barely even resembles what they
were in those early days. Instead, Wonderful
Wonderful is a record about all the things that probably no one wanted to
think about when they were listening to “Mr. Brightside” and “Somebody Told Me”
in 2004: family; marriage; fatherhood; mental illness; failure; midlife crisis;
political strife. The consequence-free fun of Hot Fuss is more than over. Wonderful
Wonderful was inspired by the very real, very serious battle with complex
PTSD that Tana Mundkowsky—Brandon Flowers’ wife—fought in the years preceding
the album’s creation and release. The result is an album that doubles as a
wake-up call. Everyone has their issues; no one is invincible. Those
revelations end up paving the way for the most honest, unguarded music The
Killers have ever made. Flowers was always a somewhat self-conscious
frontman—someone who tended to make reactionary left turns based on the
critical responses to his albums. On Wonderful
Wonderful, he takes big swings, not caring whether they come across as too
earnest or too corny. The two biggest risks—the sweet, tender “Some Kind of
Love,” which features his kids singing to their mother; and the titanic “Tyson
vs. Douglas,” a complex anthem about watching your heroes fall—are arguably the
finest pieces of songwriting in his oeuvre. Who would have guessed that the
same guy who once sang about a “boyfriend who looked like a girlfriend that [he]
had in February of last year” would end up writing such wise, nuanced songs
about being a husband and father?
94.
Yellowcard -
Yellowcard
There’s something to be said for artists getting to say
their goodbyes deliberately, on their own terms. The first time Yellowcard said
goodbye, with 2007’s
Paper Walls, it
seemed like an afterthought. The band’s fame had petered out and it wasn’t
clear if they were ever going to come back. “We can’t stay in Neverland
forever,” frontman Ryan Key said, as if being in a band had to be a young man’s
game. When Yellowcard came back in 2011, they proved that wasn’t true. The
band’s run this decade was the finest stretch of their career, featuring both
their most creative album (
Lift a Sail)
and their best (
Southern Air).
Yellowcard, the band’s swansong (for
real this time) is not the best of the bunch, but it’s an awfully good way to
say goodbye. Yellowcard spent most of their career writing songs that captured
the bold freedom of youth. Their last two albums went beyond that, with
Lift a Sail facing the trials and
tribulations of adulthood and
Yellowcard acknowledging
that, eventually, some things just run their course. But the result is an
emotionally gripping and satisfying collection of songs, one that plays almost
like a series-ending book or a big climactic movie finale. It’s the
Avengers: Endgame of the Yellowcard
catalog: an album that compiles everything the band does well into one place,
before paying off every bit of fan service the band had been hinting at for
years. By the time the record spins to a close, with the violin-drenched,
country-tinged lullaby of “Fields & Fences,” it really does feel like it’s
time to bid farewell.
95.
Miranda Lambert -
The Weight of These Wings
Most double albums are exercises in excess, or hubris, or
ill-advised experimentation. Oddly, when Miranda Lambert tried her hand at the
form, it was to make something more honest, more intimate, and altogether
smaller-scale than the music she’d made in the past. That may sound like a
contradiction, because how can a 24-song, 95-minute song cycle possibly be
described as “small scale”? But Lambert made this album in the wake of her
divorce, from fellow country superstar Blake Shelton, and it’s mostly comprised
of sad, contemplative songs. Lambert made her name on scorched-earth breakup anthems
wrought from gunpowder, lead, kerosene, and broken hearts. When her marriage
crumbled, though, she succumbed to the same sadness and melancholy that the
rest of us feel at the ends of the relationships we really thought were going
to last. She gets behind the wheel of a car and drives, with no clue where
she’s going but with a mind set on running. She stumbles home from a hookup in
the harsh morning light, knowing that she’ll be back seeking solace from her
loneliness the next night. And she wishes, with complete earnestness, that she
didn’t have a heart that could hurt this badly. In between, there are moments
of levity: songs about drinking until closing, and rocking cheap sunglasses, and
missing the good ol’ days, and having out-of-this-world sex. But The Weight of These Wings ultimately
succeeds because the ballads hit so hard and cut so deep. On this record,
Lambert turned her broken heart into an epic-length blockbuster, and made one
of the great country albums of the decade as a result.
96.
Twin Forks -
Twin Forks
In my teenage years, I gravitated toward the music of Dashboard
Confessional because of the angst. Chris Carrabba had a knack for making
heartbreak and sadness sound noble and romantic. I figured that, eventually,
those songs would get me through breakups. That never really happened. Instead,
Carrabba’s music ended up serving as a surprising through line to my love story
with my wife. The night I realized I was in love with her, “Dusk and Summer”
was playing. So, fittingly, when we finally got married, four years into our
relationship, it was Carrabba who was there to provide the soundtrack. As the
frontman for Twin Forks, Carrabba traded the angsty emo of Dashboard for the
twangy, feel-good folk-pop jams of The Lumineers and Mumford & Sons. The
difference was Carrabba’s writing. Always such a deft chronicler of matters of
the heart, Carrabba built Twin Forks into
arguably the decade’s ultimate summer-in-love album. Tracks like “Can’t Be
Broken,” “Back to You,” “Kiss Me Darling,” “Something We’ll Just Know” and
“Cross My Mind” are impossibly catchy love songs that call to mind swooning
summer flings set against the backdrop of small beachside towns. The songs are
so effortlessly infectious that it’s difficult to believe this record didn’t
somehow become a smash—whether as part of the early-decade folk-rock revival or
on the radio in the summer-loving country music format. For my wife and I,
though, Twin Forks was like a photo
album of the summer we got married.
97.
U2 -
Songs of Innocence
The legacy of Songs of
Innocence will always be tarnished by the way in which it was released to the
world. In partnership with Apple, U2 gave the album away to every single iTunes
user. Apple meant it as generosity. U2 meant it as a way to keep rock ‘n’ roll
grandiose and universal in an era where neither of those terms applied to much
rock music. Both of those intentions backfired. Twitter savaged both brands for
their hubris, in thinking that everyone even wanted a U2 album. Plenty of people thought Songs of Innocence was an invasion of privacy in the form of an
album, thanks to the fact that the album just appeared on users’ iPhones
without warning or consent. All these factors bogged down what is, on the
whole, a very strong set of songs. When Songs
of Innocence arrived in the fall of 2014, U2 had been away for the better
part of six years. Hearing them again, in any form, would have been a
pleasure—at least to me. But even I was pleasantly surprised by Innocence, which took the complacency
you would expect from a band almost 40 years into their career and threw it out
the window. Here was the most personal and autobiographical album that Bono,
The Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen, Jr. had ever made together. It’s an
album about youthful hopes and adolescent rage; about kids and their
relationships with their parents; about friendships and young love; about home
and what it takes to leave it; about violent neighborhoods and family
tragedies. Most of all, it’s about four guys who found their way together as
young lads and somehow stayed together for the next four-plus decades. Musically,
the album is neutered somewhat by too-clean production from the likes of Ryan
Tedder and Danger Mouse. In trying to make the songs palatable for modern pop
radio, U2 dulled the edge of what should have been their dirtiest, thrashiest,
most urgent album since War. But the
songs are too strong to be undone by something so simple as production, and
tracks like “Every Breaking Wave,” “Song for Someone,” “Cedarwood Road,” and
“The Troubles” ultimately resonate as some of the finest work in U2’s storied
career.
98.
The Hotelier -
Home, Like NoPlace Is There
Sometimes, albums just feel important. They might not be
your favorite albums, or the albums that seem to say the most about your life,
but you can hear them once and know they are going to
matter. That’s how I felt the first time I heard
Home, Like NoPlace Is There. There was a
gravity to it, not unlike what I felt the first time I heard
Clarity or
Transatlanticism or
Funeral.
There’s a certain sense of communal catharsis to these records that very
quickly screams “This album is going to save lives.” With The Hotelier, I felt
that X-factor right away. “Open the curtains/Singing birds tell me ‘Tear the
buildings down,’” Christian Holden bellows at the top of the record, on a song
called “An Introduction to the Album.” From those words, you’re in Holden’s
world—a world of sadness and depression and feelings of inadequacy and crushing
loss. The rest of the album keeps you there. It grapples with the death of
friends and thoughts of suicide and abusive relationships and all the toxic
things we try to escape in our lives that just seem to pull us deeper into
their web. It’s a tough listen, and it’s not an album I put on the turntable
very often for that reason. But it’s also a record that turns all its suffering
into a rallying cry and a badge of honor. Here, The Hotelier were inviting
everyone who’d suffered similar things to come and scream their vocal cords
red—to be baptized in the burst of emotional noise and made clean again by the
din. Writing for AbsolutePunk and watching people gravitate toward this album—watching
people let it heal them and save them and keep them afloat—was a remarkable
experience, and something that I’ll always remember. I’m used to music saving
me, because it does it all the time. To be reminded of how music could save other
people was heartening, and it
underlined what I thought about this record from the start: that it was going
to
matter.
99.
The Alternate Routes -
Lately
In their earlier years, The Alternate Routes were a
roots-rock band—not so far from what bands like The Wallflowers were doing in
the ‘90s, or from the music The Damnwells made this decade. On Lately, they went full U2, delivering a
record packed with sparkly, anthemic, guitar-driven arena rock. It’s their best
album, an example of a young band swinging for the fences and punching above
their weight class, in hopes that their chutzpah will make them superstars.
Unfortunately, The Alternate Routes couldn’t will their way into stadiums,
though that fact had a lot less to do with their talent than it did with this
decade’s hostility toward rock music in general. In another time, “Carry Me
Home”—the album’s proper opener and finest hour—would have morphed into a
generational anthem. It carries the sweep of titanic album openers like “Baba
O’Riley,” or like the first three tracks from The Joshua Tree. It just builds and builds, until it crests like a
wave into a torrent of wordless vocal wails. It’s such an emotional peak that
it threatens to write The Alternate Routes into a corner: how do you follow up
a song like that? But with big, punchy rockers like “Rocking Chair,”
“Stay,” and “Just the Same,” and with tender, aching ballads like “Raincoat”
and “Two of a Kind,” Lately somehow
manages to live up to its own larger-than-life commencement. It’s a shame these
guys never got to the big rooms, because their music was absolutely made for them.
100.
The Tallest Man on Earth -
The Wild Hunt
The cover of The Wild
Hunt is one of my favorite album covers of the decade. There’s nothing
particularly special about it on first glance. It looks like the kind of shot
you might snap on your iPhone out the window of car as you were riding through
the middle of the rural American nowhere. But I love it for what it captures: the
unbridled freedom and boundless solitude of the road—especially on a cloudy day
as dusk approaches. The music on the album itself conveys a similar feeling: of
leaving everything behind and driving straight off into a storm, never to be
seen or heard from again. There’s so much folklore and myth tied up in that
idea: of prodigal sons and would-be heroes disappearing on pipe-dream odysseys
and maybe never making their way back. On The
Wild Hunt, Kristian Matsson (the singer-songwriter who performs
under the
moniker of The Tallest Man on Earth) plays up those folkloric myths
every
chance he gets. “Rumor has it that I wasn’t born/I just walked in one
frosty
morn”; “I bend my arrows now in circles/And I shoot around the hill”;
“There's a
boy running downhill to the lowlands tonight/And he's catching the train
to
where he's heard you have been.” Matsson’s wanderers are otherworldly,
immortal, strange, and fascinating. By his estimation, when you leave
home and
embark upon some journey, you leave the shackles of reality behind and
encounter stranger things. Or maybe the wildness of Matsson’s stories is
all
just a metaphor for youth—so colorful and fresh and fascinating in the
moment
that it almost feels alien when you look back on it. The most clarity
comes on
the closing track, when Matsson muses about memories and how “we will
never be
a part of the pictures once taken.” Once those wild hunts of youth are
gone,
you can’t get them back. They live on in your head and become wayward
myths of your own making. But every once in awhile, you might just get
the urge to
get in the car again, and hit that horizon one more time. “Will we ever
confess
what we’ve done?” Matsson asks in the song’s chorus; “Guess we’re still
kids on
the run.”
101.
Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit -
Here We Rest
Jason Isbell lived out perhaps the greatest rise from the
ashes narrative of any artist in the 2010s. That narrative started with 2013’s Southeastern, a record that is largely
about Isbell’s sobriety, his then-recent marriage, and his newfound perspective
on life. But in a lot of ways, the story begins here, two years earlier. They
say that you have to hit rock bottom to recognize that you have a problem, and
to make the vow to seek help and get better. On Here We Rest, Isbell wasn’t quite there yet, but you could sense in
the songs that he was getting close. In particular, “Alabama Pines” sounds like
a bleary-eyed Sunday morning drive the morning after a bender, with a pounding
headache and nothing but the uncomfortable truths in the back of your mind for
company. Having come to Isbell with Southeastern,
I’m not sure how these songs would have played back then: if they shed any
light on what their creator was going through, or what might become of him if
he didn’t clean up his act. In retrospect, though, Here We Rest sounds like Isbell being honest with himself in his
songs, before he could be honest with himself in real life. “I can’t stand the
pain of being by myself without a little help on a Sunday afternoon,” he sings
in “Alabama Pines,” longing for a visit to the only open liquor store for
hundreds of miles. In “Go It Alone,” he’s realizing how close he’s come to
death, and how far he had to fall to turn over a new leaf. And in “Stopping
By,” he talks about the highway and the families he sees in the cars going the
other way, all with the happiness and connection and fulfillment he’s seeking
and never finding. It’s a sad album, one where the jauntiest tune is a cover song
and the second jauntiest tune is a
song named after a pain relief narcotic. Looking back, it’s a reminder both of
how far a person can come in a short time, and of how remarkable a songwriter
Jason Isbell always ways—even before he was in the right mind to take full
advantage of his gifts.
102.
Phoebe Bridgers -
Stranger in the Alps
Stranger in the Alps is an impossibly sad album. My
favorite track on it is called “Funeral,” which has never failed to absolutely
drain me when I listen to it. It’s a song that captures so much about the way we
think and talk about death: quietly, in whispers, as if trying to keep the
fates from hearing our words and dealing us or someone in our lives a bad card;
recklessly and stupidly, making jokes about killing ourselves and then immediately
feeling bad about them. “Last night I blacked out in my car/And I woke up in my
childhood bed/Wishing I was someone else, feeling sorry for myself/When I
remembered someone's kid is dead.” Those words are so relatable, because we’ve
all been there. We’ve all found ourselves in those moments of self-centered
bullshit, even when tragedies have just rocked our lives, or our communities,
or our nation. Even when we should feel grateful to be where we are and to
have what we have. Stranger in the Alps is a dark listen because
it
forces us to contend with little thoughts like those that might not
necessarily
be comfortable. The songs grapple with mental health struggles, suicidal
thoughts, emotional and physical abuse, and even murder. On the proper
closer, a cover
of Mark Kozelek’s deeply creepy but beguilingly pretty “You Missed My
Heart,” Bridgers locates an unspeakable sense of sadness and futility
amongst scenes of
grisly homicide and execution. What I’ve always said about this album is
that
it’s one of the prettiest things in the world, full of songs about some
of the ugliest
things imaginable. The contradiction there makes Stranger in the Alps an
album that I know will stay with me for a long time—even if it’s sometimes just
too heavy to listen to.
103.
The Menzingers -
After the Party
“Where are we gonna go now that our twenties are over?” So
goes the rallying cry of “Tellin’ Lies,” the raucous opener of After the
Party. It’s also the album’s thesis statement, a question that The
Menzingers spend the next 40-plus minutes trying to get to the bottom of. For
the band and the characters in their songs, turning 30 scans not quite as a
crisis moment, but certainly as a shock to the system. When you’re a teenager
starting college or moving into your first apartment, your twenties seem
huge—even endless. But they go by so fast: a dizzying whirlwind of romances and
songs and half-forgotten nights that seems to be over in about half the time
that your teenage years were. After the Party reaches for perspective on
those years by putting them into a photobook of memories: the youthful
rebellion of “Bad Catholics”; the post-college malaise of “Midwestern States”;
the last-call rhapsodies of “The Bars.” To see your twenties slipping away is
to see that reckless freedom slipping away, replaced by routine and
responsibility. It’s to look back at those old photographs and miss the
memories they depict; to say something like “I was such a looker in the old
days.” But by the end of After the Party, Menzingers frontman Greg
Barnett is singing love songs, thinking about promising the world to a girl.
“After the party, it’s me and you” he sings on the title track, and suddenly,
the idea of being a grown-up doesn’t seem so scary. It turns out that, with the
right co-pilot in the front seat, driving away from the unpredictable wonder of
youth can hold a lot of wonderment of its own.
104.
The Fray -
Scars & Stories
Just like Snow Patrol and Keane and all the other earnest
mainstream soft rock bands that made their names snagging coda positions on
episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and One Tree Hill, The Fray were never going
to be cool and were never going to be taken seriously. For listeners who don’t
write them off completely, they are probably known as a singles band—a
designation that is hard to argue with given a resume that includes “Over My
Head (Cable Car),” “How to Save a Life,” “Look After You,” and “You Found Me.” But
Scars & Stories is so much more
than just another album with a couple rafter-shaking singles and a bunch of
filler. Rather than spend their whole label-allocated budget on recording the
album, the guys in The Fray earmarked a lot of the money for this album for
world travel. The songs came naturally from the places the band visited and the
people they met, and the result is a surprisingly searching and poignant album.
Famously, U2 ascended to new heights in the late eighties when their travels
outside of their native land—specifically to America—broadened their horizons,
reshaped their identities, and pushed them to start asking new questions about
politics, spirituality, and life itself. Scars
& Stories is The Fray’s Joshua
Tree moment, filled with songs wrought from genuine human struggling,
suffering, and resilience. “1961” is a metaphor for families separated on
either side of the Berlin Wall, while the driving opener “Heartbeat” is a song
frontman Isaac Slade wrote after meeting a determined refugee woman in Rwanda. Even
the closer-to-home songs are surprisingly deep, like “The Fighter,” which tells
the story of a marriage through the lens of a boxing match, or “The Wind,” a
song about guitarist Joe King’s divorce that yearns like “I Still Haven’t Found
What I’m Looking For.” Of course, critics heard what they wanted in the songs:
shallow, corporate, guitar-driven dad rock. And the band seemingly internalized
those criticisms, losing trust in their own songwriting and teaming up with a
bevy of faceless cowriters for the poppy, mostly-bad follow-up Helios. That album came out in 2014 and
The Fray have been dormant ever since. The “what could have been?” narrative
makes Scars & Stories both more
wrenching and more special, a momentary triumph from a band that never got
enough credit and ultimately folded under the cynicism surrounding guitar rock
in the post-2000 world.
105.
Brian Fallon -
Painkillers
From 2008 to 2012, Brian Fallon had one of the hottest hot
streaks we’ve seen from any artist this millennium. The ’59 Sound; American
Slang; Elsie; Handwritten. Each of these albums is distinctly
different and masterful in its own way—the work of an artist (and the artists
around him) clearly bursting with inspiration and creativity. 2014’s Get
Hurt—and the coinciding end of Fallon’s marriage—derailed the train. Painkillers
is the sound of Fallon trying to start over, both in terms of his music and
his personal life. The lyrics—especially on the aching, backward-looking closer
“Open All Night”—directly reference the pain of attempting to build a new life
after your old once gets smashed apart by a battering ram. The music is a
retreat, away from Fallon’s patent Springsteen-style rock ‘n’ roll and toward a
collision of classic pop influences (think ‘60s girl groups) and Americana. The
record lacks the thematic cohesion of Fallon’s best work, and it could use a
bit more full-band muscle. But what Painkillers does is sharpen the
melody side of Fallon’s writing. From the beginning, we knew Brian Fallon was a
unique lyricist—willing to pilfer and borrow from his idols, but also more than
ready to wear his heart on his sleeve and tell his own story. His melody
writing was less distinct, which is why records like The ’59 Sound can
feel a bit same-y on early listens. But Painkillers is packed
with huge hooks that stand with some of Fallon’s finest, from the folky stomp
of “Smoke” to the throwback pop of “Nobody Wins.” Those songs start off
Fallon’s second act with a huge amount of promise—even if he’d eclipse them
just a few years later with the more fully-realized Sleepwalkers.
106.
Donovan Woods -
Hard Settle, Ain’t Troubled
Hard Settle, Ain’t Troubled is a good album that
could have been a masterpiece. As released, it’s a very strong collection of
songs with a handful of towering highlights. “On the Nights You Stay Home” is a
melancholy ditty about how jealousy and suspicion can poison a relationship.
“The First Time” is a wistful look back at first love (and first sex). “Between
Cities” is a dizzying highway drive song about long-distance relationships.
“Leaving Nashville” is maybe the greatest song ever written about the rapidly
changing fortunes of the music industry. There are also two songs that Donovan
Woods released as one-off singles in the year leading up to this album that
didn’t make the record, and those songs are arguably his best work ever. The
first, “Portland, Maine,” finds another long-distance relationship on its very
last legs, sputtering and dying in its tracks as one member musters up the
courage to put it out of its misery. That song ended up getting recorded by Tim
McGraw and put on one of his albums, so at least there’s justification for its
absence from this record. The same can’t be said for “That Hotel,” a piece of
songwriting so heartbreaking, so vivid, and so ingeniously wrought that its
status as a standalone single actually feels like injustice. “That Hotel” takes
place in between the happiness of a love song and the shattered resignation of
a breakup song. There’s been a fight and a separation, but the narrator is
hopeful that things are going to work out. He’s staying in a run-down hotel,
but he’s confident that within a few days, he’ll be moved back in with the girl
he loves and everything will be alright. By the time Woods sings the last
chorus—“And now I know it’s over/But back then I couldn’t tell/I got a one
bedroom apartment now/And I miss that hotel”—you feel like you’ve weathered the
entirety of a heartbreak at his side. The good news is that, in the era of
digital music, it’s easy to actualize an alternate version of this album with
both of those songs included. It’s that version of the album that I’m ranking
here, with those two masterful, perfect songs.
107.
Dierks Bentley -
Riser
At the height of “bro country,” you would almost have
expected an artist like Dierks Bentley to make an album of songs about
backroads, pick-up trucks, and girls in cutoff jeans. While Bentley has always
shown that he is a bit more thoughtful and traditionally-minded than his fellow
pop-country superstars, he’s also shown a willingness to play the game. This
album’s “Drunk on a Plain”—as well as other lesser songs like “Pretty Girls”
and “Back Porch”—lean toward bro country clichés, and in the case of the
former, earned Bentley one of his biggest hits. Listen to Riser as a whole, though, and it’s clear that those songs are
compromises. Written and assembled shortly after Bentley’s father passed away, Riser is imbued with palpable grief, vivid
memory, and deep gratitude. Bentley didn’t even write many of the songs: the
shimmering “Say You Do” was penned by the guys from Old Dominion, while
“Riser”—the track Bentley built the album around—was written by Travis Meadows
and Steve Moakler, both artists you will find elsewhere on this list. But when
Bentley sings these songs, it sounds like
he wrote them, so thoroughly does he commit to the character and emotion of
them. The ones he did write, meanwhile—“Here on Earth,” about fruitlessly
seeking answers for questions about loss and grief; “I Hold On,” about clinging
to the things that remind you of the people and memories that are gone; “Damn
These Dreams,” about the painful separation that touring musicians feel when
they leave their families behind for weeks or months at a time—are incredibly
heartfelt and deeply nuanced. Throughout, Bentley shirks most of the hip hop
and modern pop influences of the bro country era for other signifiers:
whiskey-soaked southern rock on “Bourbon in Kentucky,” or All That You Can’t Leave Behind-era U2 on “Here on Earth.” And looking
back, it’s amazing how many up-and-comers Bentley happily shared the stage with
here. Some of the album’s biggest joys are hearing the familiar voices of
future superstars on the bookends: Kacey Musgraves on “Bourbon in Kentucky” and
Chris Stapleton on “Hurt Somebody.” Riser
isn’t perfect, and its “compromise” songs get in the way of the flow and
theme. But on the whole, it is an achingly beautiful and gorgeously melodic set
of songs, made in the midst of one of country music’s worst movements.
108.
Death Cab for Cutie -
Thank You for Today
For a band like Death Cab for Cutie, it’s hard to sustain a
career. It’s hard to keep a band going in the first place, under any
circumstances—especially now that the industry has largely cratered and made it
impossible for rock bands to find any traction. For a band like Death Cab,
though, the challenge is aging gracefully after being something that a whole
lot of people came to associate with teen and young adult angst. Ben Gibbard
and co. aren’t the only people who have faced this challenge: Chris Carrabba
and pretty much the entire early 2000s emo/pop-punk community have gone through
it too. For Death Cab, though, the struggle might have been even more
difficult, thanks to the fact that they existed somewhere between the
heart-on-the-sleeve intensity of emo and the trendy-white-boy indie-rock of
early Pitchfork. What makes Thank You for Today so terrific is how it ages
gracefully by acknowledging the fact that aging has indeed occurred. Where
Carrabba’s 2018 record (the good-not-great Dashboard Confessional comeback LP Crooked
Shadows) seemed preoccupied with trying to sound young, Death Cab
let the years be a character in these songs. The result is a nostalgic album about
nostalgia: a record that sounds a whole lot like Transatlanticism but
that is meta enough to recognize its own backward-looking theme. There’s a
reason the album ends with “60 and Punk,” about an aging rock star wondering if
he might have been better off not getting his big break all those years
ago. Elsewhere, he looks back wistfully at his summer years and reflects on
what his city looked like before gentrification changed its entire character.
With time racing past, and with everything changing in the blink of an eye,
maybe saying thank you for today is the best any of us can do.
109.
Danielle Bradbery -
I Don't Believe We've Met
I Don’t Believe We’ve
Met is an album about being blindsided. It’s about those relationships
where the crushes come on fast and hard, where everything moves fast, where the
emotions feel like lightning, and where it all ends like a car crash: suddenly
and destructively. While there’s nothing wrong with the sequencing—or the
positioning of the crowd-pleasing, feel-good “Sway” as the album’s red-herring
commencement—the story of the record actually seems to start on track 8. That
song, called “Hello Summer,” finds the narrator crushing hard on a mysterious
out-of-towner who just so happens to be spending a summer in her orbit. “I fell
in love before he unpacked his bags,” Bradbery sings. You can guess at the
twist: the fling doesn’t outlast the season, and by fall, she’s picking up the
pieces of something that burned hot and then burned out. The rest of the album
is the aftermath: chilly, moody, and surprisingly downbeat. Bradbery won The Voice as a country singer, but I Don’t Believe We’ve Met is closer to
modern pop radio’s sad streak. Tracks like “Potential,” “What Are We Doing,”
“Messy, and “Human Diary” are surprisingly insightful songs about reckoning
with the failings of your relationships and then dealing with the blast radius
when those relationships blow up in your face. Breakups hurt not just because
you lose the person, but also for so many other reasons. They hurt because the
happy memories become tinged with sadness. They hurt because everything you
gave to that person—the stories, the secrets, the whispered truths you could
never admit to anyone else—stay in their hands. They hurt because you lose
their family, and your family loses them. This record grapples intelligently
with all of that collateral damage, in a way so many shallower breakup albums
never even think to attempt.
110.
David Ramirez -
We're Not Going Anywhere
“Where were you when we lost the twins?” Those are the first
words David Ramirez utters on We’re Not Going Anywhere, a haunting and
unsettling album written and recorded in the wake of Trump’s election. On first
blush, you might assume the song—called “Twins”—is about parents losing their
children. It actuality, it’s about September 11th and about the sense of fear and
unease it created in our country that has never truly dissipated. “It was one
of the first times I remember feeling unsafe and without control in a country
that had previously made me feel otherwise,” Ramirez said of the song and 9/11
in general. We’re Not Going Anywhere is about those feelings coming
rushing back 15 years later, renewed by the sharpest political divide that most
of us have seen in our lifetimes. Ramirez—whose father is Hispanic—has gone on
record about the kinship he feels with the minority populations that MAGA
zealots view as “not belonging” in America. This record isn’t all about those
feelings—“Watching from a Distance” is a yearning breakup song that wouldn’t
sound out of place next to “The Boys of Summer”
on a playlist, while “Eliza Jane”
is an Elton John-style character sketch. But the brief moments of political
tension, on songs like “Twins” or the anti-racist protest rock of “Stone Age,”
give the album its heart-pounding urgency.
111.
Matt Nathanson -
Last of the Great Pretenders
Last of the Great
Pretenders is Matt Nathanson’s identity crisis album. On earlier records,
he’d been a guitar-slinging pop-rock troubadour, not far from the sonic
stomping grounds John Mayer occupied on his first couple records. After this
album, he would transition into full-on pop savant mode, throwing all his
influences—from Prince to Kanye West to Bruce Springsteen—into a blender to
create his own unique twist on modern pop. Here, he couldn’t quite decide which
of these modes to occupy. Some of the songs—the best songs—reach back to what
he did so well on Some Mad Hope and Modern Love. “Sunday New York Times” is
a gorgeous acoustic heartbreaker that shares some DNA with classic James
Taylor, while “Last Days of Summer in San Francisco” is arguably his best
song—a beautiful, resplendent anthem that captures the bittersweet melancholy
of late August. Elsewhere, though, you can hear Matt itching to venture outside
of his comfort-zone, on thumping, beat-driven jams like “Earthquake Weather,”
“Mission Bells,” and “Kill the Lights.” The resulting collection doesn’t really
feel like a cohesive album, but that’s arguably to its advantage. Instead, Last of the Great Pretenders plays kind
of like the mixtapes you make in college, when your connections with new people
of different social groups, backgrounds, and interests sends your music taste
scattering in all different directions. For Matt, all those musical ideas and
influences end up as a patchwork quilt of sorts, painting his perception of the
city of San Francisco over the course of a tumultuous year.
112.
John Mayer -
The Search for Everything
Throughout his career, John Mayer’s public persona has often
threatened to upend what is appealing about his music. On The Search for Everything, though, he let his own fame serve as the
punching bag for the songs. Written and recorded in the wake of yet another
breakup with yet another celebrity starlet—Katy Perry, this time—Search is the sound of a man grappling
with his own romantic failures. “Can I make a relationship last?” “Will I ever
find ‘The One’?” “Am I even capable of love?” “Why am I the way I am?” The Search for Everything might not
actually be a search for everything,
but it’s definitely a search for the answers to those questions. They’re
big
questions for anyone to ask, and they lead to an album of breakup songs
that is
sometimes wry and clever, sometimes agitated and nervy, and sometimes
just
downright crushing. The album was undone somewhat by a confusing release
strategy, where Mayer promised 12 months’ worth of four-song EPs and
then only
delivered two of them before dropping the supposed “Part 1” full-length.
We
never got the part two, or the other 10 EPs, and Mayer has only released
three songs since. Add a wacky, incoherent track sequencing and it’s
not surprising
that many wrote Search off as Mayer’s
worst album. Strip away all that context, though, and this album has some of the
sharpest, hardest-hitting material that Mayer ever wrote. From the beginning,
one of Mayer’s biggest strengths as a songwriter was his willingness to be
completely honest about his own emotional vulnerability. That’s what made songs
like “No Such Thing” and “Why Georgia” scan as such relatable tales of young
adulthood. It’s why “Stop This Train” is maybe my favorite song ever written
about getting older. And it’s why he can spin a song like “In the Blood,” where
he wonders whether he is genetically predisposed to fail at love. In an era
where pop music seemed to get less honest
and open, Mayer continued his oversharing tendencies—to brilliant effect.
113.
Chad Perrone -
Kaleidoscope
Young songwriters revel in the pain of failed relationships.
They take those heartbreaks and breakups and relish them, channeling them into
songs that teenagers and twentysomethings can listen to and cry to and sing
along to in the midst of their own romantic disasters. As you get older,
though, the connotations of a breakup song change. It’s not just you and your
crush and your feelings anymore. When you’re young, a breakup maybe means
awkward moments in the halls at school, or difficult juggling acts for your
mutual friends. When you get older, the stakes are higher. A breakup might mean
a called-off engagement and a returned ring. It might mean divorce. It might
mean figuring out what happens to your kids, or your pets, or the house you
shared together. It probably means that your respective families feel the
fallout of losing someone they had started to see as family. There is nothing
to relish in these breakups: no grand catharsis in the songs they bring.
Instead, it’s all a dull aching sadness. It’s a crisis of wondering what
happened to all those years you gave to that person, and of worrying (at least
fleetingly) that you might always be alone. Kaleidoscope traces all
these difficult feelings into one of the most gutting and honest breakup albums
of the past 10 years. It’s an album about seeing the future you had envisioned
with another person completely dissolve in the blink of an eye. It’s about hoping
that you might one day find someone who sees your flaws as something beautiful,
rather than as a liability. It’s about trying to get back out there, only to
find yourself stumbling home at the end of the night, feeling as dejected and
defeated as ever. Most of all, it’s about loneliness, and about how heartbreak
in your 30s or 40s looks a hell of a lot different from heartbreak in your
teens. At 16, a broken heart hurts, but it also feels like a badge of honor. At
36, it can only make you wonder if happiness might not be in the cards for you.
114.
The War on Drugs -
Lost in the Dream
Was it Americana? Was it Bruce Springsteen-style rock ‘n’
roll? Was it guitar hero pyrotechnics? Lost in the Dream, the breakout
album from The War on Drugs, offers all these parallels and more. It is a
thrilling, classic-leaning rock ‘n’ roll album, plucked from the middle of an
era where listeners and critics seemed ready to rebel against the classic rock
canon of old. Somehow, Lost in the Dream still found enough of an
audience to become one of the decade’s 10 or 20 most beloved albums. And
frankly, it’s an album that is hard not to love. The keys glow like molten lava on the
grandiose opener “Under the Pressure.” “Red Eyes” sounds like Springsteen’s ’69
Chevy on nitrous oxide. “Eyes to the Wind” plays like a Segar ballad transposed
into a dreamscape. And “In Reverse” feels like an aimless wander out on the
neighborhood streets of your hometown, way past dark on a summer night. The way
Lost in the Dream hits that balancing act—between the past and now,
between familiar and a little bizarre, between predictable and
unpredictable—makes it one of the decade’s most thoroughly beguiling musical
achievements.
115.
Maddie and Tae -
Start Here
Maddie and Tae burst onto the scene with maybe the most
prescient, subversive country hit of the decade. “Girl in a Country Song”
skewered the bro country fad so thoroughly and savagely that it may have
singlehandedly killed it. It directly referenced songs by artists ranging from
Thomas Rhett to Tyler Farr to Blake Shelton to Jason Aldean to the kings of bro
country themselves, Florida Georgia Line. It was bold for a duo of two young,
largely unknown female songwriters to take shots at established superstars, but
it paid off. “Girl in a Country Song” hit the top of the country airplay
charts, and it largely forced the implicated artists to reform—or at least tone
down their blatantly sexist depictions of female characters. It also paved the
way to Start Here, one of the most
confident and assured mainstream country debuts of the last 10 years. The
barbed wit of “Girl in a Country Song” manifests itself a few other times on
the record, like on “Sierra,” where they try to avoid saying what they really
think about a bully from their high school days; or “Shut up and Fish,” about a
date with a boy who only speaks in pickup lines (until he ends up dumped in the water). But Maddie and Tae’s real
strong suit on this album proves to be a more earnest type of country music.
The bookends, “Waitin’ on a Plane” and “Downside of Growing Up,” are both
poignant coming-of-age stories; “Right Here, Right Now” and “No Place Like You”
are soaring evocations of young love that recall Taylor Swift’s Fearless; and “After the Storm Blows
Through” is an incredibly lovely pledge of undying friendship, made all the
more effective by its tight-knit, Dixie Chicks-esque harmonies. Beyond “Girl in
a Country Song,” the album largely went overlooked and Maddie and Tae ended up
spending the next four years fighting to get their second album released. When
you listen back to the songs, it’s remarkable that Start Here wasn’t a juggernaut. Every single song is a hit.
116.
Kelsea Ballerini -
The First Time
When Taylor Swift officially ditched country music in 2014,
there was an opening for a new pop-country crossover starlet.
The First Time is Kelsea Ballerini’s
application for the job, and it’s a pretty damn good one. The record sent three
singles—“Love Me Like You Mean It,” “Dibs,” and “Peter Pan”—to the top of the
country airplay chart, an unprecedented feat for a female country artist in the
current country music climate. Listen to each of those songs once and you’ll
know exactly why they broke through, despite country radio’s head-scratching
unwillingness to play women. The hooks are massive, Ballerini’s charisma is off
the charts, and the pop element of the “pop-country” mix is very, very heavy.
The criticism, from purists, is that Ballerini is not and never has been a
country artist. Certainly,
The First Time
makes no effort to hide its pop signifiers, whether they’re in the form of
sticky melodies or very modern instrumentation. As a writer, though, Ballerini
couldn’t be further from what pop is right now. She’s an open-hearted,
optimistic, unabashedly reflective storyteller with an eye for crucial details.
Sure, this album blew up because songs like “Dibs” are catchier than literally
anything pop radio played in the past 10 years. But Ballerini’s clearest talent
is her ability to bring you fully into her world. You’re there waiting next to
her in “The First Time” as she scans the driveway for a boy who will never show
up. You’re there in “Secondhand Smoke” as she lies awake in bed listening to
her parents scream at each other downstairs. And you’re there in “Underage” as
she celebrates the warm comforts and fleeting beauty of teenage freedom. Who
cares if Kelsea Ballerini sounds like a pop star? She’s country where it counts
the most: her heart.
117.
Josh Ritter -
Sermon on the Rocks
Josh Ritter has always been an exemplary songwriter and a
spectacular lyricist. For most of his catalog, he’s used those skills to make
very pretty, thematically dense folk music. For whatever reason, though, in
2015, he tossed out the rulebook and got weird. The result, Sermon on the
Rocks, is the most singular album of his career. At its core, Sermon
is still a folk album. It’s just that this time, Ritter’s palette is a bit
more extensive. He described the album as “messianic oracular honky-tonk,” but
that description only hits on some of the elements at play here—namely, the
religious satire and the barn-burning Nashville sound that run through much of
the album. But there are also flickers of electronic production and hip-hop
rhythms here, brushing up against Springsteen-esque anthems and old
country-western cowboy mythos. On paper, throwing all those things together on
one album sounds like a wild experiment—one sure to be exciting but unlikely to
yield apexes on the level of previous Ritter triumphs like “Girl in the War” or
“Thin Blue Flame.” But Sermon on the Rocks, for all its satire and wit,
is also a deeply poignant album about growing up in rural middle America. Songs
like “Homecoming” and “Where the Night Goes” are beautiful, intimate snapshots
of young love on dirt roads, in fast cars, or at secluded makeout destinations.
You can grow up and leave those places behind, but the awakenings that happen
in these songs are the kinds of things that stay burned in your mind and on
your soul for life. By making those moments sound like a million different genres
at once, Sermon on the Rocks somehow captures their heart-thumping
excitement as if it was happening to you right now.
118.
Josh Kelley -
New Lane Road
Not many albums I’ve heard exude humility and grace the way
that New Lane Road does. Josh Kelley is a fascinating artist, in that
he’s had all sorts of brushes with celebrity and success. He had a few minor
hits in the early 2000s, he’s married to Katherine Heigl, and his brother is
Charles Kelley of Lady Antebellum fame. Despite all this, he’s still somehow
stayed largely under the radar. It’s the kind of narrative that could break a
singer-songwriter down, waiting for his own art to catch on in the way that his
brother’s did or his wife’s did. On New Lane Road, though, Kelley sounds
just about as perfectly content as I’ve ever heard someone sound on record.
This is an album about cherishing the small, simple, beautiful things in your life:
your kids; the songs you love from when you were young; the land you own and
the home you live in with your family; the relationship that isn’t perfect, that
hits bumps every once in awhile, but that keeps on rolling regardless. Kelley
captures these small-scale ideas beautifully, wrapping them in a subtle
throwback texture that evokes the country, folk, and soft rock of the late ‘80s
or early ‘90s. It’s a classic-sounding piece of work, made all the more potent
by the fact that Kelley sings his whole heart and soul into the songs.
119.
Fleet Foxes -
Helplessness Blues
All of Helplessness Blues is
terrific, building on the pastoral folk tapestries of Fleet Foxes’ debut in
confident and interesting ways. The cacophonous war of sound at the end of “The
Shrine/The Argument” is one example of the band’s bigger, more audacious
direction here, as is the Arcade Fire-sized punch of closer “Grown Ocean,”
which seems tailor-made to ring through arenas. But the title track is the
masterpiece—a track that has established itself as, I think, one of the most
definitive songs of the past 10 years. Few tracks from this decade better
capture the millennial struggle: the yearning to do something great; the apathy
that comes with feeling insignificant; the disillusionment of learning that,
no, you aren’t as unique or special as your parents or teachers told you
growing up. The song taps into a generation’s intense struggle to prove itself
and find its place in the world. It makes you want to say “fuck you” to
everyone and everything and push on regardless. In a year where I suffered a
crushing failure—at the hands of “men who move only in dimly lit halls and
determine my future for me”—this song and its bristling, inspirational message
is something I needed more than I think I ever realized back then.
120.
Yellowcard -
When You're Through Thinking, Say Yes
Yellowcard were always
a summer band. For those of us who grew up or came of age listening to Ocean Avenue and Paper Walls, they were the sound of beaches and freedom and full
sunlit days without a care in the world. The first time I heard When You’re Through Thinking, Say Yes,
though, Michigan was still locked in what felt like an endless winter. I had a
month left on the clock for my sophomore year of college, and I felt like I’d
never needed a summer vacation more. Nearing the end of an awful semester,
feeling the strain of a long-distance relationship, and ready to melt back into
the embrace of home, When You’re Through
Thinking… sounded incredibly poignant to me. It was a reminder that,
no
matter what—no matter how many bad days I had or how dreadful my grades
got or how
miserable I was with my job as an RA—summer was out there. It was a
concrete
thing that existed, that had come before and would come again. I
remember,
vividly, trying to will the summer into being a little sooner, driving
around
in my little Honda Civic in legitimate snowstorms blasting “With You
Around”
and “Soundtrack.” The cognitive dissonance was incredible, but it
somehow only
made these songs sound better. That’s the funny thing about summer
songs: when
you listen to them in summer, you take them for granted. They sound like
throwaways, like background music to be played at parties, or to be
half-drowned-out
by the roar of an open window in a speeding car. But when you hear them
as I did
that spring, when I was yearning so hard for the sense of freedom and
youth
they captured, they pierced me right to my soul. One of my top 10
favorite
music memories from this decade was climbing into the car when the end
of the
school year finally wound around—when all my classes and exams and job
obligations were finished and I could set out toward home at last. I
made a
point of playing this album first, and as “The Sound of You and Me”
kicked in
to start the journey, I felt an immense weight off my shoulders. “I’ve
never
been more ready to move on,” Ryan Key sang. I can count on one hand the
lyrics that have felt more apt for specific moments of my life.
121.
The Tower & The Fool -
How Long
How Long is one of
the great forgotten records of the past 10 years. Released in the spring of
2012 by Run for Cover Records—a label known for their role in the emo revival—How Long was a little too early to
capitalize on the revival trend. It might also not have been the right kind of
record to capitalize on it. The Tower & The Fool are neither an emo band,
nor do they exist in the adjacent genre of pop-punk. How Long is a country-tinged rock record that has more in common
with '90s bands like Counting Crows, Whiskeytown, or Old 97s than with any of
their labelmates. In a different decade, a song like “Broken”—a bittersweet
road trip anthem about “chasing down Kerouac’s American dream”—might have been
a hit. In this one, it went sadly overlooked. For those who heard it, though, How Long packed a punch. You can
probably count on one hand the break-up albums from the past 10 years that are
more potent than this one. This album asks: what does it take to get over
someone who you thought was going to be there forever? The title track seems to
offer an answer, that “only time will heal your pain.” But what if time doesn’t
help? What if your knees wear through the jeans she bought you and you’re still
not over it? What if a whole year goes by without even seeing her face and
you’re still wandering down the street where you used to live with her,
wondering where everything went so wrong? How
Long is an album about those broken hearts that don’t mend quickly—if ever.
For anyone who was having trouble getting over an ex this decade, I can’t
imagine there was a better soundtrack for a solitary highway drive than this
one.
122.
Go Radio -
Close the Distance
“We’ve both got way too much ahead/To worry about what we’ve
left behind.” Those words, the first time I heard them, stopped me in my
tracks. They come from the song “Collide,” the first single from Go Radio’s Close the Distance.
I first heard them
at the tail end of the summer of 2012, which, for both my girlfriend and
for
me, was a big time of change and transition. She’d graduated from
college the
previous spring and was preparing to move six hours away from our
hometown to
start her first job. I was heading back to college for my last year.
Saying goodbye to home at the end of that summer felt more final than
the ones that had preceded all my
other college years. Those words from “Collide” seemed to perfectly
capture the
bittersweet ache of the moment that we both left, headed for different
destinations. We were leaving friends and family and a place that had
brought
us together. But we were hopefully leaving it for big opportunities, and
for a
future—preferably together—that would be even grander than our past.
Throughout
the fall and the rest of the school year, I leaned on “Collide” and the
rest of
Close the Distance a lot. More than
maybe any other album that came out while I was in college, this one seemed to
tell the narrative of my love story.
It was and is one of the greatest albums ever made about long-distance
relationships, because it conveys both the pain of leaving and the euphoric
rush of being reunited. “Baltimore” is the night before a departure, trying to
stop time to be with the person you love. And “Close the Distance” is about the
moment when the distance finally disappears, when you and that person can be
together for days or weeks or months or years,
rather than just a few hours on a stolen Saturday or Sunday. As my senior year
drew to a close, I remember spending a lot of time listening to this album on
drives back and forth to Chicago, visiting the girl I loved. The title track
got my heart racing, because I knew that our three years of long distance were
almost up. No matter what happened next—regardless of whether I got a job or
figured out what I wanted to do with my life—we would at least be together.
Looking back now, six years removed from college and five since that girl and I
told each other “I do,” I still can’t go back to this record without feeling
that same rush of feelings. As our wedding approached, these songs were the
ones I kept going back to, if only because they seemed to encapsulate
everything we’d committed to and everything we’d built together. It’s still an
extremely important record to me for those reasons.
123.
Frank Turner -
Tape Deck Heart
I always loved that title: Tape Deck Heart. The lyric that it comes from—“You will always be a
part/Of my patched up, patchwork, taped up, tape deck heart,” from the song
“Tell Tale Signs”—sheds some light on what it means. Like a tape deck, the
heart is repeatedly replaying and recording and re-recording moments on top of
each other. People waltz in and out of our lives. We fall in and out of love
with them, or forge friendships and bonds with them that may later crumble away
to nothing. It’s not unlike a cassette tape being taped over, losing the traces
of the songs that used to mean something but no longer do. Tape Deck Heart turns that powerful metaphor into a collection of
songs about heartbreak and recovery. “Fuck you Hollywood, for teaching us that
love was free and easy,” Turner sings on “Good & Gone,” a magnificent song
about how anger and pain and sadness are often the same damn thing in the wake
of a broken relationship. It’s about those moments of low, low heartbreak when
you’d rather record over the person who is gone, rather than feel all the hurt
of their absence. But then you get a song like “Polaroid Picture,” about the
temporary nature of the things in our lives, and you remember that our memories
are sometimes the only things we have. “We won’t all be here this time next
year/So while you can take a picture of us,” Turner sings. That’s the meaning
of the album that I relate to most strongly, because Tape Deck Heart was in heavy rotation during my very last weeks of
college. I knew it was a break-up record, but to me, it seemed to say something
more powerful about closing out important chapters of your life and embracing
new ones. There’s a line in “The Fisher King Blues” about wondering “how the
air tastes when you’re really free.” I thought about that lyric a lot in the
weeks after I graduated, as I tried to find my footing in the real world. Did I
want the freedom? Or did I want the sheltered innocence that I had left behind the
day I drove away from college? I couldn’t quite decide, but I think my own tape
deck heart probably wanted both.
124.
The Night Game -
The Night Game
The Night Game deserves a coming-of-age movie worthy
of its wistful summertime jams. A lot of artists spent the better part of the
last decade—especially the later part—chasing after the 1980s aesthetic in
their music. Few artists captured it as well as Martin Johnson did here.
Johnson, formerly of Boys Like Girls fame, has always excelled at writing songs
that encapsulate the yearning and possibility of the teenage experience. When
he sang about a girl whose voice was the soundtrack of his summer in
“Thunder,” those feelings felt like they were happening right now. The Night
Game is different. It’s a record about looking back 20 or 30 years after
the fact and having all those memories hit you like a gale-force wind. On
anthems like “The Outfield” and “Once in a Lifetime,” you can feel a warm
fondness for those days gone by radiating through the propulsive choruses.
Elsewhere, though, regret and thoughts of what might have been linger in the
songs. On “Do You Think About Us,” Johnson sings about the sliding doors: the
moments in your life when you could have gone through one side of the door but
went through the other instead. How different would your life be if you had
made another choice? And would your high school crush or your one-who-got-away
be the person you ended up spending your life with? It’s natural to have
thoughts like that, especially late at night in the summer when the hot, muggy
weather and songs like these ones spur vivid memories from many years ago. Are
the people from your past out having the same thoughts you are? It’s hard to
know for sure, but albums like The Night Game are comforting because
they show just how common those nostalgic trips are.
It took me a long time to get a handle on Passwords.
For most Dawes fans, the head-scratching moment was We’re All Gonna Die,
a zany, studio-abetted album where our favorite band of Laurel Canyon folkies
blew up the blueprint they’d been following for four albums straight. By all
accounts, Passwords should have felt more familiar. It was produced by
Jonathan Wilson, who also produced the first two Dawes albums, and it
definitely strikes more than a few “return to form” trademarks. For whatever
reason, though, this album confounded me. It felt too long, too somber, too
midtempo. Taylor Goldsmith still writes in character vignettes, but here,
they’re often set against the uneasy backdrop of the Trump political era. It’s
not always a comfortable place to be—especially on jittery cuts like
“Telescope,” which tells the entire life story of a guy who probably became a
MAGA conspiracy theorist. But Passwords, if you peel away the
layers, is
a nuanced and deeply empathetic album about reaching for understanding
and
measured dialogue—even in a time when so many people are calling for
more
extreme measures. Those messages might not resonate with everyone, but
when
Goldsmith delves into his own personal life toward the end of the
record—really
a first in his songwriting—you start to find the truth in a lyric from
“Crack
the Case”: “It’s really hard to hate anyone when you know what they’ve
been through.” When Goldsmith sings about his life of lonely, melancholy
sadness—masked with wry humor and songs and miles on the road—he reminds
us
that everyone is living out a more complex narrative than we can ever
understand through social media or minimal interactions. Maybe if we all
decide
to coexist, we can live happier lives. It would be nice, because as
Goldsmith
notes at the end of this album, “the time flies either way.”
126.
Turnpike Troubadours -
A Long Way from Your Heart
Country music had a lot of songwriting heroes this decade.
The Americana segment loved Jason Isbell. The Nashville scene admired Chris
Stapleton and Lori McKenna. The left-of-the-dial listeners yearning for
something a little weirder gravitated toward Sturgill Simpson. Amidst the
country purists, though, I’m not sure anyone was more beloved than Evan Felker
from Turnpike Troubadours. A Long Way from Your Heart makes it immensely
clear why that was. It’s a record that doesn’t seem all that special the first
time you listen to it. Sure, it sounds nice enough: Turnpike Troubadours are
(were?) a legendarily tight live band, and their talents are well on display
here—especially fiddle player Kyle Nix. But the more time you spend with this record
and delve into the lyrics, the more it grips you. The melodies find ways to
burrow into your soul, and the lyrics absolutely get under your skin. I could
fill an entire blurb about this album just by quoting little lines that I love:
lines that are tender or resilient or wryly funny or achingly sad. But I
suppose I’ll just choose one verse from one song that I think encapsulates
precisely why Evan Felker spent this decade admired by so many country fans:
“This old world will spin again/Play me like a violin/Knock all of the wind out
of my chest/Well I don't mind you playin' me/Just keep it in a major key/Now
you're waking up and I can get some rest.” Sometimes, you find yourself just
waiting for a specific verse in a specific song to come around because you love
the words so much. With Turnpike Troubadours on A Long Way from Your Heart,
that’s every verse, on every song.
127.
Will Hoge -
Small Town Dreams
On Small Town Dreams,
Will Hoge set out to answer a single question: could he be a country superstar
if he really tried to be? By this point, Hoge had scored a number one hit and a
very prominent feature on a heavily-syndicated Chevy ad campaign. Sure, his
number one hit had been performed by a different artist (Eli Young Band, taking
on Hoge’s 2009 classic “Even If It Breaks Your Heart”) and his ad campaign song
(called “Strong”) had never translated into airplay or big-time recognition.
But there was no doubt that Hoge’s songs could play to the masses if the circumstances
were right. By all accounts, Small Town
Dreams should have been a mainstream country juggernaut. Songs like “Better
Than You” and “Middle of America” are catchier than anything Luke Combs smashed
the charts with two years later. “Growing up Around Here” is a way smarter
hometown hymn than Zac Brown Band’s gargantuan “Homegrown” from the same year.
And “Just up the Road” is up there with Stapleton among the most well-sung
country songs of the decade. Regardless, Small
Town Dreams failed to take off. Part of it was a classic case of David
getting crushed by Goliath. Hoge tells a story of him and his band landing a big
promotional slot from a radio conglomerate, only to lose it to a mainstream
artist with higher-up connections. The other part was that Hoge maybe didn’t
quite go far enough to play the Nashville establishment game. While he teamed
up with Nashville songwriters and ramped up the hooks, Small Town Dreams still retains some grit and guile—in
tear-jerking story songs like “They Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used To” and
“Little Bitty Dreams,” or in rockers like “Til I Do It Again,” a song that
certainly would have been a smash if Brothers Osborne had cut it for their
debut album a year later. It’s too bad for Hoge that he never got the big-time
dream he’d been chasing for years, but for the rest of us, Small Town Dreams remains a rare treat: a country album with the
hooks and muscle of the Nashville machine, but the heart and hustle of the
underground.
Looking back now, it’s almost impossible to believe that
fun. ever got as big as they did. Aim
& Ignite, the band’s 2009 debut, was essentially a cult classic. In the
pop-punk/emo scene, that album rode the goodwill for singer Nate Ruess’s
former band The Format to huge amounts of love and acclaim. But our corner of
the music world often embraced artists that no one else ever heard of or
appreciated—especially before the so-called emo revival that arrived in the
middle of this decade. Most of us never would have predicted that fun. would
even ever land even a minor hit, let alone become a household name. That first album
was weird, with songs that blurred
the lines between pop music, Disney film scores, opera, classic rock, and a
circus. But “We Are Young” captured the zeitgeist, landing on Glee (another 2010s relic that it’s hard
to believe was ever as popular as it was), scoring a Superbowl commercial
feature, and resonating deeply with every person who happened to find
themselves in high school or college at the time it hit the radio waves. It was
odd, to hear a band I loved this much become a “thing” with so many of my
friends. I remember hearing my roommate singing along with “Some Nights”
through the bedroom wall we shared, or my choir buddies jamming “Carry On” on
our spring tour. I certainly remember, during one of the last Friday nights of
the spring semester, hearing “We Are Young” come on the radio when me and all
my friends were one drink away from needing
to be carried home. Briefly, fun. were
a household name, and it seemed like they were poised to become the biggest
rock band on the planet—an eventual arena rock draw and a probable Superbowl
Halftime Show act. Instead, these guys never made another album together. Seven
years later, that fate feels both melancholic and like the perfect microcosm of
just how fleeting pop stardom seemed in the 2010s. But when I listen back
through Some Nights, removed from the
overhype and overplay that set in during the spring of 2012, nothing about
these songs seems fleeting: “Some Nights” is still gargantuan and so, so
hopeful; “Stars” still over-reaches for pop maximalism in a way that probably
reshaped the course of pop music more than we realize; and “Out on the Town”
still sounds like the perfect callback to old fun.—a little less famous and a
little more naïve. Most of all, “We Are Young” still sounds like those stolen
moments with friends at 2 a.m. on some spare Friday night, thinking we had all
the time in the world when we really had nothing but the music and the night.
129.
Counting Crows -
Somewhere Under Wonderland
Counting Crows were one of the most formative bands in my
music development. I first heard them in childhood, when August & Everything After—“Mr. Jones” in particular—struck a
chord. But I didn’t fall in love with them until I was 13, when I picked up
their greatest hits collection and let it become the soundtrack to a dark,
cold, solitary winter. Then, after that, the Crows effectively disappeared. It
would be four long years until 2008’s Saturday
Nights & Sunday Mornings, and then six-plus years until Somewhere Under Wonderland. By the time Wonderland arrived, I was no longer that same awkward adolescent boy, hiding away in his bedroom for hours at a time and
listening to “Anna Begins” and “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby” while working on art
projects. Somewhere Under Wonderland arrived
a month and a half after I got married. My wife and I were preparing to move
back to our home state of Michigan—from the Chicago area, where we’d spent a
couple years—and this album came to be the sound of my goodbye to that place. I
loved it at first, won over by its freewheeling arrangements and loose,
anything-can-happen musicality. I turned on it later, longing for the sharper
hooks and tighter lyrical work of Hard
Candy and even Saturday Nights.
I’m somewhere in between those two extremes now. On the one hand, Somewhere Under Wonderland comes closer
than any other Crows album to capturing the band’s improvisatory live show. On
the other hand, it lacks some of the emotional punch that had always given the
older Crows albums their gravitational pull. Still, there’s a lot to love here,
from the way “Palisades Park” builds an entire universe in a song (it’s
reminiscent of “Incident on 57th Street” or “New York City Serenade,
from Springsteen’s The Wild, The Innocent
& The E Street Shuffle), to the perfect poetic beauty of “Possibility
Days.” As the sun set on my time in Illinois, and as I wound my way closer to
home, the lyrics of that song hit me hard. “The worst part of a good day/Is
hearing yourself say goodbye to one more possibility day,” Duritz sang. It was
an encapsulation of what I felt as I closed the door on one chapter and
everything it might have been, to start another with endless possibilities of
its own.
130.
Bleachers -
Strange Desire
Jack Antonoff spent the decade trying to remake pop music in
his own image. He largely succeeded. First with fun. and later with songwriting
and production duties for the likes of Taylor Swift and Lorde, Antonoff was
semi-sneakily one of the most influential people in the music world for the
last 10 years. But his apex came here, on his first album under the Bleachers
moniker. Strange Desire was one of
the many albums from this decade that earned comparisons to John Hughes movie
soundtracks. It was a decade where pop was enamored with the sounds of the
‘80s, and Antonoff was just one of the many artists playing in that sandbox.
But something about Strange Desire feels
more worthy of that comparison than any other album that received it—which
could also help explain why multiple songs from this album actually did end up in a Hughes-y teen movie
called Love, Simon. There’s a
widescreen sugar rush fantasia to songs like “Wild Heart,” “I Wanna Get
Better,” and especially “Rollercoaster” that immediately feels cinematic. I
remember hearing “Rollercoaster” for the first time and just wanting to find a
deserted road somewhere, where I could drive really fast and play that song
really loud. But for all of its throwback glory and youthful innocence, Strange Desire also packs a weighty
emotional punch. The first song Antonoff wrote for the project was “Like a
River Runs,” which is about his sister who died of brain cancer when he was 18.
In the song, he falls asleep and dreams of her, so vividly that he feels like
she’s still there with him. But when he wakes up, it’s like losing her all over
again. “I get the feeling that you’re somewhere close,” he sings, late in the
song. It’s a feeling we’ve all had before and will have again, because, as
Dumbledore asks in Harry Potter: “You think the dead we loved ever truly leave
us?” Of course they don’t.
131.
Carly Rae Jepsen -
E.MO.TION
Somewhere along the line, Carly Rae Jepsen became
the
critical darling pop star. Leaving aside “Call Me Maybe,” one of the decade’s
most ubiquitous mainstream hits, Jepsen has never been a superstar. In the eyes
of critics (and fans) though, she’s maybe the greatest active artist in pop
music. I’m not sure I agree with that assessment, but every time I push play on
E.MO.TION, I at least see the
argument. Anchored by “Run Away with Me,” a yearning, horn-assisted, dopamine
rush of a love song, this album soars like an '80s teen movie romance. One of my
very favorite music memories of the decade was listening to this album in the
car when driving home from a concert late at night in December 2015. My car was
the only one on the road, and as I cruised and careened along the overpasses
and interchanges that pass through the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan,
surrounded by bright streetlights and tall buildings, these songs just sounded
so epic. Songs like “I Really Like You, ”“Making the Most of the Night,” and
“Let’s Get Lost” made me feel like I was traveling at light speed, even if I
was barely clocking over the posted speed limit of 70. That’s the effect that
great pop music
should have: it should amplify everything and make you feel
like you are living some larger-than-life version of your own existence. That’s
part of what makes
E.MO.TION special,
but it’s not all of it. The other piece is that, on these songs, Carly Rae
manages to sound more like the girl next door than like a pop superstar.
Compared to the Taylor Swifts and Beyonces and Ariana Grandes, she sounds
friendly and approachable in a way that makes her music more relatable. You can
imagine her commiserating with you about boy problems, or knocking on your window
in the middle of the night and inviting you to run away with her on some misfit
adventure that will surely end up the stuff of teen movie myth. It’s a unique
talent, and it’s part of what makes
E.MO.TION
so singular, so thrilling, and so beloved among the people who fell under
its spell.
132.
Tyler Hilton -
City on Fire
Tyler Hilton is one of those artists that doesn’t really
belong to any one genre. He came up as an early 2000s teen pop heartthrob, but
he’s always had other aspects to his sound: folk, country, and Americana over
here; a little bit of southern rock over there; swooning ‘80s pop somewhere in
the middle. He has had, frankly, the most bizarre journey of any artist I
follow, with his biggest claims to fame including a guest spot in Taylor
Swift’s “Teardrops on My Guitar” video, a lengthy recurring role on the teen
soap opera
One Tree Hill, and a brief cameo as Elvis Presley in the
Johnny Cash biopic
Walk the Line.
City on Fire is maybe the first
album in Hilton’s catalog that captures his full idiosyncratic, versatile
capability as an artist. The title track and “Anywhere I Run” are flammable
country songs. “When the Night Moves” and “The Way She Loves You” are sweeping,
romantic, ‘80s style soft-rock jams. “How Long ‘Til I Lose You” is a pure pop
confection. “I Don’t Want to Be Scared” and “When I See You, I See Home” are
gorgeous, aching folk songs. There are even oddities like “Seasons Change” (a
catchy little reggae-influenced ditty) and “Find Me One” (a tongue-in-cheek
honky-tonk one-take). And then the album ends with a five-minute, super earnest
acoustic cover of Rihanna’s “Stay.” It’s a mess of an album, just like Hilton’s
career has been a chaotic thing to follow, full of hiatuses and chameleonic sonic
shifts. But it’s also an impressive display of songcraft, making up for what it
lacks in cohesion with sharp hooks and a metric ton of charisma.
Legend has it that Jon Latham’s
very first word was “Bruce”—as in Bruce Springsteen. That’s not entirely
unsurprising after you hear Lifers, an album whose heart beats with the
spirit of classic rock ‘n’ roll. Latham himself sounds more like Petty than
Bruce, but his biggest impulses—long, detailed story songs; openhearted
nostalgia; unwavering earnestness—were surely learned from The Boss. Latham
proves on track one that he can use these skills to craft bar-band rock ‘n’
roll that strikes to the heart of the generational struggle of disenfranchised
millennials. But he spends most of this album in much quieter territory,
investigating Springsteen standby topics like father-son relationships (“Old
Man and the Sea”) and the lifelong, blood-deep bonds of friendship (“Lifers”)
with detail and empathy. Latham’s biggest talent is the slowburn build: five of
these eight songs are longer than five minutes, and most of those are ballads.
He uses that time wisely, constructing songs that feel as vast as a wide-open
countryside, with emotions as deep as a well. Case-in-point is “Yearbook
Signatures,” possibly the most openly nostalgic song I have ever heard. It’s a
song about growing up to the soundtrack of rock ‘n’ roll, and about how those
songs sometimes end up being the only things you have left of high school,
after those friends slip out of touch and those times turn into distant
memories. “Lord ain’t if funny what rock ‘n’ roll can do,” Latham sings. As
someone who hears his favorite songs from high school far more than he sees his
best friends from high school, those words hit hard.
134.
Eric Church -
Mr. Misunderstood
Mr. Misunderstood is the Eric Church album that comes
the closest to encapsulating everything that is great about Eric Church.
According to the vast majority of his fans, Church is one of those artists who
you just can’t really get until you’ve seen him live. There are so many
different sides of him: Eric Church the singer-songwriter; Eric Church the mainstream
country star; Eric Church the arena rock star; Eric Church the hardest working
man in (country music) show business. I wrote a piece a few years ago about
how Eric Church is “the heir apparent to Bruce Springsteen,” at least in a live
environment. His marathon shows and do-or-die commitment to the act of
entertaining make him a truly generational live music figure, in any genre. All of that is
hard to convey in the course of a 40-minute album. Chief was the
mainstream country album; The Outsiders was the big arena play; Desperate
Man was the singer-songwriter album. None of those records show off all his
sides, which strands them in “good not great” territory. (Chief is on
this list, thanks in large part to the presence of the song “Springsteen”; the
other two just missed.) Mr. Misunderstood almost does the trick. “Record
Year” was a number one country hit; “Kill a Word,” an anti-bullying screed that
took on extra weight in the Trump era, was one of the decade’s smartest,
hardest-hitting pieces of songwriting; and songs like the title track and
“Knives of New Orleans” were massive enough to shout from the cheap seats. If I
had to guess, I’d say Church’s masterpiece is still in front of him. For now,
though, Mr. Misunderstood is a pretty solid stand-in.
135.
John Mayer -
Paradise Valley
Loosely, Paradise
Valley is a concept album on two fronts. On the one hand, it was intended
as Mayer’s “country music album,” to follow the folk-rock lean of the previous
year’s Born and Raised. Several of
the songs are as twangy as Mayer would ever take his sound, like the
starry-eyed rhinestone cowboy lullaby of “Badge and Gun” or the pure honky-tonk
kick of “You’re No One Til Someone Lets You Down.” On the other hand, Paradise Valley is structured to tell
the arc of one entire summer. The opener, another twangy gem called “Wildfire,”
conjures up visions of a raucous early-summer party under the stars and a big
full moon. The closer, a wistful beauty called “On the Way Back Home,” finds
the protagonist leaving a summer town after Labor Day, as the beach closes down
and the ghost of a summer fling disappears on the breeze. The album isn’t
always successful at adhering to either of those concepts. There’s an obvious
pop play in “Who You Love,” featuring Mayer’s then-girlfriend Katy Perry, and
an even more obvious cred-grab with a late-album interlude (also called
“Wildfire”) that features a wildly out-of-place Frank Ocean. Paradise Valley may have been better if
Mayer had committed himself fully to making a country album, or to making a
concept album about a whirlwind summertime romance, or to doing both. At its
best, though, the album transcends its own flaws. “Dear Marie” is a thoughtful
song about an old flame that morphs from a pleasant folk ditty into an
arena-worthy rave-up. And the aforementioned “On the Way Back Home” is such a
strong and fitting finale that it makes the album feel more cohesive than it is. “Life ain’t short but it sure is
small/You get forever and nobody at all/It don’t come often and it don’t stay
long.” The things that make life worth living—love, good times,
friendship—don’t necessarily last forever. Just like a perfect summer, they can
be temporary or even fleeting. “On the Way Back Home” captures all of that. It
captures the melancholy sadness of leaving something wonderful behind; it
captures the fond grin as you drive away, remembering all the good things that
will now be a part of your memory forever. Mayer may have made better albums,
but he hasn’t written many better songs.
Anchors is a back-to-basics record for Will Hoge. He
spent the better part of this decade pushing toward a more mainstream country
sound, emboldened by the success his song “Even If It Breaks Your Heart” had enjoyed in the hands of the Eli Young Band. On Anchors,
he drops the charade and
goes back to writing songs more like he did before: raw, rootsy rock ‘n’
roll with
all the dirt, dust, blood, sweat, and tears left intact. It’s not my
favorite
record of his, but there’s something about it that feels so honest and
unvarnished. There’s a kind of rebellious hope in these songs that I
always
loved. The characters hitting the highway for greater things maybe don’t
have
all the naïve optimism of Springsteen’s heroes in “Born to Run.” They
know they are getting older and that their dreams might be out of reach.
They know that they
might end up turning around and retreating back home as broken, dejected
failures. They know their relationships might pick up a little bit of
rust from
time to time. But their hearts are still beating, and their radios are
still
blaring, and their souls still feel the promise of sweeter days
ahead—even if
those sweeter days are intermingled with some tough times and cold
nights. When
Hoge sings a song about being 17 and falling in love for the first time,
he
does it like Seger singing “Night Moves,” because he knows that summer
songs
and young love and hymns of possibility still have resonance. They
always will, and this album will too.
137.
Brandy Clark -
Big Day in a Small Town
I once read that the ultimate benchmark for a classic album
was world building. If an album could wrap you up and transport you to its own
little ether universe—a spot with a clear sense of place and character—then it
was well on its way to classic status. Classic or not, Big Day in a Small
Town undoubtedly fits that particular bill. The cover itself features a map of a small
town, and the vinyl version of the album even includes vocal narration between
tracks that is intended to shore up the concept. Whether you have those elements or
not, though, this album encapsulates a lot of what it means to live in a
nowhere, dot-on-the-map town. It’s a place where being crowned Homecoming Queen
in high school can feasibly be your biggest life accomplishment, or where the
gossip is so loud (and the geographical radius so small) that everyone hears
about an affair or a teenage pregnancy within 15 minutes flat. But it’s also a
place where single mothers pine for love, where siblings mourn their late
parents with drinks and tears, and where heartbreaks are so potent that they
might lead someone to proclaim that “love can go to hell in a broken heartbeat
minute.” It’s a sad, quirky, vivid place, and Brandy Clark’s ability to paint
the songs with equal parts empathy and humor makes that world come alive.
138.
Brandon Flowers -
Flamingo
The second time Brandon Flowers made a solo LP, with 2015’s The Desired Effect, he made something
extremely inventive and unique. While that record had shades of The Killers in
its DNA, it was thoroughly its own animal—the rare solo album from an
established rock ‘n’ roll frontman that offered something as potent and
singular as his work with the full band. Flamingo
isn’t that. Instead, this album—the first Brandon Flowers solo LP—plays
like the great lost Killers album. By this point in the Flowers/Killers
narrative, the band had essentially been riding an unstoppable wave since
before the release of Hot Fuss. The
schedule was: make a record, put out a record, tour the world, court some
controversy, rinse, repeat. By the time 2010 rolled around, the band was burned
out and in need of a break. Flowers wanted to keep going, so he made Flamingo. It’s hard not to yearn for the
full might of the band on these songs, especially widescreen scene-setters like
“Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas,” or would-be arena-fillers like “Crossfire.”
You want the roar of Dave Keuning’s guitar, the tumultuous rain of Ronnie
Vannucci’s drums, or the dark Joy Division-esque grumble of Mark Stoermer’s
bass. Even without those ingredients, though, Flamingo thrives. In terms of pure songwriting, Flowers has rarely
been better than he is on “Hard Enough,” a clear-eyed plea for a second chance
at a relationship that failed the first time; or “On the Floor,” a nightmarish,
gospel-tinged slow burn that sits near the end of the album. With the full
band, Flamingo would have been a
classic. As a solo affair, it’s a tad too polite, lacking the wall-scaling
audacity that makes Day & Age (a
considerably weaker set of songs) feel somehow more consequential. Luckily,
when we got this level of songwriting from Flowers, plus the full might of The
Killers, we got what I consider to be their best album: 2012’s Battle Born.
139.
Brothers Osborne -
Pawn Shop
Brothers Osborne were a breath of fresh air in country music
for a lot of reasons. They arrived in the waning stages of the bro country
movement, and they could have almost been mistaken for the next incarnation of
the Florida Georgia Line mold thanks to songs like “Rum.” But if you delve into
Pawn Shop, the familial duo’s first full-length, you’ll find a lot of
substance to latch onto—both musically and lyrically. TJ Osborne’s sandpaper
baritone voice is worlds different from all the Luke Bryan soundalikes that populate country
radio, and John Osborne’s ripping lead guitar skills—especially on the massive
solo that grounds “Stay a Little Longer”—made him a guitar hero in a decade
with far too few of them. But lots of Nashville artists can sing, and most of
them end up backed by super-skilled sessions players anyway. What made Brothers
Osborne stick was how cleverly and genuinely they shook up country tropes. “21
Summer” is an all-timer in the “summertime nostalgia anthem” category,
capturing the kind of youthful summer fling that you can’t ever quite let go
of. “Heart Shaped Locket” is a dark twist on the cheating song genre, with a
climactic moment that is thrilling and threatening even though the story never
turns violent. And “Loving Me Back” takes the overused “love is a drug”
metaphor and turns it into a soul-elevating, gospel-touched beauty.
140.
The Menzingers -
On the Impossible Past
On the Impossible Past. I always loved that title. I
never knew exactly what it meant, and for a long time, I didn’t even appreciate
the album that it came from. But something about that title was magnetic to me.
It seemed to convey this sense of deep, unquenchable yearning—for a time, or an
ideal, or a relationship, or a sense of innocence that’s gone for good. On the record, “On
the Impossible Past” is a minimalist interlude about crashing a car into a
ditch. It’s the same “American muscle car” that shows up in the opening track,
“Good Things.” “Like when we would take rides/In your American muscle car/I
felt American for once in my life/I never felt it again.” Early this decade, my
first opportunity to write about music outside of my own blog came for a
European publication called Rockfreaks. Right after I joined the staff, I
remember the site running a perfect 10-out-of-10 review of this record. And I
remember how the writer, who was from Denmark, wrote about the world this
record built for him: one that was deeply American but also undeniably
universal. “I’ve never been to America, never driven a muscle car, never smoked
a cigarette, and never loved a waitress,” he wrote, and it didn’t matter. The
story of On the Impossible Past—of having a horrible time pulling
yourself together; of hanging out in diners; of driving around aimlessly
late
into the night; of running out of money; of getting drunk and washing
dishes with a significant other; of getting high and listening to your
boredom—is a story a lot of
people have lived. It’s a story that is mundane, but also one that is
crammed
with passion and love and life. There’s nothing airbrushed are fake
about On the Impossible Past. It is the truth, told by characters who
are complicated, about lives and worlds and economic situations and day-to-day
troubles that are complicated, too. No wonder it became one of the true
classics of this era.
141.
Ingrid Michaelson -
Lights Out
At this point, Ingrid Michaelson’s career can be fairly
split into two halves. First, she was a folk-leaning singer/songwriter who
benefitted greatly from the brief peak of coffeehouse-themed channels on XM and
Sirius satellite radio. Later, she became a full-on pop artist, slinging
anthems like “Hell No” straight toward the Top 40 charts. Lights Out is her in-between album, an idiosyncratic,
all-over-the-place set of songs that flits from rousing crowd-singalong jams
like “Girls Chase Boys” or “One Night Town” to moments of pure intimacy, like
“Wonderful Unknown” and “Ready to Lose.” The mix doesn’t really make for a cohesive
album, but Michaelson’s songcraft is pure, raw, and personal in a way that pop
music often isn’t. Her love songs feel lived-in and organic. Her break-up songs
ache with the hurt of something that can’t be reclaimed. And her summer-ready,
seize-the-day anthems—particularly the splendid “Afterlife”—are bold, epic, and
uplifting. Sonically experimental while still keeping the wit and
girl-next-door charm that made Michaelson so relatable in the first place, Lights
Out is maybe my favorite Ingrid Michaelson album, just for how it captures
her at so many of her best angles. I also fondly remember listening to this
album all spring in 2014, leading up to my wedding day. It’s an album my wife
and I shared, often putting it on as an agreeable soundtrack for long, long
drives home from the Chicago area, where we were living at the time. I don’t
miss those drives, and I don’t miss Chicago, but I still love thinking back to
the excitement of that season—excitement this album still holds within its
songs.
142.
Damien Rice -
My Favourite Faded Fantasy
Damien Rice disappeared for so long that when news of My
Favourite Faded Fantasy started to emerge, I thought it was a cruel April
Fools prank. I bought 9 with my birthday money the week after I turned
16. My Favourite Faded Fantasy arrived in the fall after I got married,
shortly before my 24th birthday. So much of my life changed in the intervening
years, but hearing Rice’s voice again on songs like “I Don’t Want to Change
You” and “The Greatest Bastard” made it feel like no time had passed at all. These
songs were packed with the pent-up heartbreak, regret, and resignation that
Rice had been sitting on for eight years. As the story goes, Lisa Hannigan was
Damien’s muse, lover, and musical partner on 9 and O, his
emotionally raw debut. When their relationship fractured, Rice told everyone
that he would trade all his songs and all his fame to have her back in his
life. He almost did, but in the end, the music won. The result is one of the
decade’s most patiently beautiful albums, packed with stuff like “Colour Me In”
and “Trusty and True” that is among Rice’s best material ever. On the latter,
Damien even seems to stumble toward something we hadn’t heard much in his music
up to that point: hope.
143.
The 1975 -
I like it when you sleep for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it
I like it when you sleep for you are so beautiful yet so
unaware of it is, at once, the biggest argument for and the biggest
argument against The 1975. On the one hand, it is an obnoxious overreach.
Suffice to say that the 74-minute runtime is as exhausting as the album title.
On the other hand, I like it when you sleep is a sterling
example of everything that a modern rock band can be if they want it enough. On
this album, The 1975 use genres and influences like playthings. They write
colossal pop songs like “The Sound” and then sequence them just a few tracks
away from acoustic folk heartbreakers like “Nana.” They get honest and candid
about heartbreak, drug addiction, grief over lost loved ones, and people who
post photos of their salads on the internet. And they somehow manage to make
all their extremes coalesce into one of the decade’s most immersive,
jaw-dropping listening experiences. In The 1975 catalog, the first album had
more obvious highlights, while A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships was
the record that really hit the zeitgeist and made The 1975 into critical
darlings. Here, though, they were still in a unique position: under-the-radar
and written-off enough to play the underdogs, but big enough stars to reach for
arena-scraping grandeur. The result is, top to bottom, their greatest work of
art—even if it’s not my personal favorite.
144. The Gaslight Anthem - Get Hurt
“I came to get hurt/Might as well do your worst to me.”
Brian Fallon sings those words, gruff and unguarded, on the crushing title
track of Get Hurt. The line and the
song come just three tracks into an album beset on all sides by heartbreak,
change, and exhaustion. Fallon’s marriage had crumbled and his band was feeling
the strain of a tireless write-record-release-tour schedule that stretched back
the better part of a decade. By the time Get
Hurt arrived in the summer of 2014, it was the fourth Brian Fallon-related
album in as many years. Everyone was burned out and everyone’s patience was
fraying. It was a wildly different place than where we’d left the band just two
years before, after Gaslight had scored a breakthrough with 2012’s Handwritten. That album’s leadoff
single, “45,” had been their most popular song ever, and the album’s
larger-than-life sonic palette—courtesy of producer Brendan O’Brien—made them
sound a lot like the next big thing. Add the mainstream punch to the mantle
that had been tossed at Fallon’s feet since the early days—that he was the next
Bruce Springsteen—and Get Hurt should
have been the next logical step toward superstardom. But the success and lofty
comparisons also put a target on Fallon’s back, and Get Hurt quickly became a punching bag. Pitchfork eviscerated it and other publications compared it to
Nickelback. The mean-spirited reaction dovetailed with the band’s exhaustion
and Fallon’s personal-life turmoil to derail arguably the greatest rock band of
the 21st century, and they have yet to release another album.
Get Hurt, in
retrospect, is as messy as all these circumstances would lead you to believe.
Fallon and company are caught between wanting to reach even higher (massive
rockers like “1,000 Years” and “Rollin’ and Tumblin’”) and wanting to turn away
from the limelight (jagged and insular cuts like “Stay Vicious,” “Stray Paper,”
and “Underneath the Ground”). The result is the least cohesive Gaslight Anthem
record—an album that lacks the arc and flow that made albums like
The ’59 Sound and
American Slang greater than the sum of their parts. But it’s also
an incredibly revealing portrait of a band under unbearable amounts of
pressure. Amidst the experimentation and all of Fallon’s attempts to avoid his
usual writing signatures, the embattled frontman jams poignant and devastating
accounts of his pain into the songs. On “Get Hurt,” he thinks about packing up
and leaving Jersey for California—something you could hardly picture him doing on
The ’59 Sound. And on the
shattering closing track “Dark Places,” he pledges: “If I thought it would
help, I would drive this car into the sea.” The song is a legitimately
upsetting account from a broken man, recognizing his own need for a change, or
a rest, or a chance to drift away for awhile. Fallon’s story ultimately had a
happy ending, chronicled on his first two solo albums. For The Gaslight Anthem,
though, the story still rings bittersweet, thanks to this album. They,
alongside a few contemporaries, were living proof that rock ‘n’ roll could
thrive in the 2010s. And one by one, they drifted away.
145.
Frank Turner -
Positive Songs for Negative People
On 2013’s Tape Deck Heart, Frank Turner was a
heartbroken mess. On Positive Songs for Negative People, he sounds
rejuvenated and he sings like his life depends on it. Songs like “Get Better,”
“The Next Storm,” and “Glorious You” are imbued with the reckless optimism that
comes with realizing that yes, life does in fact go on. Getting over a rough patch
in your life—whether it’s a breakup or a big failure—can be difficult. But
realizing that you’re still alive and that your heart is still beating can also
be hugely life-affirming. Realizing that you’re strong enough to weather those
storms can give you a new lease on your life, and a new drive to explore all
the possibility the world has to offer. This album rings with that promise.
Even the breakup songs—tracks like “Mittens” and “Love Forty Down”—can’t help
but sound a little hopeful. It doesn’t hurt that Butch Walker is sitting behind
the boards, offering up what might be his career-best production work, or
encouraging Frank to deliver raw, live vocal tracks on every song. The radiant
highs of this album are intoxicating, which only makes it that much more
heartbreaking when, on the last track, everything comes crashing back to Earth. The
closer, called “Song for Josh,” is a crushing ode to a friend who chose to end
his own life, delivered through tears during a live show at the venue where
that friend used to work. “Why didn’t you call? My phone’s always on,” Frank
sings at the beginning of the song. It’s a sobering note to end the album on,
and a reminder that, even as you face your own burdens and battles, you never
know what the people around you might be grappling with, too.
146.
Josh Abbott Band -
Front Row Seat
On most records, the artist is the protagonist. There’s an
implicit contract, in listening to most music, that you side with the person
singing the songs. What’s fascinating about Josh Abbott Band’s
Front Row Seat is how it subverts that
contract. Abbott, an extremely successful singer from the niche “Texas country”
scene, structured this album to tell the entire story of his first marriage. It
starts as you would expect it to, with opener “While I’m Young” functioning as
the jaunty “boy meets girl” moment. The first half of the album is a love
story, moving from that chance encounter in a bar to honeymoon stage
infatuation to the intimacy that comes with time and engagement and marriage.
But then the plot twists, and you get to the back half of the record—a stretch
of seven tracks that pummel you with their sadness and resignation. We’ve heard
this before: it’s breakup album 101, dating back to legendary records like
Blood on the Tracks. For decades, we’ve
listened to artists tell us all about their broken hearts and the people to
blame for them. The thing with
Front Row
Seat is that Abbott is the guy to blame. “It ain’t your fault/I might have
been born to break your heart,” he sings at one point, and he
did. Abbott’s marriage broke apart
because he cheated on his wife while he was out on tour. He knows it’s
reprehensible, and that it’s a mistake he’ll never stop regretting. There are
no excuses here, or attempts to redirect blame. Songs like “Ghosts,” “Amnesia,”
“Autumn,” and “Anonymity” grapple compellingly with the way a momentary mistake
can be big enough and unforgivable enough to upend your entire life. By casting
himself as the villain, Abbott somehow makes the art of a breakup song ache
that much more.
147.
Miranda Lambert -
Wildcard
The last time we heard from Miranda Lambert, she was getting
over a heartbreak—seemingly in real time, on tape for all to hear. That album,
2016’s post-divorce opus The Weight of These Wings, blew Lambert’s
personal life up into a big screen subject, exploring her split from ex-husband
Blake Shelton over the course of an epic double album sprawl. In contrast, Wildcard
seems almost tongue-in-cheek. There’s one song called “White Trash,” where
Lambert makes light of the insults that close-minded people have occasionally
thrown her way over the course of her career. There’s another song called “Way
Too Pretty for Prison,” which is kind of like a rewrite of the “Cell Block
Tango” from the musical Chicago, only with the ladies deciding not to
kill their cheating, good-for-nothing, bastard husbands. Other tunes extol the
virtues of strong Mexican spirts (“Tequila Does”), hand-wave all the disasters
and social blunders that might come over the course of a lifetime (“It All
Comes out in the Wash”), and own Miranda’s reputation as a maneater (“Track
Record”). The result is the most purely fun album Lambert has made in
years—perhaps ever. But when the serious moments crackle through—the sweeping
forbidden romance epic of “Fire Escape,” or the personal reckoning of “Dark
Bars”—they add an extra layer of sincerity and maturity that gives the funnier
songs more depth. One of the best lessons Lambert learned on Weight was
that songs didn’t have to be just happy, or just sad, or just sassy, or just
funny, or just badass, or just inspirational: sometimes, they can be all those
things at once.
148.
Kalie Shorr -
Open Book
Kalie Shorr had a long, hard road to travel to get to
Open
Book. While this record is her debut, she’s been a factor in the
up-and-coming country music scene for at least half a decade—especially in the fight to support and
elevate the genre’s female songwriters. While her
EPs were strong, though,
Open Book is a triumph. It is the kind of raw,
honest, unflinching album that you can only make when you’ve been through hell
and come out on the other side. For Shorr, that hell was losing her sister to a
heroin overdose. This album reckons with that tragedy, along with a million
other smaller battles she’s fought to get to this point: a childhood that
wasn’t picture perfect, with a family that definitely had its issues; a
complicated relationship with her father; a lot of heartbreaks, courtesy of a
lot of shitty guys; her own vices, mistakes, and regrets. The resulting set of
songs is sometimes funny (“F U Forever,” 2019’s greatest kiss-off anthem),
often deeply poignant (“Big Houses,” a love letter from Shorr to her mom), and
occasionally unendurably painful (“The World Keeps Spinning,” about moving on
after her sister’s death). But the album peaks with “Lullaby,” a hymn to the
resilience of the human spirit and to closing the book on the bad chapters to
start newer and hopefully better ones. The song is the album in microcosm,
existing somewhere between the early 2010s pop-country of Taylor Swift, the
angsty teen pop of
Let Go-era Avril Lavigne, and the quiet-to-loud
emotional dynamics of Dashboard Confessional circa
A Mark, A Mission, A
Brand, A Scar. It’s Shorr’s own little corner of the country music scene, and she owns it with wit, heart, and brutal honesty.
149. Eric Church - Chief
Eric Church would become more contemplative, more ambitious,
and more interesting as he moved further into his career. On Chief, though, he was at the crossroads
between his pop-country gifts and his classic rock impulses. The result
is both his commercial peak and his most immediate record. It’s all weekend
beers and whiskey hangovers and summertime romances, blasting like a jukebox in
a rowdy bar. The lyrics are usually decidedly small-scale, offering
slice-of-life narratives that aren’t far from the bar band rock ‘n’ roll that
made up one-half of Springsteen’s The
River. There’s the working-class hero of “Drink in My Hand,” counting down
to Friday evening when he can cut loose and transform into a livelier version
of himself. There’s the titular subject of “Homeboy,” a stubborn, smartass,
hip-hop-loving teen rebelling against his parents for the sole purpose of being
contrary. There’s the small-town backroads romance of “Springsteen,” a tribute
to the way a melody can sound like a memory when you hear a song from your teen
years crackling through the car radio on a July Saturday night. But despite the
subject matter, Chief saw Church
reaching for the big leagues, with anthemic, hooky songs and muscular
arrangements capable of scraping the cheap seats in an arena. When it came out,
Chief looked like Church’s coronation
as country music’s new superstar entertainer. Looking back, it plays more like
the origin story for the decade’s greatest rock star. That it can be both
without contradicting itself is a tribute to the quality of the songs and the
dynamic talents of the man who brought them to life.
150.
Butch Walker and the Black Widows -
I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart
It says a lot that even Butch Walker’s worst album lands at
150 on my albums of the decade list. By most accounts, I Liked It Better is a flawed album. It feels scattershot and
random where most Butch albums are cohesive and unified, and it lacks the lofty
highlights that I’d come to expect from him by this point in his career. Here,
on his first of two albums with The Black Widows, Butch loosened his control
over his own music, allowing co-writers—especially Michael Trent—to have a lot
of influence on the direction of his sound. The result is a Butch Walker album
that often doesn’t feel like a Butch
Walker album. There are dusky country songs and vaudevillian pop songs and
Beatles-inspired ditties and at least two songs that sound like the modern folk
of Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes. There’s not much of Butch’s trademark,
tongue-in-cheek rock ‘n’ roll—though that side of him definitely creeps in on
late-album highlights like “They Don’t Know What We Know” and
“Days/Months/Years,” as well as on rock-solid live show staples like “Pretty
Melody” and “She Likes Hair Bands.” Even if it’s not my favorite Butch Walker
album, though, I have a lot of good memories of these songs. I vividly recall
sitting in my dorm room during my freshman year of college, excitedly waiting
for the album to download. I even more vividly recall a two-day spell in the
spring of 2010 when my brother and I caught two Butch shows back to back. Most
vividly, I remember the first night I ever spent hanging out one-on-one with
the girl I’d end up marrying. It was a not-quite-date where we drove all around
town before finally ending up at a local beach, just the two of us, lying on
the sand, looking at the early July stars, and learning all about one another.
In Friends, they call this occurrence
“The Night,” or: “When two people finally realize their feelings for each other,
and they talk for hours, and they learn all about the other person.” When I got
in my car to drive home, “Don’t You Think Someone Should Take You Home” was
playing on my iPod. From the beginning, I’d had that song earmarked for
late-night drives on hot muggy evenings. I knew it would play that role. I
didn’t know it would end up serving as the coda to one of the most pivotal
nights of my life. But then again, that’s what your favorite artists do
sometimes: even with their weakest albums, they’re still there to soundtrack
your world.
151.
Valenica -
Dancing with a Ghost
The last time we’d heard from Valenci, in the late 2000s,
frontman Shane Henderson was still reeling from the tragic and sudden death of
his girlfriend. The band’s 2008 album, We All Need a Reason to Believe,
was wrought with pathos from that event. It sounded like a bright, summer-ready
pop-punk album on the surface, but the lyrics packed a hefty emotional punch. Dancing
with a Ghost plays, to me, like one of the great recovery records of the
decade. “Have you skipped through broken records of your past and future self?”
Henderson sings at the very beginning of the album, on the propulsive title track.
It sounds like a mission statement for the album: about leaving the past
behind, even if you’re not totally sure what the future might look like now
that every plan you ever made is gone. Recovery doesn’t happen overnight.
Recalibrating your dreams and your plans takes time, and leads to stumbles and
false starts. But Dancing with a Ghost seems to embrace those false
starts with optimism. “I know somehow, some way, things will get better” goes
the refrain in “Spinning Out.” The album isn’t always so sunny: on “Losing Sleep,”
the narrator drives straight into the clouds of a foreboding storm, ignoring
the prophecies of the weather report as he goes. But most of Ghost is an
upbeat blast, stacked with pop-punk jams the likes of which we haven’t seen
much since (see “The Way” and “Days Go By”) and doing it all with genuine emotion and
heart. It’s a shame that, as of right now, this album is Valencia’s swansong.
152.
Green Day -
Revolution Radio
A lot of people think that Green Day went political on American Idiot and have largely been
making protest rock ever since. What made that album special, though, was how
it wove its politics into a broader story about coming of age and reckoning
with your own mistakes and naivete. Revolution
Radio is not as ambitious as American
Idiot. It isn’t a rock opera, for one thing. But it succeeds in part
because it takes the lessons learned on Idiot
to heart: first, ground the politics in the personal; second, wrap it all
up in songs that are catchy, fun, and digestible—even if their subject matter
is meant to stick around after the record stops spinning. And a lot of these
songs do demand some reflection. “Say
Goodbye” evokes Flint, Michigan, while “Bang Bang” is a troubling, potentially-in-poor-taste
look into the brain of a mass shooter (that also happens to be a riotously
catchy pop-punk song). Revolution Radio came
out right before Trump won the presidency, but it was so prescient that it
sounds even angrier and more urgent three years later. Those moments of
political disenfranchisement are intercut with songs like “Outlaws,” about
youthful rebellion and longtime friendships, or “Ordinary World,” about holding
the things that matter to you closely even as the world spins out of control.
And when the personal and political collide, on the seven-minute, two-part opus
“Forever Now,” the message comes across clearly: we protest and criticize and
fight against the bad things in our world because we want to live fulfilling
lives. We want to live lives defined by freedom and love and family and good
will toward our fellow men and women. Instead, we’ve given away our freedoms,
grown hostile toward one another, and focused in on the things that make us
different rather than recognizing all the things that make us the same. “If
this is what you call the good life/I want a better way to die,” Billie Joe
Armstrong proclaims, rejecting the idea that our world can’t be a better place.
Ultimately, that’s what the album is about: as long as we’re still breathing,
we have a chance to reach for something better.
153.
The Damnwells -
The Damnwells
What do you think of when you think of a “break-up album”?
For most of us, it’s probably an album we related very deeply to a personally
fraught period from our past. These albums come in many forms, but they’re
often awash in melancholy sadness, potent self-pity, and maybe even a bit of
self-righteous blame or vindictive anger. Especially if you came of age in the
pop-punk era, as I did, you’re well-versed in the latter. The Damnwells is a different kind of break-up album. It’s a
break-up album with the perspective of age, time, knowledge, and experience.
Absent are the mercurial emotions of the break-up albums you loved as a
teenager. In the lead-up to this album, the guys in The Damnwells counted off “cross-country
moves, grad school, marriage, divorce, and a couple of corporate jobs” as the
inspiration for the songs. The resulting album is a kick in the gut. It’s a
record about bad husbands, and girls who aren’t in love with you, and being way
too old now to die young. Frontman Alex Dezen delivers the lyrics with a wry,
self-deprecating sort of resignation, but that fact oddly just manages to make
them more crushing. “She walked with you under countless stars/She bought the
drinks at the cheaper bars/You found a way to make her laugh out loud/But she’s
somebody else’s baby now,” he sings in “The Girl That’s Not in Love with You,”
before adding the line that will surely break your heart: “It just kills you
that she still wants to be your friend.” What could be worse than that—than the
girl you used to love not wanting to be with you, but still wanting to stay in
touch? If you’re waiting for the answer, the album gives you one, in the form
of the last track. “You said, ‘Maybe we’ll meet someday in the middle of the
street.’/But I know I’ll never see you again.” The Damnwells captures that feeling, of uncoupling yourself from a
person who has been a major, pivotal part of your life, with the knowledge that
your time as lovers or friends or even acquaintances is over. Fittingly enough,
that last song, an achingly understated ballad called “None of These Things,”
was the last track The Damnwells ever put on a record. It’s all a bit like that
old Third Eye Blind lyric: “How it going to be/When you don’t know me anymore?”
154.
Thomas Rhett -
Life Changes
I wanted to hate Thomas Rhett. I really did. He was the
antithesis of everything I was supposed to admire as a fan of “real” country artists
like Stapleton and Sturgill and Turnpike Troubadours and Tyler Childers. He was
blatantly commercial! He was dispensing with the sound of traditional country
and incorporating elements of pop and R&B and hip-hop! He was ruling the
genre with limited vocal ability and a mere fraction of the musical skill of so
many other deserving artists! But little by little, Life Changes chipped away at my defenses until they were nothing
but rubble. About Rhett, all the things I said above are true. But it’s also true
that he’s one of the best craftsmen of hooks in any genre. And it’s also true that his writing is often more
than meets the eye, tucking detailed, highly autobiographical narratives into
ridiculously catchy pop-country songs. Moreover, Rhett’s desire to push the
boundaries of what country can be results in one of the most dynamic, enjoyable
albums in the genre this decade. Life
Changes isn’t cohesive—how could it be when it flits from EDM to '50s
doo-wop to Petty-flavored heartland rock in the space of just a few tracks? But
it touches on so many different sounds and styles that it’s impossible to be
bored while listening. Some of the songs are only interesting as sonic
experiments. The swooning, Sinatra-esque “Sweetheart,” for instance, sounds cool
on paper but sags a bit in execution. But other moments of the record are just
damn sturdy writing, like the weepy “Marry Me,” about watching the person you
love get hitched to someone else; or “Unforgettable,” about a beautiful girl
drinking a mango-rita and singing a Coldplay song. These songs, along with
wistful anthems of youth like “Sixteen,” “Renegades,” and “Smooth Like the
Summer,” capture two of the things I love most about country music. No other
genre so effectively distills the potency of nostalgia and no other genre so
effectively distills the possibility of a perfect summer night. Rhett does both
of those things just about as well as any artist in the game.
155.
The 1975 -
A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships
The 1975 are the rare band that have always been fearless.
They learned early on how to act like superstars, even if they weren’t yet. And
lo and behold, somewhere along the line, they managed to will themselves into
that status. Even by The 1975’s standards, though,
A Brief Inquiry into
Online Relationships is a big swing. On this album’s predecessor, 2016’s
I
like it when you sleep for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it, the
goal seemed to be to make an album that flowed like a dreamscape. It was a
puzzle where every piece fit logically, and the result was a listening
experience so deeply entrancing and immersive that you came out the other side
wondering where the time had gone.
A Brief Inquiry is not that. This
album takes a new left turn every five minutes, cramming shades of jazz,
hip-hop, synthpop, electronic music, singer-songwriter, Britpop, ‘80s power
balladry, ‘90s adult contemporary, and unabashed rock ‘n’ roll anthem into the
tracklist. You can argue about whether it all hangs together as a cohesive
whole (I honestly
don’t believe it does)
but the high points—the careening electric guitar zips of “Give
Yourself
a Try,” the zeitgeisty anthem that is “Love It If We Made It,” the
candy-coated
hooks of “It’s Not Living (If It’s Not with You),” the “Champagne
Supernova”-aping “I Always Want to Die (Sometimes)”—stand as some of the
very best tracks
anyone put on an album this decade.
156.
Vince Gill -
Down to My Last Bad Habit
Vince Gill is one of the greatest singers in the history of
country music, and one of the finest songwriters. On Down to My Last Bad
Habit, he makes it clear that he hasn’t lost a step, even as he enters the
elder stateman period of his career. Released a year and change shy of Gill’s
60th birthday, Down to My Last Bad Habit still sounds remarkably vibrant
and emotional. Where most singers—especially men—tend to start losing range and
vocal depth as they get older, Gill sings the absolute shit out of stunners like
the title track, a soulful ballad about not being able to quit a woman who
walked out the door. It’s a voice that can still pack power and punch into
big-chorus anthems like “Reasons for the Tears I Cry” or “When It’s Love,” or
lend gentle elegance to slow-dance ballads like “I’ll Be Waiting for You.”
Plus, as always, Gill shows himself to be a generous champion of the next
generation of country music. One song is an Ashley Monroe co-write, while
another features up-and-coming singer-songwriter Cam and a third brings in the
folks from Little Big Town. The album itself didn’t get much attention, because
records by older “past their prime” musicians rarely do, but it’s easily one of
the decade’s most perfectly constructed country LPs.
157.
Noah Gundersen -
White Noise
White Noise is a lot of things the two Noah Gundersen albums
that came before it were not. It’s frustrating and inconsistent. It’s
self-indulgent. It overstays its welcome and has a few legitimately bad tracks.
Where Ledges and Carry the Ghost were masterpieces—at least from
my perspective—White Noise is a bit of an unruly mess. It’s also a
fascinating piece of work, and an album so ambitious and far-reaching that it
instantly established Noah as one of the most interesting voices making music
today. You could have written Noah off, after Ledges and Ghost,
as just another singer-songwriter: a sad white guy with a guitar, leaning on
styles and sounds of the past rather than blazing a new trail. But nothing
sounds like White Noise. It is big, bold, brash, loud, and thoroughly modern
in a way that most singer-songwriters never try. It takes big swings, hits
big home runs, and suffers big strikeouts. But even with the misses, it’s truly
electric to hear a songwriter of Noah’s caliber expand his sonic palette the
way he does on songs like “After All” and “Heavy Metals.” Sure, the best tracks
are the ones that sound the most like the Noah of the past: the forlorn
small-town drama of “Fear & Loathing”; the treatise on modern crisis that is
“Dry Year”; and the epic, cathartic build of “Send the Rain (To Everyone).” But
when Noah surrounds his acoustic triumphs with songs that draw just as
convincingly from ‘90s alt-rock (“Number One Hit of the Summer”), John
Mayer-style blues-pop (“Bad Desire”), and psychedelic Beatles records (“New
Religion”), he opens up a whole new world of musical possibilities to explore.
158.
Catherine McGrath -
Talk of This Town
Talk of This Town should have been this decade’s Fearless.
Just like Taylor Swift’s world-conquering breakthrough, the debut album from
Scottish country singer Catherine McGrath is a rich, catchy, and wistful
collection of songs that chronicle the angst of coming-of-age. Fearless was
a country album filtered through the hooks, topics, and concerns of teen pop. Talk
of This Town is the same. There are songs about chasing your dreams after
high school and maybe falling on your face. There is a song about being at a
Coldplay concert with a guy you like who is only thinking about the girl who broke
his heart. There are lots of songs about unrequited love, and about the hurt of
sitting right next to someone you think you’re in love with, knowing that
they are never going to see you as anything more than a friend. There are songs
about first kisses and honeymoon phases and about vowing not to lose the magic
of those first kisses and honeymoon phases as a relationship moves forward.
There is an ache to McGrath’s voice that recalls exactly how your heart felt
when you were young and experiencing these same things. It’s easy to roll your
eyes at an album like this, that is all about things that seem so important at
17 or 19 or 21 but prove ultimately to be largely superfluous. But that’s not
how those moments feel when you’re in them. They feel like life or death; like
moments on a movie screen; like a grand, epic drama with you at the center.
When McGrath sings about boys or breakups or bad nights, the ache in her voice
alone is enough to remind you how it felt to feel so much, so deeply.
159.
Donovan Woods -
The Widowmaker
The Widowmaker sounds
like frozen streets and prairie
towns blanketed in snow. It sounds like hoarfrost on trees and memories
locked in ice. It sounds like winter, in all its quiet, cold, lonesome
beauty. I
first heard this album on Christmas Day 2010, and it was the start of a
new era
of holiday seasons for me. In the past, I’d mostly spent holiday breaks
enjoying a much-needed escape from everything. I’d see friends a few
times—usually
around New Year’s—but I’d mostly put in a lot of quality family time and
enjoy
long, lazy days at home. 2010 was different. I was dating the girl I’d
ultimately end up marrying and we were trying to juggle time together
with our family obligations for the season. I spent a lot of days
that winter break driving back and forth between our houses—a
30-minute-long
haul, despite the fact that we technically lived in the same town. This
album
was playing on a lot of those drives, especially the late-night return
treks.
There was something about the delicate beauty of songs like “Lawren
Harris” and
especially “No Time Has Passed” that sounded so perfect in those
moments.
Listening back to the album now, knowing how much Donovan Woods would
come to
mean to me as a songwriter, it’s amazing how much this album still feels
like those 2010 December nights to me. Some albums grow with us and pick up
new memories as we go. Others are perfect time capsules pieces of memories and
moments and feelings that we might otherwise forget. This album is one of
those, and I couldn’t have made this list without including it as part of the
scrapbook.
160.
Transit -
Listen and Forgive
2011 wasn’t so far from my high school days. When I listened
to Transit’s Listen & Forgive during
that gorgeous, golden autumn, though, I felt like an eternity had passed.
“Lately, you’ve been looking at me like you’ve seen a ghost/And isn’t it
obvious who’s been missing who the most?” goes the chorus of a song called
“Long Lost Friends.” As I’m writing these words, it’s been 10 years since I
graduated high school and almost three since I last saw my best friend. In
2011, when I first heard this album, I was two years past the beginning of my
senior year. But two summers had elapsed since high school at that point,
enough time for the bonds I built with friends to start fraying or at least
loosening a bit. These songs wrecked me. They spoke of memories like skipping
stones and of tides bringing those stones back to us, sometimes when we least
expected it. They talked about how growing up often meant growing into the sadder
songs, discovering the hurt hidden away in the lines you misread or overlooked
when you were younger. And they talked about the definitive struggle of young
adulthood: trying to find your place, your identify, yourself—only to learn that so much territory has already been
staked and claimed. The album is one fraught with sadness: with lost
friendships and broken relationships and the failures that ultimately prove
formative and crucial but seem like mortal wounds in the moment. Transit’s story
proved to be a sad one, too. Once one of the most promising pop-punk bands in
the scene, Transit sputtered and stalled on later albums and ultimately called
it quits in 2014. And earlier this year, it was announced that Tim Landers,
ex-guitarist for the band, had passed away. For this one classic record,
though, Transit distilled the angst of growing up and growing apart from your
youth into one of the decade’s preeminent coming-of-age albums.
161.
Matchbox Twenty -
North
Matchbox Twenty were one of my first favorite bands. Yourself or Someone Like You is a record
that still reminds me vividly of first grade, while both Mad Season and More Than You
Think You Are were heavy-rotation albums when I started really getting into
music around 13 or 14. Back then, I found out about new releases from artists I liked
when singles I hadn’t heard yet popped up on the radio. In 2003 or 2004, I
remember fantasizing about what it would be like when Matchbox Twenty released
a new album, so that I could experience the rollout for the first time as a tuned-in
fan. I didn’t know that I was about to wait a long, long time. The next
Matchbox Twenty song didn’t break until 2007, to go along with the band’s
greatest hits album. The next album was this one, North, which arrived in 2012, just a few months shy of More Than You Think You Are’s 10th
birthday. It was, honestly, bizarre. I’d thought for a long time that I would
never hear another Matchbox Twenty record—and no, Rob Thomas’s solo output is
not the same thing. The long-awaited fourth LP arriving eight or nine years
after the peak of my fandom seemed to beg the question: can the bands that
meant something to you as a kid still mean something to you on the
cusp of adulthood? But then I pushed play, and the wistful guitar notes of
“Parade” drifted out of my speakers, and Rob Thomas sang the opening lines:
“When the slow parade went past/And it felt so good you knew it couldn’t
last/And all too soon, the end was gonna come without a warning/And you’d have
to just go home.” The day I first heard that song was the day before I left
home at the end of my last college summer. I was leaving a job I’d never work
again, with a group of people who would never all be in the same room again,
and departing a house that I would never live in again beyond a stray night
here or there when I would visit my parents. And here was this song—this
perfectly fitting, beautiful, sobering song about how some things can’t last.
Listening to that track—and to the rest of this album—took me right back to
being a kid and to innocently loving everything about this band’s music.
In just a few notes, North seemed to
shrink the years between those two versions of me. It still does.
162.
Old Dominion -
Old Dominion
Old Dominion have always been incredible melodic craftsmen,
capable of repeatedly writing the catchiest songs in all of pop-country. Early
on, though, it would have been easy to dismiss them as bro-country wannabes. While
their debut, 2015’s Meat and Candy (an album I like quite a lot), was
cleverer and had more heart than anything Florida Georgia Line or Luke Bryan ever
made, songs like “Beer Can in a Truck Bed” and “Said Nobody” had a fratty
energy about them that was hard to ignore. Hearing this band progress toward maturity
while maintaining their instinctive grasp on how to write a hook has been a
joy, and they’ve reached the peak of that progression with their self-titled
third album. The songs on Old Dominion are still catchy as hell—and they
even sound pristine, with big guitar licks, gorgeous piano work, and
surprisingly classic-sounding production choices—but they also delve deeper
than this band has gone in the past. “One Man Band” and “My Heart Is a Bar” are
smart explorations of loneliness and how it only deepens as you get older and
go through more years of trying and failing to find the one; “Hear You Now” is
a song about really shutting up and listening to the person you love—and
about how some of us only learn how to do that when it’s too late; and “Some
People Do” is an almost shockingly raw plea for reconciliation—the rare
post-breakup “I’m sorry” song where the protagonist really, truly seems bent on
becoming better. I’ve always liked Old Dominion, in part because they never
seemed to take themselves too seriously. There was always an edge of a grin or
a wink in their songs, which lent a warmth and humanity to their music that tends
to be missing from most radio country. Old Dominion retains that
welcoming feel, but pairs it with songs that are more personal, more soulful,
and more driven by matters of the heart than past efforts. The result is the
best album yet from this undervalued pop-country band.
163.
Foo Fighters -
Wasting Light
It seems like virtually every Foo Fighters record has to
have some sort of concept. Not a story, and not even a music theme, but
something the band can talk about in interviews to juice conversation. On In
Your Honor, it was the double album approach, plus the electric-acoustic
dichotomy. On Sonic Highways, it was the gimmick of recording each of
the eight songs in a different city with a different guest from that
city. Even Concrete & Gold seemed to want to say something about the
balance of classic rock influences (Paul McCartney showed up on a track) and
modern touch (Greg Kurstin was the producer). The band got so caught up in
concepts over the past 15 years that even their no-frills, back-to-basics
record seemed like a big picture move. Wasting Light was billed in 2011
as a return to the band’s 90s roots. They recorded it in Dave Grohl’s garage,
and Butch Vig (producer of a little 90s album called Nevermind) manned
the boards. The result is that Wasting Light ends up sounding exactly
like a 90s rock record: loud; immediate; catchy; flirting with anthemic arena
rock but only occasionally embracing it fully. The band steers toward darkness
near the end of the album—on shadowy numbers like “Miss the Misery” and “I
Should Have Known,” the latter of which reunites two of the three members of
Nirvana. But then they blast everything into the sun on “Walk,” a rousing,
joyful rock song that kept Foo Fighters’ very long string of perfect singles
alive for at least one more album cycle.
164.
Glen Hansard -
Rhythm & Repose
Rhythm & Repose was the first record I ever
reviewed for AbsolutePunk, after being asked to join the staff. I always thought
that was significant, because Glen Hansard had been a hero of mine for five
years at that point. There are still very few film performances that resonate
with me the way his turn in Once did, and those songs are frankly
written on my soul. Writing about his debut solo album—and a record that is so
clearly so personal—felt like a fitting start to my own journey as a writer.
I’ve always tried to be honest and candid and personal in my work. I feel that,
by sharing stories of our lives and of the things we love—in this case,
music—we can discover new shades of empathy or new commonalities with others
that we didn’t know were there. Glen has always known that, and this album
might be the clearest display of it. He wrote it after his split from Marketa
Irglova—his Once co-star and real-life romantic interest in the wake of the
film. Some of the songs sound like they’re being sung by a heartbroken person
one verse shy of a breakdown (“Bird of Sorrow,” “What Are We Gonna Do”), while
others spark with tentative optimism for the future (there are two tracks with
the word “hope” in the title). But the song that always cut the deepest for me
was “Maybe Not Tonight,” an achingly gorgeous George Harrison-esque ballad that
finds two lovers at a crossroads—enjoying one last summer evening of idyllic
romance before they go their separate ways. “Maybe we should say goodbye,” Glen
sings at one point; “But maybe not tonight.”
165.
Steve Moakler -
Wide Open
In college, I took a writing class where the professor
always encouraged us to find the “aboutness” in a piece of writing—whether it
was ours or someone else’s. Writing that was focused and intentional about its
core theme or subject, she argued, was superior to writing that meandered or
had no strongly defined center. One of the things I most respect about Steve
Moakler is his firm grasp of aboutness. Moakler’s records aren’t flashy. They
fall somewhere between the dusty Americana of Jason Isbell and the catchy, blue
collar mainstream country of artists like Dierks Bentley and Thomas Rhett. His
songs feel like radio-ready jams, but he performs them like they are
left-of-the-dial gems. Not so surprisingly, several of his songs have been cut
by major Nashville superstars—including Bentley himself, who plucked this
album’s centerpiece “Riser” for his own album of the same name. Aboutness is
something country fans and artists respect, because it can be hard to capture
an idea fully in the space of three or four minutes. Moakler does it repeatedly
on this songwriting masterclass of an album. There’s a cleanness to his
songwriting, where every track has a thesis statement or core lyrical idea that
it introduces immediately and then builds upon throughout the album. It’s the
kind of writing that seems effortless on first glance, even though so much
thought undoubtedly went into every line.
166.
Augustana -
Augustana
I miss the way that summers felt during college. In high
school, the word “summer” referred strictly to July and August, plus the latter
half of June. In college, it meant a full four-month stretch, from May through
Labor Day. The result is that “summer” ended up feeling very much like two
pieces of a larger whole. There was the
actual
summer part, in the sweltering heat of July and August. When I think of
most of my favorite summer albums, they’re the ones that remind me of those
months, and of windows-down drives and long days at the beach. But then there
was the other piece: the “I just got home from college and I’m transitioning
back into summertime freedoms” piece.
Augustana
reminds me of that part of 2011: an unseasonably cold and rainy spring,
after a long and torturous winter. These days, I don’t even start thinking
about summertime until Memorial Day. But the weird phenomenon of those lengthy
college breaks was that you started acting like you were on summer vacation
even when it was barely 50 degrees out and the Fourth of July was still the
better part of two months away. This record, with its torrential bursts of
roots-flecked pop-rock, makes me yearn to have that kind of freedom back again.
You can still hear the last gasps of winter on some of the songs—especially the
majestic “Hurricane.” But you can also hear the highway ripping past you on the
zippy “Shot in the Dark,” or sense the wide-open August evening sky within the
sprawl of “You Were Made for Me.” Of all the seasons, springtime is the one
that has always had the least of a musical identity to me.
People make summer albums, and people make winter albums, but not many people
make
springtime albums. Both here and
on 2008’s
Can’t Love, Can’t Hurt,
Augustana mastered that unique but beguiling alchemy.
167.
Sturgill Simpson -
Sound and Fury
At some point, Sturgill Simpson went from country
traditionalist to post-genre provocateur. On
Sound and Fury, he seems to
have no desire bigger than getting a rise out of people. He’s not picky with his
targets either. The people who hailed him, upon the release of his early
records, as a potential “savior” of country music. The award show posers who
have either showered him with honors (the Grammys) or ignored him entirely
(CMAs). The people who love his music. The people who hate his music. Everyone
might as well be in the sights on
Sound and Fury, a wild left turn of a
record that gleefully douses Sturgill’s past successes in kerosene before
flicking a match to burn them all to the ground. It’s maybe the most divisive
record of 2019: an album hailed by some as a daring melding of genres and
by others as a loud, tone-deaf, self-indulgent piece of trash. The best thing
about it might be that it is ultimately both. There’s something definitively
trashy about the songs, which
sound like sleazy ‘70s rock ‘n’ roll and
spend most of their lyrics in “old man yells at clouds” mode. But Sturgill
presents this wild opus in a masterful way: slice-and-dice guitar riffs;
earworm hooks; massive, pristine production; a trippy anime film that begs to
make
Sound & Fury the millennial version of
Dark Side of Oz.
Frankly, we need more artists willing to take big, bizarre swings like this
one.
168.
John Moreland -
In the Throes
On the list of the most perfect songs written in the last 10
years, John Moreland’s “Gospel” is very near the top. It’s a simple
song: just three verses sung soulfully over a simple acoustic guitar part. 12
lines of text; six rhymes; 137 words. But it’s a flawless piece of poetry: the
rare song where every line hits as hard as the one before it, and where there’s
not a single wasted word or phrase. It’s hard to pick a favorite line, or a
favorite couplet, or a favorite verse, just because every piece of this song
seems to contain so much wisdom and magic. It’s full of simple pleasures, like
driving a car down a dirt road or finding your faith in great records from long
before you were born. It’s full of great aspirations, like being as cool as the
night air, or never giving up your dreams no matter what anybody says. It’s full
of hints at the hardness of the world: “I wanna believe even when I know life
don’t play fair,” Moreland sings at one point. The song is, essentially, his
wish list: the things he wants out of life that he might not ever get; the
goals he’s chasing that might never come to pass. But that’s life: you want;
you hope; you dream; you chase. Maybe you fall short or maybe you hit the mark,
but it’s the optimism of wanting things out of life—wanting more, and
being willing to go after it—that ultimately makes life such a journey.
“Gospel” is a perfect song about that journey, and In the Throes—and
often deeply sad record that finds moments of uplift in the unflinching
humanity of Moreland’s incredible songwriting—is a tribute to its many ups and
downs.
169.
Cary Brothers -
Under Control
On Under Control, Cary Brothers wrote a song that
always sounded to me like falling in love. “Belong” starts off as a slow,
patient piano ballad, but then it turns into anything but patient. Midway
through, the song accelerates like a racing heart and explodes into a firework
show of emotion. “What I’d give for that first night when you were mine,”
Brothers sings, bringing to mind those moments at the beginning of a
relationship when you need the other person so badly that it feels almost
dizzying. Brothers has always been good at capturing that kind of high romantic
drama in his songs. Who You Are did it more consistently, but Under
Control might be the purest distillation of his musical goals. When I
interviewed him in 2018, Brothers told me about his love for ‘80s teen movies
and the music that soundtracked them. Under Control plays like the soundtrack
to a John Hughes movie that never was, ranging from new wave-y pop euphoria
(“Someday”) to romantic introspection (“Can’t Take My Eyes off of You”) all the
way to crushing isolation (“Ghost Town”). Brothers came up through the music
business in the era of Garden State, The OC, One Tree Hill,
Scrubs, and Grey’s Anatomy, so it’s fitting that his music always
hearkens back to a time when any song could feasibly be used to score a coda
montage at the end of the night.
170.
The Hold Steady -
Heaven Is Whenever
The Hold Steady, to me, will always sound most like
springtime on a college campus. The band’s music—big, grandiose, anthemic,
jagged, unapologetic, a little drunken—makes them perfect for that kind of
environment. When the parties spill out onto decks and lawns, or when the dorm
room windows open wide and you can hear music cascading out of them, that’s
when I fell in love with The Hold Steady. My first baptism into their music was
Boys & Girls in America. But
Heaven Is Whenever may have been the
album that most informed my impression of what The Hold Steady could mean to
me. This album dropped on May 4, 2010, but it received a vinyl-only release on
Record Store Day that year, nearly a month early. I remember a rip circulating
around in the final weeks of my freshman year of college, and I remember how
those songs blended perfectly with that season. It was a surprisingly warm
spring—especially in Michigan where “warm spring” sometimes doesn’t arrive
until June. The balmy temperatures made
Heaven
Is Whenever come alive. The lilting slide guitars of “The Sweet Part of the
City” called to mind the humid summer nights that were very soon to arrive,
while big booming anthems like “The Weekenders” and “Hurricane J” seemed to
promise an epic season. “Hurricane J, she’s gonna crash into the harbor this
summer,” Craig Finn sings on the latter; I was
ready for the collision. Fans and critics largely looked upon this
album lukewarmly, missing Finn’s more nuanced narrative writing, or longing for
the evocative, E Street style keyboard licks of once-and-future band member
Franz Nicolay. But I always loved
Heaven
Is Whenever for how well it did blistering, straight-ahead, summer-ready
rock ‘n’ roll. It came along in a year that brought a string of albums in the
same Springsteen-indebted wheelhouse: The Gaslight Anthem’s
American Slang; Jesse Malin’s
Love It to Life; Titus Andronicus’s
The Monitor. Nine years later, when
records like that are a whole lot harder to find, it’s tough for me not to look
on
Heaven Is Whenever with a sad
fondness for what poptimism destroyed.
171.
Charlie Simpson -
Young Pilgrim
To a lot of people, Charlie Simpson is first and foremost a
boy band pop star. To me, though, he’ll always be the sound of Young Pilgrim, his first solo LP.
There’s something cool about a big pop star deconstructing his own musical
identity and stripping it down to its barest essentials. Even the boy band
stars that have achieved success as solo artists—the Justin Timberlakes,
obviously, or the Harry Styles types, to a lesser extent—typically keep the
big, bombastic production values of their band work. Simpson opted for
something different: a largely spartan folk-pop album that combines his flare
for big melodies with gorgeous, wistful, acoustic-driven arrangements. The
result is an album with surprising range, substantial emotional punch, and
smartly engaging lyrics. “We send people into space without ever really
knowing/If they’re ever gonna come back down” he sings on the propulsive opener
“Down, Down, Down”—just one of many thoughtful lyrics that stick with you long
after the album is done. Repeatedly, Simpson finds solace in the things that
pop stars often overlook: the natural world; the beauty of pastoral imagery;
the sleepy suburbs. The result is that Young
Pilgrim is often delightfully small scale, like the way the weather can
chart the passage of time in a relationship, or like the way a sunset feels
when you know it signifies a goodbye. But when Simpson’s flair for the dramatic
rears its head, as on the massive album closer “Riverbanks,” the moments feel
earned and emotionally resonant.
172.
Mat Kearney -
Young Love
Mat Kearney started the decade as one of my favorite
artists. His first two albums, 2006’s
Nothing
Left to Lose and 2009’s
City of Black
and White, captured something about growing up and leaving home that was
deeply resonant to me when those records came out. In contrast, I couldn’t get
through Kearney’s latest record—the blaring, synth-driven Top 40 play that was
2018’s
CRAZYTALK. I still love
Young Love, though, which somehow finds
a way for Kearney’s maximalist pop impulses and idiosyncratic, hip-hop-tinged
songwriting style to coexist. These songs are big, bold, and catchy, but they
are also still wildly unique. “Ships in the Night” starts out sounding like an
early Coldplay piano ballad, morphs into a beat-driven pop song, and still finds
room for freewheeling verses that sound like stream-of-consciousness beat
poetry. “She Got the Honey” and “Young Dumb and In Love” are as infectious as
anything that was on the radio in 2011, but still carry Kearney’s one-of-a-kind
authorial voice. “Seventeen” makes teenage pregnancy sound as sweeping and
romantic as a song about a first kiss down on a beach. There’s even a song that
sounds like Kearney xeroxed it wholesale from Springsteen’s
Nebraska—a surprising left turn for an
album that is usually as brightly colored as its yellow cover. Maybe Kearney
was having an identity crisis and didn’t know where to go next. Maybe that same
identity crisis is what ultimately led him to the shipwreck of
CRAZYTALK. Here, though, he made his
competing impulses and influences cohere into the perfect soundtrack to a
youthful summer fling.
173.
Ashley McBryde -
Girl Going Nowhere
There’s something about being told you can’t do something
that makes you push that much harder to achieve it. Based on the lyrics on
Ashley McBryde’s Girl Going Nowhere—specifically the title track—she
heard a lot of no’s over the course of her life. For some reason, we live in a
world and in an age where people want to see other people fail. Maybe
it’s always been this way. Maybe social media and the anonymity of the internet
made it worse. It certainly seemed like this decade was the “grab the popcorn
to watch this person fall on their face” decade. In that context, it’s
wonderful to see an artist like Ashley McBryde succeed. As I’m writing these
words, she’s just walked away with a Best New Artist statue at the CMA Awards,
which doesn’t necessarily mean a ton, but which is sure as hell a big middle
finger to anyone who ever told her she couldn’t make it. That trophy
will hopefully open big doors for McBryde in the new decade, but even exiting
this one, she already feels like one of country’s most exciting voices. This
album, with its punchy hooks (should-have-been hits like “Radioland” and
“American Scandal”) and sharp, clever songwriting (“The Jacket” is one of the
best examples of songwriting craft from the past five years, in any genre)
shows off a serious amount of talent. I can’t wait to hear what’s next.
174.
The Maine -
Black and White
From what I’ve heard, the guys in The Maine are not super
fond of this record. It was their sophomore LP and their major label debut, a
move from the pop-punk minor leagues of Fearless to Warner Bros. The major
label big wigs clearly exerted some influence, teaming the band up with
big-name songwriters (including Butch Walker, on the infectious “Right Girl”)
and smoothing over some of the brattier, more idiosyncratic elements that had
characterized The Maine’s debut, 2009’s Can’t
Stop, Won’t Stop. But I love the hell of Black & White, largely as a product of when it came out. This
album hit the internet probably two or three days after I started going out
with the girl who I would end up marrying. It was the peak of summer, and I was
spending a lot of time in the car, between my house, work, and her house. An
album like this one—a glossy, impossibly catchy summertime soundtrack—was
precisely what I needed, and The Maine delivered in spades. I still go back to
little moments of that season when I play these songs back: the anthemic keys
of “Growing Up” remind me of one of our first dates, to the local mini golf
park, and I’m pretty sure “Saving Grace” was playing in the car one evening as
we shared an extended kiss goodnight. The Maine would eventually evolve beyond
this sound, and carefree, low-substance pop-rock albums don’t resonate with me
now like they did back then. But as a sonic backdrop to the excitement of a
brand-new summer romance, I could hardly have dreamed up a better album for
that moment in my life. It’s still a summer running/driving staple, if only
because it takes me back to a time when summers still meant endless
possibility.
175.
The Wallflowers -
Glad All Over
One of the great musical tragedies of the past 25 years is
the sidelining of The Wallflowers and Jakob Dylan. “One Headlight” was my first
favorite song and The Wallflowers were my first favorite band. Their
breakthrough album, 1996’s Bringing Down
the Horse, was and is a masterpiece. The band’s fame couldn’t outlast the
‘90s, but Dylan still had a respectable run in the 2000s, releasing three more good-to-great
Wallflowers records before teaming up with Rick Rubin for a 2008 solo debut
called Seeing Things. In the 2010s,
though, Dylan only made two records: Women
+ Country, a 2010 solo LP; and Glad
All Over, a 2012 Wallflowers reunion. He’s been more or less dormant—at
least as a recording artist—ever since. It’s a shame, because a lot of what
made The Wallflowers such a magical band in the mid-to-late ‘90s is still
intact here. They had a knack for instant-classic-sounding roots rock and for
big, wide-open arrangements that captured the scope and sprawl of a (6th
Avenue) heartache. At its best, Glad All
Over captures the same sense of highway-bound yearning that I always got
from Bringing Down the Horse.
Starry-eyed beauties like “Love is a Country” and “Constellation Blues” are
some of the decade’s dreamiest rock songs—expansive kaleidoscopic beauties that
seemed to anticipate the sonic template that The War on Drugs would turn into
critically-acclaimed gold on Lost in the
Dream and A Deeper Understanding.
Jay Joyce—on his way to becoming an A-list country producer thanks to his work
with Eric Church—handled production duties, to notable effect. “Basically, we
made a record the way people used to make records,” Joyce said of the recording
process, which was defined by jam sessions, live recording, and instruments
bleeding across all the mics. I wish more people still made records like that,
but I’d settle for The Wallflowers making just one more.
176.
David Ramirez -
Fables
David Ramirez is a songwriter who writes smartly and vividly
about a lot of things. On this album he pens a slew of insightful songs about
falling in love and about the dynamics and priorities of relationships. On the
follow-up, 2017’s We’re Not Going Anywhere, he dove into political
waters with a deft hand and a ton of empathy. His greatest gift, though, may be
chronicling the life of the mid-level touring musician. Rock music history has
been dotted with tons of songs about the touring lifestyle and about the toll it can
take on musicians, their families, their relationships, and their lives as a
whole. But those types of songs have become less common as the myth of the rock
‘n’ roll star has begun to fade away. Ramirez brings them back. On his 2015
album Apologies, there’s a song called “Stick Around” where he asks the
questions that any professional musician has to start asking at some point.
Will I ever have a stable home, or a stable life? Will my relationships with my
family suffer because I don’t see them enough? Will my nieces and nephews ever
know me? Will I ever have a family of my own? On Fables, he follows
those questions to their logical extreme: to where music, once a blessing,
becomes a curse. “Be careful with your hobbies,” he sings on “Ball and Chain,”
the album’s stirring and sad closing track; “They may define you someday.” It’s
a surprisingly bitter point to end on, especially since the song contains a
lyric about the “honesty” of confessional artists maybe being an illusion when
their audiences are the ones that decide what the songs mean. But it’s also a
welcome dose of candidness in a time when not enough music tells the truth.
There are two sides to every sword, and there’s maybe no artist making music
today that is better at conveying the dark side of that coin than David
Ramirez.
177.
Florence + The Machine -
Ceremonials
Most of the time, the big-voiced theatrics of Florence Welch
of Florence + The Machine turn me off. But on Ceremonials, the band’s
weird, Baroque-leaning sophomore LP, Welch and company temporarily won me over.
This album’s dark-as-night anthems—layered with dramatic reverb and packed with
pounding tribal drums, droning bass, celestial chants, and Welch’s cavernous
vocals at their foreboding, witchy best—make for a true one-of-a-kind epic. When
she sings about “echoes of a city that’s long overgrown” in “Heartlines,” she
sets the scene for this record and its almost Lord of the Rings-esque
battlescape arrangements. On most of the record, Welch seems inclined to
embrace the darkness. She sings about holy water and exorcisms on “Seven
Devils,” and there’s literally a song called “No Light, No Light.” By the end
of the album, she’s offering up her body to the arms of doom and caterwauling
away like she’s Stevie Nicks at the end of “Gold Dust Woman.” But all the death
and doom and gloom only seems more impressive when Florence + The Machine let
the light break through, on colossal, cathartic pop songs like “Shake It Out”
and “All This and Heaven Too.” Welch
says the wrote the former about shaking off a hangover; on Ceremonials,
it sounds like an epic last stand against the literal forces of hell.
178.
Motion City Soundtrack -
Go
“It’s not a matter of time, it’s just a matter of timing.”
Those words anchor “Timelines,” my favorite song on Motion City Soundtrack’s
fifth album
Go. In the band’s
catalog, this album tends to get overlooked or even downright derided. It is
less beloved, for instance, than this decade’s
My Dinosaur Life, an album that I find to be considerably less
thoughtful. In a lot of ways,
Go is
the most complex album in the MCS discography. It’s certainly the darkest,
hanging most of its weight on themes of mortality and impermanence. There is a
song here called “Everyone Will Die.” There’s another, called “Circuits &
Wires,” about only being designed “to last a finite length of time.” A third
track, “Happy Anniversary,” is about making preparations for death—from
settling your accounts to telling your kids you love them. These are heavy
ideas, and the songs that carry them often feel as exhausted and heartbroken as
you would expect anthems about death to be. But
Go isn’t an album
about death,
even if plenty of its songs are preoccupied with the subject. Rather, it’s an
album about recognizing the temporary nature of life and about learning to take
advantage of it. “I have a few years to go before I’m floating down the river
again,” Pierre sings in the final track. How are you going to spend them?
“Timelines” gives the answer, and it’s not about chasing down milestones or
measuring yourself against the other people in your life. Your own timeline
doesn’t have to match what your parents did, or what your friends are doing, or
what the kids in your graduating class have planned. “It’s not a matter of
time, it’s just a matter of timing.” Everyone’s timing is different, and
everyone’s timeline is unique.
Go is
about writing your own story and not being afraid of being “too early” or “too
late” for anyone else’s standards. After all, we’re all going to end up in the
same place eventually: “fertilizing daffodils,” in the words of Robin Williams in
Dead Poets Society. We’d
might as well make the journey to that point as exciting and one-of-a-kind as
possible.
In a lot of ways, GIRL is a sophomore slump. It’s
less adventurous, less dynamic, less catchy, and all around less fun than
Hero, the album that took Maren Morris from unknown to superstar. Even
on weaker footing, though, Morris’s grasp of the poppier side of country is
second to none. When she shoots for big and bombastic, it’s virtually
impossible for her to miss. From the title track, with its jagged 2000s indie
rock guitar riff, to “All My Favorite People,” a summertime barn-burner
featuring Brothers Osborne, GIRL is at its strongest when it lets Morris
wail away over songs that sound huge. The back half, packed with ballads about
her marriage, is less immediately striking, though it still features two
tracks—“The Bones” and “To Hell and Back”—that stand among the decade’s best
and most innovative love songs. “The house don’t fall when the bones are good,”
Maren sings in the former. She’s singing about her marriage, but she could also
be singing about this album: a collection that succeeds in spite of those
flaws, thanks to the tremendous talent of its creator.
180.
Brothers Osborne -
Port Saint Joe
To make the follow-up to their smash debut, Brothers Osborne
retreated to the titular Port Saint Joe in Florida, holed up in a beachside
house with producer Jay Joyce, and hammered out this record. While the album
lacks the clear singles that made Pawn Shop such a meteoric debut, Port
Saint Joe does carry an irresistible, laid-back, groove-driven feel that
proves a couple things. First, Brothers Osborne are and will probably always be
purveyors of summer soundtrack fare. Though the album dropped on 4/20, leadoff
track “Slow Your Roll” was the first clear summer jam of 2018. Second, these
guys are some of the very best musicians in any genre right now. Any list of the
best guitar solos of the decade will probably exclude Brothers Osborne, if only
because those lists tend to skew toward either veteran alternative rock bands
or metal, ignoring genres like country entirely. But I’ll submit that any list
of the best guitar solos of the decade is also incomplete without at least one John
Osborne feature. The obvious nominee from this record is “Shoot Me Straight,”
the stomping, shapeshifting lead single that spends a huge amount of its
six-and-a-half minute runtime on guitar pyrotechnics. But even the ballads are
big guitar showcases, with splendid production that makes them sound like
vintage 1970s classics.
181.
William Clark Green -
Ringling Road
There’s a warm glow to the songs on Ringling Road that
reminds me of ‘90s radio rock. That music—The Wallflowers, Goo Goo Dolls,
Sister Hazel, Counting Crows, even Hootie & the Blowfish—is the stuff that
made me fall in love with music in the first place. People mostly stopped
making rock records like that in the 2000s, and finding them in the 2010s was
nearly impossible. Ringling Road scratched that itch, packing massive
hooks, lush acoustic guitars, and memorable lyrics into tracks like “Sticks and
Stones,” “Sympathy,” and “Hey Sarah.” 20 years ago, these songs would have been
massive hits. William Clark Green might have ended up on MTV singing with Bruce
Springsteen, just like The Wallflowers did at the 1997 VMAs. Instead, Clark
Green flew way under the radar this decade, releasing albums packed with radiant red dirt
country songs that only got noticed by the Texas country crowd. It’s a shame,
because Ringling Road has a lot of personality and heart—whether Clark
Green is playing the part of Tom Waits-ian troubadour (see the twisted circus
world of the title track), string-band frontman (the county fair rave-up that
is “Creek Don’t Rise”), or heartbroken balladeer (the crushingly lonely “Still
Thinking About You”).
182.
Kip Moore -
Slowheart
Springsteen has become a common reference point for rock
artists and country artists alike over the past 15 years, and it’s not difficult
to see why. His songs are deeply empathetic, his stories are detailed and
haunting, and his arena-packing rock star status is something just about any
artist would want to aspire to. Of all the artists that have emulated Bruce,
though, few sound as innately like him as Kip Moore. On this album’s
predecessor, 2015’s Wild Ones, Moore co-opted the tough-guy persona of
Springsteen’s Born in the USA period, crafting an LP full of sexy,
sweltering summer throwback songs. Slowheart is more personal and less
innately nostalgic. It’s also the peak of Moore’s songcraft, showing off the
same empathy, sense for detail, and knack for anthems that have long made Bruce
a rock ‘n’ roll icon. The towering achievement is “Guitar Man,” a weathered
five-and-a-half-minute closer about the sacrifices an entertainer makes to keep
plugging along out on the road. But the rock ‘n’ roll anthems—big, catchy jams
like “Sunburn,” “Bittersweet Company,” “Last Shot,” and the hit, “More Girls
Like You”—are what make Slowheart so listenable and replayable. Fun,
hooky, confident rock songs were hard to come by in the 2010s—especially the
last few years. Thank goodness country guys like Moore decided to pick up the
mantle of 1970s and ‘80s rock superstars.
183.
The Wonder Years -
The Greatest Generation
Throughout the 2010s, The Wonder Years were a band that a
lot of people in my musical orbit absolutely adored. For the emo/pop-punk
crowd, this band seemed generation-defining. They were literate but not
snobbish, and so visceral in their tales of small-town suburban life that their
songs took on an almost Springsteenian quality. For whatever reason, The Wonder
Years mostly passed me by. I liked parts of their earlier “classics”—The Upsides and Suburbia, I’ve Given You All and Now I Am Nothing—but the albums as
a whole felt a little samey to me. And while their later albums yielded
incredible high points like “Cigarettes & Saints,” I mostly found that this
band didn’t speak to me in the way they did to a lot of other people who shared
my general age and music tastes. The Greatest
Generation was the exception. For one album, I understood why this band
might become someone’s favorite band.
I chalked it up to timing: The Greatest
Generation came out two weeks after I graduated college, just as I was
trying to get my sea legs out in the so-called “real world.” The weekend of my
graduation, I remember feeling so much hope and excitement about my future. It
only took a few weeks for that to drain away, replaced by the strain of trying
to find a job in a broken economy and a city that didn’t feel like home. When I
did find a job, it wasn’t at all what I wanted to do and I ended up taking it
against my better judgment. 10 days, lots of stress, and a car accident later,
I quit and started reconfiguring my life into the freelance writing career I
have today. It was a tumultuous month, and I honestly can’t remember a time in
my life where I felt lower. The Greatest
Generation was a comfort during those weeks. The songs spoke of stagnation
and sadness and rage. They saw frontman Dan Campbell taking shots at himself,
questioning everything from his self-worth to his social anxiety to the
decisions he’s made throughout his life that have led him to now. It’s a
crushing album, and I have trouble listening to it—both for the raw
admissions of the songs and the not-so-great memories it digs up of my own
life. But man, at that crucial coming-of-age moment in my life, I’m not sure
there was a more fitting album to have playing as the soundtrack.
184.
The Hotelier -
Goodness
Ask a Hotelier fan which of their albums is better and you
might just inspire an existential crisis. Home, Like NoPlace Is There feels
more important somehow, but Goodness might be the better album. Where Home
almost felt designed to exist, favorably, in the lineage of emo classics
like Clarity and Diary, Goodness completely builds its own
world. The interlude tracks help, grounding the record in an escapist, scenic
place somewhere under the moon and stars—but it’s the songwriting that seals
the deal. There’s a yelping urgency to Home that made it incredibly
relatable to the people who needed it at the time, but that makes it a little
bit difficult to revisit. The songs and performances are so intense that
listening to it means committing to an emotional cost. Goodness feels
more patient. The Hotelier have learned how to let a song like “Opening Mail
for My Grandmother” glide along without a big cathartic climax, knowing that
the ellipsis only makes the song more haunting. It’s a lesson that serves them
well throughout Goodness. Even when the big emotional climaxes do
come—like the payoff in “End of Reel”—they feel inflected with maturity, grace,
and optimism that you couldn’t necessarily hear on Home. It’s the kind
of album we had less if in the 2010s, as rock bands became fewer and further
between and as rock bands with multi-album catalogs became an endangered
species. Too many bands broke up after album number one or two, but here, The
Hotelier began stumbling toward that most sublime and elusive destination:
maturity.
185.
The Summer Set -
Legendary
Sometimes, the most important thing with music is timing.
Such was the case with Legendary, an
album I heard for the first time maybe two weeks before I graduated from
college. At any other time, I think I would have appreciated this album’s hooks
but found it largely empty and unremarkable. But at that particular moment in my
life, it sounded immaculate and prescient. The songs spoke of good times with
friends and of sky-high hopes and dreams that somehow came true. They talked
about friendships and loves that could be truly everlasting, truly legendary. They looked forward to the
promise of someday and all the possibility it feels like it might hold when
you’re young and naïve and optimistic. Coming to the end of my college journey,
trying to cling to those legendary nights and naïve hopes when I knew both were
running out, this album hit me with an emotional gut-punch that I didn’t expect
from its neon pop-punk hooks. “I’ve spent too many nights watching How I Met Your Mother alone,” goes the
title track; “Now I’m searching for my yellow umbrella, hoping I’ll take her
home/Maybe I just want to be legendary/We all want to be legendary to
somebody.” I had started my college years in that place: alone in my dorm room,
watching reruns of How I Met Your Mother or
binging Glee on Hulu, trying to drown
out the sound of my own loneliness. I was exiting it with a small but tightknit
friend group and a girlfriend I loved, and these songs seemed like they were
meant to soundtrack my own series finale happy ending. I didn’t know that my
immediate post-college life was going to offer a quick succession of ups and
downs, or how quickly my college years would start to feel like memories from a
different lifetime. But I love this record for how it takes me back to those
last moments of sheltered naivete. The world looks different on the other side
of college, and this album was one last snapshot before the leap of faith into
the void.
186.
Counting Crows -
Underwater Sunshine
Most cover albums are a drag. They strand the artists you
love in karaoke mode for 12-15 tracks and probably a year or more of recording
and promotion time. There are exceptions, of course, but on average, cover albums are
rarely worthy of repeat listens—let alone worthy of being called great. The
highest praise that can be given to Underwater Sunshine is that it never
once feels like a cover album—even though it absolutely is one. A big part of
that is due to the song choices, which are inventive and adventurous. A few big
artists (and obvious Crows influences) do get covered: Bob Dylan; Gram Parsons;
Big Star; The Faces. But Adam Duritz is a record collector and a music
obsessive like the rest of us, which means some of his picks skew pretty far
under-the-radar. He even pulls out a Dawes song that, at the time of this
record’s release, had only been released as part of a live Daytrotter session.
The result is that Counting Crows get to take songs that most of their
listeners won’t know and truly make them their own. “Untitled (Love Song)”
blisters with intensity and buildup that is vintage Crows; “Like Teenage
Gravity” burns like a late-night cut from the middle of Hard Candy;
“Amie” and “Start Again” allow the band to flex the country-folk roots that
have always lurked in their songs but never burst forth this clearly. There’s
a pleasantly loose, tossed-off feeling to the whole endeavor—something that
would bleed directly into the sound and atmosphere of the band’s next full-length,
2014’s Somewhere Under Wonderland. It’s an undervalued treat.
187.
Weezer -
The White Album
It’s possible that no band has ever been more hit-or-miss
than Weezer. When they’re on, they can deliver some of the catchiest, wittiest
pop-rock of any band ever. But they have so many misses—so many head-scratching
lapses in judgement, and so many downright bad records—that you can
really only approach their prolific output with skepticism. The White Album was
their lightning-in-a-bottle moment this decade. Here, Rivers Cuomo and crew
teamed up with producer Jake Sinclair (a former member of Butch Walker’s Black
Widows), who made it his mission to help the band recapture the
magic of their glory days. Sinclair used to play in Weezer cover bands, so he
knew the DNA of the band’s revered classics—specifically The Blue Album—enough
to know how it might translate to 2016. The result is a perfect
drive-to-the-beach soundtrack, as hinted at by the photo of the lifeguard stand
on the cover. The opening tracks—“California Kids” and “Wind in Our Sail”—are
the kind of songs you play on blazing hot days when you just can’t get in the
water fast enough. By the end of the record, the party is over: the closing
track, “Endless Bummer,” is a break-up song that starts with the line “I just
want this summer to end.” But for the 30 minutes before that, The White
Album is one breezy, sunny hit after another. It’s the best album Weezer
have made in 20 years.
188.
David Nail -
Fighter
There’s a song on this album called “Home” that
is right up
there with my very favorite songs of the last 10 years. It’s a duet,
between
David Nail and Lori McKenna, and it packs such a potent, truthful punch
that
I’m not sure I ever make it through the runtime without feeling a lump
in my throat. The
song itself is simple: a delicate piano figure and an acoustic
accompaniment
that evoke rolling plains and beautiful vistas as far as the eye can
see. It’s
not unusual for country artists to write tributes to their hometowns,
but this
one seems to go beyond that. It’s not surface-level observations, like
the
storefronts you pass by going through town, or the one stoplight that
seems to
be a fixture of every other song like this. Instead, it evokes the idea
of home is a feeling first and a place second. “It’s where you’re
from/It’s your
oldest friend/And you think it will forget you when you go/But you know
it will
take you back in/It won’t fade away/It’ll watch you leave/And stay
sitting
there/Waiting in the fields, in the sky, in the stone/In your blood and
your
bones/Home.” When you’re young, you take your home for granted. It feels
like
it will always belong to you, and you to it. It’s only when you grow up
and
leave it behind—maybe temporarily, maybe for good—that you start to
cherish all
the little things you might have missed, like the way the air smells at
the
beginning of spring, or the colors of the leaves during the peak of
fall. And
if you stay away long enough, you start to feel like a stranger,
wondering if
home is still even home. This song captures all those things, and it’s
incredibly
beautiful and so comforting in the way that only home can be. On Fighter,
David Nail conjures up a similar feeling repeatedly, singing songs about summer
nights and loving parents and girls singing along with “Little Red Corvette” in the car. But “Home” is the
album’s beating heart, and it’s the reason this album is on this list.
189.
Sister Hazel -
Lighter in the Dark
Growing up, Sister Hazel were one of my favorite bands in
the world. Like a bunch of other ‘90s bands, I fell in love with their sound
when I was a kid, only to lose track of them in the early days of the 2000s.
When my brother taught me how to download music, circa 2003, I slowly started
going back and unearthing the records I’d missed from bands I’d loved when I
was seven or eight years old. Sister Hazel were one of those bands. I
rediscovered their early 2000s releases (Fortress and Chasing
Daylight) and then eagerly anticipated their new releases (Lift and Absolutely).
Then, around when I graduated high school, they put out an album that did
nothing for me. For awhile, I thought I’d outgrown them. Lighter in the Dark
brought me back into the fold. It didn’t hurt that Sister Hazel were
switching into full-on country mode just as my tastes were skewing as far in
that direction as they would go. This band had always had country in their DNA,
but they’d largely stayed toward the Petty/heartland rock side of the equation.
This record flirts a little deeper with radio country, to generic-but-pleasant
results (see “Karaoke Song” and “We Got It All Tonight,” the two obvious
single plays). But it also features some extremely pleasing treats: “Fall of
the Map” and “Something to Believe In” are both Heartbreakers-esque anthems
(and both even contain Petty namedrops); “Almost Broken” and “Ten Candle Days”
are potent, rootsy ballads; “Prettiest Girl at the Dance” is a dusty Eagles throwback;
and “Run Highway Run” sounds like it could have been on a road trip mix right
next to “All for You” back in 1997.
190.
Dierks Bentley -
The Mountain
There’s a moment on The
Mountain where Dierks Bentley muses about leaving it all behind. The
record’s final song, called “How I’m Going Out,” is about recognizing when it’s
time to leave the party. It’s not something that many mainstream Nashville
stars would even think about putting on an album—and not something most labels
would let their top guys get away with. But it feels honest and well-earned at
the end of The Mountain, an album
about the long, winding journey of growing up. When you’re a kid, you tend to
think of adults as people who have everything figured out, people who have all
the answers. Once you actually become an adult, though, you recognize that
growing up is a never-ending road. Here, Dierks reckons with that dichotomy: between
being a husband and a father and being a reckless, fun-loving adventurer.
There’s a tension on the record, between embracing the responsibility of the
former and accepting the call of the latter. And the ultimate answer of the
record is that, for a lot of us, our younger selves will always be a part of
who we are. We might shed parts of the skin we used to wear, but we’ll always
have a bit of that identity in our hearts and souls. But that clash—between
adulthood and youth, between responsibility and freedom—seems to come to a head
on “How I’m Going Out,” where Dierks envisions the day that he will hang up his
guitar and be a family man full time. It’s a revelation that underlines the
album’s themes: of split identity and aging and mortality and family. Eventually,
whether you’re ready for it or not, the moment to step away from your youth—or
from your dreams, or from a past version of yourself—comes along. The question
the album seems to ask is whether you will fight the shift, or gracefully
succumb to the tide. Most of today’s artists would fight like hell. There’s
something graceful and respectable about Dierks and his willingness to be swept along by the current.
191.
Lindsay Ell -
The Project
The first time I heard Lindsay Ell was literally years
before her Nashville label got off their asses and let her release a
full-length album. Such is the bizarre buzz-building purgatory that
up-and-coming country artists often must go through early on in their
careers—especially if they lean mainstream and especially if they are female. I
remember being intrigued by Ell early on, and by the sassy, hooky pop-country
songs she was putting out as one-offs. All of those singles were good and a few
of them—particularly “By the Way” and “All Alright”—are among the sturdiest
should-have-been-hits of the decade. None of them prepared me for The
Project, a blues-inflected, soulful collection of songs that takes its cues
from John Mayer’s Continuum. Ell even re-recorded Continuum in
full en route to crafting this album—a project she later released as The
Continuum Project. Covering the entirety of Mayer’s magnus opus allowed Ell
to see clearly what made those songs tick, but it also got all the imitation
and hero worship out of her system before she set to work recording her own
songs. The result is a somewhat fascinating piece of work: an album clearly crafted
on the template of another (see “Castle,” an irresistible descendent of Mayer’s
“Belief”) but that also very much has its own identity. Just check out “Just
Another Girl,” a No Doubt-flavored rocker; or “Criminal,” a poppy hookfest with
an edge of darkness. I assume Ell will only grow into her chops more on future
releases, but for a record that was, frankly, a very long time coming, The
Project didn’t disappoint.
192.
Old Dominion -
Happy Endings
What do you do when a girl breaks your heart and you try
everything you can to get over her, only to find that every single song you
write is still about the time you spent together? Happy Endings, the
second record from the infectiously catchy country band Old Dominion is, I
Think, about that idea. At very least, the best song here, called “Still
Writing Songs about You,” is about being unable—or maybe subconsciously
unwilling—to say goodbye to a dream girl. It’s the kind of song that underlines
what really good mainstream pop-country can be: clever, witty, full of smart
turns of phrase, and all wound around an infectious chorus and a descending
guitar motif in a way that shows clear sense of craft. In the second verse, the
narrator buys an acoustic guitar that “doesn’t know how you look, how you
laugh, how you kiss me.” But the guitar ends up lending voice to songs about
her anyway: “I’m on the edge of the bed and it’s way past two/And I’m stuck on a
line ‘cause I know what rhymes with blue.” Old Dominion are really good at
crafting songs like that: catchy and breezy songs that carry a little more
emotional weight than meets the eye. That’s the case with “Written in the
Sand,” about a girl who won’t quite commit to a relationship, and it’s
definitely true of “So You Go,” about being so torn up post-breakup that
everything you do to try to forget about her ends up feeling unsatisfying and
hollow. The result is the good kind of radio country: remarkably
well-wrought songs that just so happen to be some of the catchiest things in
the world.
193.
Death Cab for Cutie -
Kintsugi
Ben Gibbard lays his marriage to rest in this gorgeously
elegiac collection of songs. Critics and longtime fans largely wrote the album
off—they wouldn’t start coming back into the fold until the follow-up, 2018’s Thank
You for Today—but Kintsugi is a classic Death Cab LP. The songs
ground their heartbreak in a sense of place. “Little Wanderer” captures the
loneliness of walking through an airport solo when everyone around you seems to
be kissing someone goodbye or sharing a welcome-back embrace. “The Ghosts of
Beverly Drive” plays like a careening car chase through a dimly-lit suburban
neighborhood. “You’ve Haunted Me All My Life” rings like wedding bells at the
church, still chiming even when the marriage they heralded has run its course. Just
an album before this, on 2011’s lukewarm Codes & Keys, Gibbard’s
lyrics were as happy and content as they’d ever been. Here, they almost
overflow with sadness and memory, bitterness and regret, resignation and
release. “I guess it’s not a failure we could help/We’ll both go on to get
lonely with someone else.” Gibbard sings those words in “No Room in Frame,” and
even in his sad, storied catalog, it’s hard to think of a more somber line.
194.
Luke Combs -
This One's for You
I wouldn’t have predicted back when Luke Combs’ first single
“Hurricane” broke that the guy singing it would become one of the biggest stars
in country music. But somehow, This One’s for You turned into an
absolute juggernaut, notching multiple number one singles, and then charting
even bigger hits off its 2018 deluxe reissue. Then again, Luke Combs has an
affable everyman quality to him that makes him a natural country music star. He
packs his songs with big radio-ready hooks, but he also has a mixture of pathos
and humor, and a flare for slice-of-life narratives that take country tropes
and make them a little more interesting. Said another way, his songs feel more
real and honest than a lot of his overproduced pop-country contemporaries. On
the rave-ups (summertime anthems like “Memories Are Made Of,” “Don’t Tempt Me,”
or “When It Rains It Pours”), he sounds like an old college body regaling you
with stories about good times. On the ballads (the thank-you speech that is the
title track, or “I Got Away with You,” one of the decade’s cleverest love
songs), he comes across as deeply earnest and humble. It’s a mixture that lends
This One’s for You its surprising replayability. No matter what Luke
Combs is singing about, it’s hard not to believe him.
195.
Anberlin -
Dark Is the Way, Light is a Place
What music from your life retains its magic for the longest?
The most obvious answer is your formative music: the albums and songs you listen
to when you first start falling in love with music and forming your tastes. But
I think you also have to point to the music you hear around the beginnings of
the significant relationships in your life. I can’t think of another reason
that
Dark Is the Way, Light Is a Place—typically
regarded as the weakest record in the Anberlin oeuvre—has long been my favorite
of their work.
Dark came out in the
fall of 2010, and I relate it most strongly to long weekends cloistered away in
my dorm room with my girlfriend. Falling in love that deeply made music sound
sweeter and more euphoric, like the songs were trying to keep pace with the way
may heart would quicken when she was around. This album was an example of that,
and a perfect one. Anberlin charted an odd arc throughout their career,
rotating between skyscraping faith-driven rock music, hard-edged pop-punk, and
ultra-hooky 90s-informed alt-rock. I never cared much for their more aggressive
tendencies, and while their spiritual tilt sometimes led to truly thrilling,
larger-than-life creations (see “(*Fin)”), I always preferred Anberlin in their
soft-rock incarnation. Songs from previous albums, like “Breathe” and “Naïve
Orleans,” showed me how much this band could do with a straight-ahead radio
rock sound.
Dark is the only album
where they ever clicked into that vibe throughout, and it’s glorious. Fans
called the songs repetitive and decried the lyrics for lacking the depth of
previous releases, but the tracks themselves pack so much melodic and sonic
punch that it’s hard to care. Songs like “Impossible,” “Take Me (As You Found
Me),” and “Art of War” are sweeping arena-filling confections that wouldn’t
have been out of place on the radio circa 1998. “Take Me (As You Found Me)”
almost tracks as a Goo Goo Dolls anthem, circa
Dizzy up the Girl. The sweep suits them, and it suited me at the
time. When you’re falling head over heels in love, you want your songs to sound
this big, this grand, this romantic, this hopeful. No wonder I pulled this
album up on my iPod for so many walks across campus to class.
196.
Switchfoot -
Vice Verses
Switchfoot came into this decade as one of my favorite and
most formative bands. They’re exiting it with a streak of mediocre albums under
their belts and a question floating above their band name of whether they can
make music relevant to my life anymore. The last time they truly seemed to push
themselves—the last time they seemed genuinely engaged in their art—was 2011, with
this album.
Vice Verses reaches for what I once thought this band could
be: the post-millennial U2. “Where I Belong,” the epic closing track, grapples
heavenward with one of the decade’s most convincing rock ‘n’ roll stadium
plays. “Afterlife,” “The Original,” and “Dark Horses” are crunchy rock ‘n’ roll
songs with grit, rhythm, and charisma. “Souvenirs” and “Restless” are yearning
ballads with a spiritual bent. “Selling the News” and “Blinding Light” are
socially-conscious commentary. Each of these modes mimics something that Bono,
The Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen Jr. have done in the past—even if the
album
Vice Verses most resembles is
How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb,
one of U2’s less-beloved works. After this record, Switchfoot began to chase
unsatisfying pop trends. Here, for one last time, they seemed to believe in using
rafter-reaching rock ‘n’ roll to deliver the message they wanted to send.
197.
Striking Matchings -
Nothing but the Silence
Trends come and go in the music industry, but there will
always be something electric about a talented boy-girl duo. Sometimes it’s a
sexual tension thing; sometimes it’s just two really great voices melding
together in a way that sounds pre-destined. With Striking Matches, the X-factor
isn’t so much the voices as the guitars. The two musicians that make up
Striking Matches—Sarah Zimmerman and Justin Davis—are both distinct
guitar-playing talents. Zimmerman has a knack for incendiary slide guitar
solos. Davis is more of a backwoods finger-picker. They’re also accomplished
songwriters, having been tapped to write many of the boy-girl duets featured on
the 2010s primetime soap opera Nashville, and they’re also accomplished
singers, capable of selling the emotional intimacy of ballads like “When the
Right One Comes Along” or “God and You” even when their guitar amps are turned down. But it’s on the songs where all their elements come together that
Striking Matches really spark, like the runaway-train opener “Trouble Is as
Trouble Does” or the mighty crescendo of “Make a Liar out of Me,” where
Zimmerman rips one of the five or so greatest guitar solos of the decade. It says a
lot that T. Bone Burnett, a man with a storied eye for talent in the country
and roots music scenes, agreed to produce Nothing but the Silence.
198.
The Alternate Routes -
Nothing More
The Alternate Routes were, at one point, among the most
promising bands in rock ‘n’ roll. After the rafter-shaking arena anthems that packed
2010’s Lately, I would have bet on them growing a huge following—or, at
least, huge by “rock band in the 2010s” standards. Nothing More isn’t as
wall-scaling in its ambitions, but it is still a grandiose, emotional piece of
work that is worthy of a much larger audience than it reached. The Alternate
Routes have been sporadic in their activity since, falling victim to the
streaming era pitfall of releasing a single every year or so but never building
to anything more substantial. It’s a shame, given this band’s clear, shining
talent. But it’s also a factor that has given this album extra gravity for me
since it came out. When the bands you love stop releasing music regularly, you
cling that much harder to the music they’ve already made for you. Nothing More
is one such album—an album packed with empathy (the title track) and
romance (the Cusack-on-the-lawn-worthy “Stereo”) and memories so vividly drawn that you
feel like you’ve been transported right into them (the sublime “Gil”). This
record was funded by a crowd-funding campaign, and suffice to say that I am
ready to donate to the next one.
199.
Phillip Phillips -
The World from the Side of the Moon
Following
American
Idol back in the day was a blast. I have very fond memories of watching
that show with my mom throughout my middle school and high school years—picking
our favorites, deploring America’s bad choices, celebrating the victories. The
season where Phillip Phillips won was the last season I followed, and I
followed it only passingly. Once I went off to college, the amount of TV I
watched at all diminished greatly. I certainly wasn’t tuning in two nights
every week for
American Idol. But I
caught bits and pieces of the 2011 season, and once I was home for the spring
and summer, I was right back to watching the show with my mom. We weren’t wowed
by Phillip Phillips on TV. He seemed timid to the point of being unskilled, and
the singers he ended up beating were pretty unanimously superior to him. But
when Phillips released
The World from the
Side of the Moon, it was the first album from an
American Idol winner to wow me. Where most past
Idol contestants spent their debut
albums reaching for generic pop or rock trends of the time—clearly a bad move,
based on how much anyone cares about those albums now—
World combined influences like Dave Matthews Band, Damien Rice, and
O.A.R. for a record that felt surprisingly well-suited to the voice singing the
songs. Phillips was never the “best” singer, but his voice shines on songs like
“Home,” the Mumford & Sons-style coronation single; or “Gone, Gone, Gone” a
late-summer breakup anthem that deserved more airplay than it got. Phillips’
later albums lost the charm of this one, and
Idol hasn’t been an important part of my life for 10 years. But
The World from the Side of the Moon remains
a deeply enjoyable album from an artist who probably could have accomplished
more outside of the mainstream machine.
200.
Stars -
There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light
I’ve always liked Stars, but they’ve never been a band I
loved. They have individual songs that bowl me over: “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead” is
an obvious classic; “Dead Hearts” and “Wasted Daylight,” the first two tracks
from 2010’s The Five Ghosts, are up there with the best opening one-two
punches of the decade. But their albums usually lose me somewhere along the
way. At least, that was the case up until There Is No Love in Fluorescent
Light. This record bottles up everything that makes Stars special—the
alchemy of the male-female vocal tradeoff; the musical balance between pop and
folk and indie and rock ‘n’ roll; the songs about relationships that, for
whatever reason, just can’t last—and gives them their most propulsive
presentation ever. With marquee production and huge hooks—see the pseudo title
track “Fluorescent Light,” an epic about why new adventures are so important
for keeping love alive—this record makes Stars sound vital, yearning, hopeful,
and genuinely brand-new again. This band has always excelled at writing complex
songs about complex people. But There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light is
largely very simple. It’s a record about the ever-present threat of loneliness—whether
it’s in your head or in your real life—and it’s a record about finding ways to
fight that loneliness, no matter what it takes.
