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Dec. 16th, 2017 07:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretThe annual list for bookherd of my favorite new songs of 2017 (or 2016 but I didn't hear them until 2017 because I'm not hip at all)
-"Old Apartment" by Barenaked Ladies and the Persuasions. Okay, not at all a new song, a song I've loved for years, but the whole BNL/Persuasions album, "Ladies and Gentlemen: Barenaked Ladies and The Persuasions" is an absolute delight. I described it to someone as "Barenaked Ladies, but with even better vocal harmonies." But in case somebody doesn't know "The Old Apartment", let me sell it to you. It's a story about a guy who had a shitty bachelor's apartment. He got married, bought a house, moved on in his life. But one night in a fit of perversity and nostalgia, he breaks into his old apartment and imagines he's still living his old life. And he knows this is not sustainable, both because he literally committed a crime and because his new life is in most ways better than his old life. But some part of him doesn't care about any of that. It's one of my favorite explorations of memory and growing up- and the Persuasions make it even better particularly because of the way they nail the ambiguity of the ending..
"When Will I Be Changed" by Josh Ritter. New Josh Ritter album means new Josh Ritter song on this list, duh. An airy, questing prayer created with the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir. A lot of people tried to create an anthem for 2017's complicated political waters; I won't say Ritter succeeded, but I think his version's a lot more listenable and less insufferable than most.
"Sleeping Wild" by Norah Jones. There's a half dozen songs on "Day Breaks" I could've mentioned, and the Wayne Shorter(WAYNE SHORTER!)-backed title track is particularly worth a look, it's such a polished and well put together jazz vocals album. But this is my favorite thing on the album because it uses Jones's new, more technically perfect adaptation of the Adult Contemporary style from her first album... and then it goes just a little bit wild the way some of Jones's better, more adventurous later albums do. I also love the lyrical construction, with its structured internal meters. "I love you, adore you/ Awake, but in the night/ Deceive you and leave you/ Sleeping wild" strongly reminds me of things like Lorenz Hart's "I'm wild again/ beguiled again/ a whimpering simpering child again." Which is one of my favorite lyrics ever, so that explains why I like this clever invocation of it.
"John Wayne" by Lady Gaga. I miss that moment in our pop culture when a new Lady Gaga album was more of a cultural event than a piece of music. Joanne is an excellent pop album, but it doesn't mean anything more than that. Academics aren't writing ten thousand word essays about it. But I like this song's engagement with tropes: Aware that lyrical invocation of John Wayne in our modern moment implies a deconstruction of 1950s masculinity, Gaga undeconstructs. She makes an embrace of toxic masculinity a conscious choice, with inherent risks leading to risky rewards, and in doing so stakes a female claim to toxic masculinity.
"Supernova" by Meklit. So I only had three songs on my list and it felt like I ought to have more, so I poked the new music bin at my library and this popped out. And I've thus been obsessively listening to her new album and some of her older work for the past several weeks. MEKLIT IS GREAT. THE END. Ethio-Jazz is Meklit's roots, and it's the baseline for her music, but she uses it as a base to go off in all sorts of fascinating directions, as she declares in the fiercely expansive "I Want to Sing for them All", namechecking Ethio-Jazz legends I've never heard of alongside Michael Jackson and Prince and Leonard Cohen. But "Supernova" is my favorite thing on her new record. There's a deep Afro-futurist vein in Meklit's music most definitively expressed in her 2012 collaborative scifi concept album "Earthbound", and "Supernova" taps into that vein and effusively gushes it all over the place, over a rollicking baseline.
DOWNLOAD PLAYLIST HERE
bookherd of my favorite new songs of 2017 (or 2016 but I didn't hear them until 2017 because I'm not hip at all)-"Old Apartment" by Barenaked Ladies and the Persuasions. Okay, not at all a new song, a song I've loved for years, but the whole BNL/Persuasions album, "Ladies and Gentlemen: Barenaked Ladies and The Persuasions" is an absolute delight. I described it to someone as "Barenaked Ladies, but with even better vocal harmonies." But in case somebody doesn't know "The Old Apartment", let me sell it to you. It's a story about a guy who had a shitty bachelor's apartment. He got married, bought a house, moved on in his life. But one night in a fit of perversity and nostalgia, he breaks into his old apartment and imagines he's still living his old life. And he knows this is not sustainable, both because he literally committed a crime and because his new life is in most ways better than his old life. But some part of him doesn't care about any of that. It's one of my favorite explorations of memory and growing up- and the Persuasions make it even better particularly because of the way they nail the ambiguity of the ending..
"When Will I Be Changed" by Josh Ritter. New Josh Ritter album means new Josh Ritter song on this list, duh. An airy, questing prayer created with the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir. A lot of people tried to create an anthem for 2017's complicated political waters; I won't say Ritter succeeded, but I think his version's a lot more listenable and less insufferable than most.
"Sleeping Wild" by Norah Jones. There's a half dozen songs on "Day Breaks" I could've mentioned, and the Wayne Shorter(WAYNE SHORTER!)-backed title track is particularly worth a look, it's such a polished and well put together jazz vocals album. But this is my favorite thing on the album because it uses Jones's new, more technically perfect adaptation of the Adult Contemporary style from her first album... and then it goes just a little bit wild the way some of Jones's better, more adventurous later albums do. I also love the lyrical construction, with its structured internal meters. "I love you, adore you/ Awake, but in the night/ Deceive you and leave you/ Sleeping wild" strongly reminds me of things like Lorenz Hart's "I'm wild again/ beguiled again/ a whimpering simpering child again." Which is one of my favorite lyrics ever, so that explains why I like this clever invocation of it.
"John Wayne" by Lady Gaga. I miss that moment in our pop culture when a new Lady Gaga album was more of a cultural event than a piece of music. Joanne is an excellent pop album, but it doesn't mean anything more than that. Academics aren't writing ten thousand word essays about it. But I like this song's engagement with tropes: Aware that lyrical invocation of John Wayne in our modern moment implies a deconstruction of 1950s masculinity, Gaga undeconstructs. She makes an embrace of toxic masculinity a conscious choice, with inherent risks leading to risky rewards, and in doing so stakes a female claim to toxic masculinity.
"Supernova" by Meklit. So I only had three songs on my list and it felt like I ought to have more, so I poked the new music bin at my library and this popped out. And I've thus been obsessively listening to her new album and some of her older work for the past several weeks. MEKLIT IS GREAT. THE END. Ethio-Jazz is Meklit's roots, and it's the baseline for her music, but she uses it as a base to go off in all sorts of fascinating directions, as she declares in the fiercely expansive "I Want to Sing for them All", namechecking Ethio-Jazz legends I've never heard of alongside Michael Jackson and Prince and Leonard Cohen. But "Supernova" is my favorite thing on her new record. There's a deep Afro-futurist vein in Meklit's music most definitively expressed in her 2012 collaborative scifi concept album "Earthbound", and "Supernova" taps into that vein and effusively gushes it all over the place, over a rollicking baseline.
DOWNLOAD PLAYLIST HERE