Issue 24 is out! Most of the pages are devoted to my writeup of the very best songs from last year, 24 selections veering from jazz fusion to pop to traditional jazz to psychedelic rock and back again. Here’s the issue’s introductory essay.
Year after year, I keep having the sense that this is a great time for music. Could be it’s just ever-better access to music, resulting in more artists, songs, and albums of interest for any given listener. It’s easier than ever for artists to record and distribute music independently, which means more recorded music makes its way into the wild. A corresponding boost comes from online and mobile music services, which gained in both number and popularity last year. Whatever one’s tastes—bleeding-edge pop, avant-garde jazz, esoteric electronica, stoner metal—music services such as Pandora, Spotify, and Xbox Music make it easy to dive deep. At the same time, LP records, once regarded as artifacts of a bygone era, are in full production. New LPs, cleanly pressed on thick slabs of vinyl, provide premium listening on good hi-fi systems, and most come with MP3s for use on computers and phones. Meanwhile, websites like HDTracks, eClassical, HighResAudio (for outside the U.S.), and Neil Young’s soon-to-open Pono Music offer downloads of better than CD fidelity, a trend I hope will continue. An odd side effect of all this is that CDs, the dominant format for most of my lifelong listening, seem increasingly inessential.
Whatever the reasons, good and great new music seems to be everywhere. Under mounting pressure from that awareness, I spent much of last year heads down in older tunes, pouring foundations for a grand ranking of the top thousand rock songs of all time (stay tuned!). But new music, timely and fresh, kept jutting in and cranking me back to the present.
Mainstream pop in 2013 was a bumpy terrain canvassed by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Lorde, Daft Punk, Kanye West, Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Bruno Mars, Jay Z, Lady Gaga, Imagine Dragons, Justin Timberlake, Rihanna, and Sara Bareilles. Bareilles and Daft Punk hit closest to home, and I discuss both in the pages that follow. Less widely trumpeted but no less significant to my year were releases from Mary Fahl, KT Tunstall, Big Country (reformed with Mike Peters, lead singer from The Alarm), and Goldfrapp. The year was especially strong for jazz. Some songs led with compositional strength (Kenny Garrett), some with innovative arrangements (Dave Bennett, Joshua Redman), others with gripping grooves (Dave Holland, Etienne Charles). All had finesse and awesome chops. So here it is: the very best of what I heard in last year’s music.
(Reprinted from issue 24.)
17 April 2014