As 2019 drew to a close, I decided to write about a favorite song from the preceding decade every day in December. I’ve always enjoyed writing about music, though I hadn’t done it too much in recent years. This was a way to force myself back into the habit for a bit, and see if…
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“Take Care” – Beach House
Happy New Year! The year works great as a metric for measuring incremental personal change. The century helps us conceive of human history as it extends beyond ourselves. But the decade strikes a perfect balance, helping us define and analyze coherent mini-eras within our lives. It’s convenient that they’re set in cycles of ten, because…
“Ivy” – Frank Ocean
Frank Ocean has taken the idea of rejecting labels to previously unthinkable extremes. In the most literal sense, he self-released his debut mixtape in 2011 after getting fed up with his treatment by Def Jam. In 2016 he streamed a relatively lackluster “visual album” called Endless to technically fulfill that Def Jam contract, then less…
“Archie, Marry Me” – Alvvays
Cape Breton Island is in the northeast of Nova Scotia. Waves of Scottish immigrants in the 18th and 19th centuries created a distinct regional form of Gaelic music on the island that still thrives today, in part due to the Rankins. The Rankins come from Cape Breton’s small coastal community of Mabou. Five Rankin siblings…
“Jubilee Street” – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
No one has aged more in the 2010s than Nick Cave. At the start of the decade, Cave had rediscovered high-energy post-punk with his Grinderman side project; his goth rock classic “Red Right Hand” was resonating with a new audience as the theme song for Peaky Blinders; and he’d written the screenplay for the Tom…