My Year In Lists, 2023 — Music Edition
And 700 words on Bleachers, for some reason.
The best time to publish a “year in review” list is in mid-December, when everyone else is doing it. The second best time to publish a “year in review” list is during the first week of January, so that you can say you just wanted to wait for the year to actually be over, even though the real reason was that you got really busy in December and put off any form of written introspection.
The third best time to publish a “year in review” list is now, when you take the notes and outlines collected over the past two months and finally shape it into something resembling prose. So… this is part one of my highlights for 2023 that I’ll carry with me into 2024 and beyond.
This first part is about the best music I encountered last year. Up next will be movies, followed by theater & dining, which will be published hopefully across the next couple weeks.
Also, if you’re reading this on the website, you may have noticed that I bought a domain name for this newsletter! You can now send www.butteredpopcorn.org to all your friends.
Spotify Unwrapped
My Spotify Wrapped is always a bit messy, as I mostly listen to full albums and don’t often play things on repeat: my most listened to song this year was played a whopping thirteen times. For that reason, it’s been a great exercise to compile these lists of my favorite songs, albums, and concerts from 2023, as it differs from my “Top Songs” based on my listening habits. Hopefully something here will resonate with you as much as it has for me.
Five Songs That Grabbed Hold Of Me
Like most people, I listen to music while doing other things. Working, cleaning, cooking; songs are merely a soundtrack to my day. But sometimes, a great song will burst out of the background. I stop and have no choice but to listen to it. Here’s short words on five songs that grabbed my attention last year and haven’t let me go since.
I put these songs, plus several more that I loved, on this Spotify playlist.
I Give Myself Away, so You Can Use Me — Parchman Prison Prayer
Taken from a compilation of gospel songs recorded in a state penitentiary, this song is a plaintive statement of surrender. It fully moved me the first time I heard it, and continues to do so every time I listen to it. It’s easy to imagine a grander arrangement, with choirs and organs and all that, but this stripped-down rendition is far more beautiful. I first read about this album from a review by Hanif Abdurraqib, who is perhaps the best music writer alive today. About this song, he writes: “Around three minutes long, with piano as the lone accompaniment, the song begins with a single vocalist repeating the line ‘I give myself away / so you can use me.’ Midway through, another singer joins in, and then another; the language doesn’t change, but the vocals accumulate, stunning and imperfect. If you feel uncertain about the existence of God—and therefore about the meaning of words of surrender echoing through the halls of a place like Parchman—you may find the performance only heartbreaking.”
Not Strong Enough — Boygenius
I was a fan of Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus long before they formed this supergroup, and it’s been really cool to see their meteoric rise this year. In 2018, I saw the indie darlings sell out Brooklyn Steel. In 2023, they became the biggest thing in rock music and I saw them at their sold out performance at Madison Square Garden. On a record full of terrific songs, this is the best one, not least because it equally balances all three of their respective strengths better than the other tracks.
Ditto — Newjeans
I love the wistfulness of this K-pop song, in which youthful puppy love is expressed through something like a glacial thaw.
Inexperto en Olvidarte — Alejandro Fernández
Look, I know a lot of Mexican music sounds just like this: lovelorn lyrics, mariachi trumpets, minimal percussion, the singer wearing a sombrero in the music video. But when the formula works, it really works.
Perfect For You — Peach PRC
This Australian TikTok star takes up the mantle of maximalist mid-2000s pop girlie music, and with “Perfect For You,” she pays tribute to Paris Hilton, with an interpolation of the reclaimed classic “Stars Are Blind.” I love songs that are naked declarations of emotion, and this song is absolutely that. A friend of a friend turned me on to Peach PRC, particularly this song, at a time when we were starting to become pretty good friends. Due to extenuating circumstances, we haven’t spoken in months, and probably won’t for a while, if ever again. But every time I play “Perfect For You,” it brings me back to when, at the peak of our (strictly platonic) friendship’s potential, we duetted “Stars Are Blind” at karaoke. We fell flat — we didn’t actually know the original Paris Hilton song as well as we thought — but we powered through, because, in that moment, and only that moment, we meant it when we sang to each other: Baby, I’m perfect for you.
Five Albums I Listened to A Lot Last Year
Unranked.
Evenings at the Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy
Recorded in 1961, discovered in 2017, and released in 2023. It’s always terrific to hear jazz legends at the height of their powers.
Desire, I Want To Turn Into You (Caroline Polachek)
Ethereal and weird but not aggressively so. A lot of the alt-pop girlies released good albums, but Polachek’s was the most consistent.
The record (Boygenius)
Obama put “Not Strong Enough” on his summer playlist, Lucy Dacus called him a war criminal, and then he omitted Boygenius from his end-of-year playlist.
Destiny (DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ)
She’s the most underrated electronic musician on the internet. I often put this on at parties, and not just because the nearly four hour length precludes me from having to change the music every forty minutes. Sequenced to be a continuous mix, DJ Sabrina’s vibrant, bright, sample-driven music is perfect for boosting the mood.
NewJeans 2nd EP ‘Get Up’ (Newjeans)
I’d be lying if I didn’t say that out of all the records in this list, none were played more than this EP. “Super Shy” is a bop, but it’s the first track, “New Jeans,” that’s grown on me the most.
Notes on Live Shows
I had a super stacked lineup of concerts in the back half of the year. I saw Carly Rae Jepsen, technically twice: the first show was canceled after four songs due to an impending thunderstorm. She rescheduled to the next day: a Tuesday at 3 PM. I played hooky from work. In the heat of an August afternoon, with a crowd of people who had to really, really want to be there, she was glorious, we were spellbound. She wielded a sword and slayed. The Boygenius show at Madison Square Garden was transcendent, at times making a 20,000 capacity arena seem like an intimate club.
But nothing will top Beyoncé, who I saw on her Renaissance Tour. I had sort of shrugged my way into it: I was scheduled to be in London for a couple days on an extended layover and she happened to be performing on one of those nights. Tickets were about $175 (many thanks to European concert ticket arbitrage), so this was a no-brainer. I was overwhelmed and awed by the sheer force of the production: the dancers, the interludes that gorgeously contextualized the album, Blue Ivy coming out to dance for a bit, and of course, Beyoncé herself, who made the three-hour show seem effortless.
Music isn’t just about what can fill a packed arena, of course. With all due respect to Queen Bey, the most memorable music moment of my year came at Café La Trova, a cocktail bar in Miami where a Cuban band plays every night. They were very good and provided the bar with a great vibe. Then the bartenders started joining in from across the room, mostly clapping hands and shaking various percussion instruments. But then one of the bartenders grabbed a trombone and had a duet with the bandleader. Here were two guys having a conversation with each other, through music, in a crowded bar. I took a video of the exchange, but you really, truly, had to be there, and probably had to be more than a little buzzed.
Biggest disappointment: as a huge fan of PC Music, the progenitors of hyperpop, I was super excited when A.G. Cook came to New York to do a rare DJ set to mark the ten year anniversary of the music label/movement that he helped start alongside SOPHIE and Danny L Harle. I had hoped that his set would be a journey through PC Music’s history, but he largely avoided the hits. While that’s something I’ll always respect, I also just wanted to bop to “Beautiful.”
Biggest surprise: Jack Antonoff exists in a somewhat interesting place in music. He’s produced songs and albums for all of the pop girlies: Taylor, Lorde, Lana, Clairo, Carly, St. Vincent. The former Fun. sideman also has his own solo project, a rock band that is generally regarded as anywhere between mildly pleasant and offensively corny. Bleachers is one of many bands that shamelessly rip off Bruce Springsteen’s music, but that’s Antonoff’s birthright as a New Jersey native. I’d always enjoyed his music in Bleachers, in the sense of “this is a nice song to put on while driving.” His pop music instincts inform a lot of the melodies and they are very catchy, but sometimes the songs feel like pandering, sort of the Jeb Bush “Please Clap” of alt-rock.
In December, I was in Florida for a bachelor party, and one day we all went to an alt-rock music festival in Fort Lauderdale. It was one of those radio station-sponsored festivals like Jingle Ball that I honestly thought had disappeared. There was very solid lineup of rock bands I had listened to in high school: The Black Keys, Young the Giant, Silversun Pickups. (Newer acts included Lovejoy and The Beaches, so it wasn’t wholly nostalgia-driven programming.) Bleachers was there too, as the second to last act of the night. I expected a fun show; Jack Antonoff is nothing if not great at making bops, even if his best work is in the producer’s chair. So it was a surprise when he came out with blistering, manic energy, getting the crowd to dance and chant and clap throughout his set. That 1980’s E-Street sound of synth and guitar and sax, replicated by Bleachers, was basically made for this kind of outdoor festival environment, and Antonoff revealed himself to be a terrific frontman.
Halfway through the set, the band played “Everybody Lost Somebody,” a song that I have never really cared for that’s a part of Gone Now, Bleachers’ second album. It’s trying way too hard to rouse you, and the refrain — everybody lost somebody!! — is overly broad and stinks of cheap sentiment. It’s one of his most pandering songs, and he’s got a lot of pandering songs. But at this performance, at the end of “Everybody Lost Somebody,” Antonoff transitions straight into “Goodmorning,” a Beatles-esque ballad that’s a little bit Sgt. Pepper, a little bit Paul’s section of “A Day in the Life.” He describes the song as being “about waking up with all your baggage and then picking it up and going through the day,” and in the lyrics, there are allusions to the death of his sister when they were young. Nothing too direct; the song is an impressionistic portrait of a guy waking up in the morning and coming to terms with the burdens he’ll have to carry throughout the rest of his day. The recorded version of “Goodmorning” is over-produced, with distracting stereo effects and a robotic drum machine. But in the live show, he’s stripped the song down to its essentials, with just a piano and a bit of saxophone accompanying him. Hearing the song in this context, coming right after the cloying “Everybody Lost Somebody,” it felt like Antonoff was peeling back the layers of instrumentation of bombast and generic slogans, giving way to something that felt more emotionally raw than any other Bleachers song he’s released to date.
Putting those two songs in sequence feels so natural that in retrospect, it’s baffling that on the album, “Goodmorning” is three tracks before “Everybody Lost Somebody.” Fortunately, Jack Antonoff was smart enough to realize that there was a better way to perform these songs. It’s entirely possible that this new arrangement was just as calculated as the songs had sounded on the record, something akin to the trope of popstars releasing an album of country-leaning tunes, claiming new this sound is the real artist underneath the artifice. (See: Lady Gaga’s Joanne; Miley Cyrus’ Younger Now; Justin Timberlake’s Man of the Woods.) But in the moment, it felt real.
There’s a professional recording taken from a concert at Radio City Hall where these two songs play out as I described it. The video didn’t affect me the way it did when I was there in Florida, since even the best proshots lack the immediacy and energy of actually having been there.
Every concert I attended last year
Sksksks: Easyfun, DJ Rish; Elsewhere
Alt J; Kings Theatre
Sksksks: Rakky Ripper; Elsewhere
Beyoncé; Tottenham Hotspur Stadium (London)
Cobrah; Elsewhere
Ibrahim Maalouf; Prospect Park
Indigo de Souza; Prospect Park
Carly Rae Jepsen; Pier 17
Sigur Ros; Kings Theatre
Alex G, Alvvays; Prospect Park
Peggy Gou; The Glasshouse
Sksksks x PC Music: A.G. Cook, Umru; The Meadows
Space 92; Superior Ingredients
The Black Keys, Bleachers, Young the Giant, Lovejoy, Silversun Pickups, The Beaches; Riptide Music Festival (Fort Lauderdale)
100 Gecs, Tisakorean, Liturgy; Knockdown Center