Julia Brown, “All Alone in Bed.” My favorite from the last album by Caroline White and the busy Sam Ray (also of Ricky Eat Acid) under this name. Afrika Bambaataa). Afro-futurist old school party music building to a single hot-blooded climax/blastoff. Max Martin’s clockwork sense of song construction complements Grande’s impeccable vocal control (which I find annoying on her plentiful dippier material) and I nod along until there I am lipsyncing. Finally got this one at Dance Church.Īriana Grande, “Into You.” Whenever I listen to it, I wind up listening to it three times in a row.

Missy Elliott, “WTF (Where They From)” (ft. This song, trebly and echoey and delicate and nervous and sexless and circling back on itself, sounds like drugs to me. Really this whole record stirs my heart when I put other things down and attend to its big visual gestures and eerie textures, but this is the song whose emotional effect was biggest for me.Ĭhromatics, “In Films.” The second pre-release single from a record by now more than a year delayed, one of those hooks where the doubled-keyboard-and-guitar has been compressed into one big heavy blur of sound and Ruth Radelet floats over the whole thing.ĭIIV, “Dopamine.” Still trying to understand what to make of this self-mythologizing martyr wreck of an artist, but I get this one now. Jherek Bischoff, “Ca(s)siopeia.” The least filmic and for me most affecting from this record of ambient chamber music. This was my favorite from Freetown Sound. C cried watching the music video for how it made her miss what she knows is her heart’s home.īeyonce, “Sorry” and “Formation.” My two from Lemonade.īlood Orange, “Best to You.” Dev Hynes, like few other male singer-songwriters besides Tricky, can write R&B for women singers that (in this one male listener’s opinion) centers their own emotions and their own consciousness– treats them, in other words, like subjects- instead of as props for male ego or furnishing for male fantasy. These have been cut.Īdele, “Send My Love (to Your New Lover).” Seattle’s Top 40-ish, silly “hip hop and hits” station, KUBE, got amoeba’d into the even more Top 40 “Power 93,” where you can hear a lot of Justin Bieber and Juicy J and Taylor Swift and Drake and, it turns out, Adele, who I’ve never intentionally listened to, until this song made something more joyful out of a rainy drive home in a borrowed car with a cranky kid and groceries.Īfous D’Afous, “Tarhanine Tegla.” I knew this Sahara-wide hit only because of Sahel Sounds. Starred songs aren’t on Spotify.Įdit: In talking about a few of these songs I shared stories of folks’ experiences that weren’t mine to share.

Here’s what I loved best of what I did hear.įirst, songs I loved this year (including songs from last year I got around to in the last twelves months) that I loved even if I didn’t love, or never heard, the rest of the albums they were from.

So through it all I chose not to rush or cram I listened, then, to less new stuff. This was the year, of course, of groundshifting political cataclysm as well as death after death it was also the year, for me, of Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Anonymous 4’s medieval Marian hymn anthology The Lily and the Lamb, Captain Beefheart’s Doc at the Radar Station, Billie Holiday’s Solitude, Ornette Coleman, Atrium Musicae’s Al Andalus, Unwound, Incredible String Band’s Wee Tam, Augustus Pablo, Paul McCartney’s Run Devil Run, and finally getting the hang of Elvis through his Valentine Gift for You collection. Life is basically sad and hard as well as a sublime gift, a cliffdrop as well as a stargaze, and this year I tried to be less consumerist in my relationship to finding new music since why let capitalism pollute more in me than it already has.

Dej loaf try me acapella