listening to Your Favorite Songs 2024, part 14

So close to the end!! What a ride!!

Part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six, part seven, part eight, part nine, part ten, part eleven, part twelve, part thirteen.

"A Backyard" - Stay Inside
from Winter Boyfriend
"The tune gets stuck in my head for days, the lyrics stay with me for weeks. It's a subtly brilliant and devastating powerful song about growing apart and recognising something in that. 'Yeah, I like it, so I might just stay'.

Hey I know them! Well specifically Bryn Nieboer, who is so smart and cool it should be illegal. (I think the last time we talked on mic together was when I went on Generation Loss to talk about (500) Days of Summer, but our chat about Steve Albini and Big Black from my podcast's deep dive on Our Band Could Be Your Life was also extremely fun.) Anyway that's my journalistic disclosure, but I also love Stay Inside in a totally unbiased way, I promise.

The lyric "Your daughter, your neighbors / I wish they knew my name" really got me. Now that I'm in my mid-30s, more and more of my friends have young kids, and I often find myself thinking about how it feels to be known to these kids, which feels markedly different than the way I related to adults when I was a child. The first time my friends' daughter, who was maybe three at the time, addressed me and my husband by name? I almost passed away. It felt like a big deal! When I was a kid, I felt like I saw adults as fairly remote and impenetrable people, and it melted my heart when I realized she knew us. So the distance described in that lyric is pretty devastating. Hanging out isn't quite the same as being known, and only time and consistency can help you become known to someone else.

"Are You Mine" - Kim Deal
from Cow Art
"A heartbreaker inspired by Kim’s mom, suffering from alzheimer’s, asking her 'Are you mine?' Beautiful, aching, gorgeous, with a stunning production. Kim Deal is the best."

In an interview with MOJO, Kim Deal talked about writing the lyric "I have no time": "It really was weird to watch somebody lose time. Because I always knew Alzheimer’s patients might think their grandchild was their child, or be like ‘Uncle Bobby’s still alive’ when he’s been dead for years. But if they lose the sense of time, all of it’s possible. They’re not being weird." In the song, that "I have no time" lyric exists on its own, and then gets paired with the addendum "...for nothing but love." It's neat that we get both. On one hand, "I have no time" feels like despair, getting lost in the dark. On the other, "I have no time for nothing but but love" is the opposite of that—the only thing left is the connection between two people who love each other, and the fact that one person might not understand why that love is there doesn't really matter. Wow this is an emotional family themed blog section.

"Mary Boone" - Vampire Weekend
from Matthew Perpetua

I will never tire of the Vampire Weekend perspective of New York City, a constant outsider-insider tension (Ezra Koenig was born on the Upper West Side but grew up in Jersey) that is one of the endemic sensations of the city. You come to New York, and, as quickly as possible, you try to assimilate. The faster you merge with the city, the faster you can start shedding your transplant skin and saying things like things aren't what they used to be 'round these parts. My old college classmate Kevin Sweeting called this "the neighborhood game."

And it's funny that "Mary Boone" came out at a time when there's a shit-ton of Transplant Hater Discourse on various social media platforms ("transplants" are apparently easier to parse than the slightly more complex concept of "gentrification"). Koenig knows that someone like Mary Boone—Pennsylvania native, legendary New York art dealer, convicted tax-dodger— embodies all the mess of transplanting, and he loves her for it. The history of any city is a combination of gifts and plunder. You either have to give something to the place where you live, or you end up taking something from it. And if you give something, why not make it a masterpiece?

The first time that Soul II Soul "Back to Life" beat kicks in...wowee.

"Allatonceness" - Arab Strap
from Mario from Italy
"I like the groove, the bass line and the lyrics.
A lot of beautiful songs came out this year but this is the first that come in my mind if someone ask me the best of 2024, so I think this means something."

I love the phrase "groomers and grifters" spoken in a Scottish accent. I love the dour, bruised guitar. And most of all, I love the theme of rejecting rage bait and touching grass. The song chastises the Andrew Tates / "Disney has gone woke" folks / run-of-the-mill neo-Nazis of the world, but I think it could be applied to any flavor of digital slop that has been gumming up our collective works. This morning I was scrolling Instagram and on my feed appeared profiles of AI "users" that you could theoretically chat with. This is how dumb they think we are. Maybe some people are down for it, but why? When I first logged onto the internet all those years ago and worked up the courage to ask the AOL punk chat room whether Blink-182 was punk, I wanted to hear answers from real people. Why would I want to leave my potential musical identity, my risk of poseur status, to a chatbot? Sorry I'm a real people snob. I'm into actual humans. Heard of 'em?

"Kiss of Death" - El Perro del Mar feat. Vessel
from Alan Pedder
"The violinnnnns"

Omg El Perro Del Mar. This takes me back to high school when I was playing "Dog" on my iPod REGULARLY. And Sarah Assbring has not lost her touch for heart-wrenching melodies since then—"Kiss of Death" is a beautiful and stoic ballad about living with grief, full of lots of midcentury tragic glamour. When the strings come in, it sounds like a damn Hitchcock movie score. And of course—spoiler alert—there is a key change to bring yr feelings homeward.

"Screen Cleaner" - George Daniel
from Stephen B
"I love how it’s kinda vibes and ravey (I dunno I got super into EDM this year) and I think he sampled a dial tone which is so cool. I think good pop music has something that is familiar and new, and this does it well. Plus “bRat sUmMEr” or whatever."

I WANNA DANCE WITH GEORGE!! I've listened to the 1975 (George is their drummer), and I've listened to Charli XCX (George is her fiancé). I've even watched the Boiler Room where Charli and George both DJ—he drops "Screen Cleaner" at 53:05—but I didn't really appreciate the power of this dial tone house track until it was recommended to me for this blog post and I experienced it on its own. You know how it is with DJ sets. Everything blurs together and you can only hope your husband Shazamed that one tune on the dance floor.

My favorite words in the English language are "I got super into EDM this year." My sneaky and annoying belief is that there is actually a subgenre of EDM for everyone, even if you think you don't like EDM. If you're PLUR-curious, email ienjoymusicblog@gmail.com and I'll send you a link to my "edm brain transmission," a basic but diverse playlist I made several years ago for friends who have since been successfully converted into ravers. It could happen to you...

"Not Like Us" - Kendrick Lamar
from Friar John
"I mean come on. My only concern is this might be too universal a selection to mean anything as my personal favorite song of the year"

If we can sum up 2024 in a single musical mood, I think it would be "passion." Whether it's Chappell Roan hollering about vibrators, Charli XCX hollering about underwear, or hell, even Cynthia Erivo hollering about defying gravity, 'being passionate' is the new 'pretending you don't give a shit.' Even Billie Eilish is using her chest voice these days. And no one expressed more passion this year than Kendrick Lamar, in the form of hating Drake's fucking guts.

I did a live podcast this summer and one of the other guests, Mikael Wood from the L.A. Times, said something along the lines of "Liking something is stagnant, hating is generative." He is right—as we saw from the zillion think pieces about the Kendrick-Drake beef, hating starts conversations. I love the tautological nature of the "Not Like Us" chorus. I don't like him. Why? Because he is not like us. Why is he not like us? Because I don't like him. Tough year for Scorpios, between Drake and Joe Biden. I must learn from their mistakes.

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Thanks to all the song recommenders <3 See you...tomorrow...