Ears of Joy: Music in 2023

Cutting right to it: Here is the annual alphabetized group of albums—culled from the thousand-ish new releases I heard—that stuck with me throughout 2023. I turned forty this year, which led to my indulging Pitchfork’s recurring 5-10-15-20 segment, a snapshot of musical favorites enumerated at five-year intervals of one’s life. Below is that list with expanded commentary documenting the four most noteworthy aural obsessions during a year containing some of my life’s highest highs and what is unquestionably its lowest low. At least there was the sanctum of music at a time that left me overwhelmed by how random, meaningless, and absolutely fucking brutal the human experience can be.

2023 Top Twelve List
Julie Byrne, The Greater Wings (Ghostly International)
Eddie Chacon, Sundown (Stones Throw)
DJ Danifox, Ansiedade (Príncipe)
Fust, Genevieve (Dear Life)
Katie Gately, Fawn/Brute (Houndstooth)
Núria Graham, Cyclamen (Verve Forecast)
Carly Rae Jepsen, The Loveliest Time (604/Schoolboy/ Interscope)
Sofia Kourtesis, Madres (Ninja Tune)
Róisín Murphy, Hit Parade (Ninja Tune)
Paramore, This Is Why (Atlantic)
Tennis, Pollen (Mutually Detrimental)
Kalia Vandever, We Fell in Turn (AKP)

5-10-15-20
5: I can vividly recall listening to oldies on a wooden radio at the place where my father lived prior to meeting my future stepmother. Coasters songs like “Yakety Yak” and “Charlie Brown” stand out along with “Under the Boardwalk” by the Drifters. Also spent an abundance of time hearing 96.5 and 95.7 in mother’s car where Janet Jackson’s songs from the Control album ruled the airwaves. My little brain loved soul music.

10: My buddy Howie loaned me Dr. Dre’s The Chronic and then we were on the phone listening to and laughing at the foul skits until my mother picked up and listened in too. Uh-oh. I think east coast rap is infinitely superior, but like most children, I’ll always have a soft spot for “The $20 Sack Pyramid” and, as if you had to ask, “Deeez Nuuuts.”

15: CCR’s Chronicle was the first compact disc I ever bought. I will forever put it up against any other hits compilation for overall song quality. When Moore, Josh, and I made The Blair (Son of a) Witch Project, a parody skewering advertising in media, for an eleventh-grade video project presentation, my character was pushed into a bush while “Fortunate Son” blasted on the soundtrack. The nostalgia we inadvertently create for ourselves, and how we create it, is fascinating.

20: In college I was obsessed with Radiohead, as was Josh. When Hail to the Thief got released, I couldn’t stop playing it (and consider “There, There” to be an all-time Radiohead tune). I revisit them rarely these days aside from The Bends, but when we saw them on the Thief tour I was about as happy as a human being can be. (Still the one time I saw them.) They are the best Britpop band despite not being a Britpop band. I don’t understand either.

Carnac the Magnificent: Radiohead. What Gramma gave Grampa as FDR’s fireside chats blared. 

25: The Decemberists’ catalogue. The first five albums, including The Hazards of Love, which I saw them play in full at Mountain Park in Holyoke, Massachusetts, are untouchable. I know they are arch, self-conscious hipster bait, but Colin Meloy improved my vocabulary while I rocked out. Helluvan achievement. They are a well I drink from on a wet bender once a year. Did you know: Lin-Manuel Miranda used to play “The Crane Wife” suite in full to decompress after Hamilton performances.

30: Grateful Dead 1977 shows. I worked with a generous tech dude named Chase at StubHub. He owned every fucking official live Dead release in existence and put them on an external hard drive for me. Many people insist the ’77 shows are their best and based on all the shit my ears inhaled from the late ’60s through their 1990 shows, I agree. The Rhino box set featuring five full May ’77 shows is a treasure trove. I do enjoy their studio stuff as well, American Beauty and Shakedown Street in particular. Don’t tell me this town ain’t got no heart, dear reader.

35: Kacey Musgraves’s Golden Hour, which gets my vote for one of the two best twenty-first century albums, one of the best produced albums ever made, and contains a song that reduces me to tears literally whenever I play it (“Butterflies”). Sue and I saw her open for Harry Styles at MSG and play some of these songs, then I took my mother to see her at the Cap in Port Chester where she played the entire album and did a Cash/Carter duet with her now ex-husband. Unrelated: until she chopped (and artificially extended) it, she had one of my ten favorite natural heads of hair in the world. This album was released days before my old boss sold the company and told me about my severance, so it became a triumphant soundtrack as I mapped out my book prior to writing it. I love this album on the most deeply spiritual level I know.

40: Wayne Shorter albums spent more time on my turntable this year than the output of any other artist. I read a blurb about how Don Was once played Speak No Evil for a year straight, bought the Blue Note reissue, and then continued through Shorter’s discography after he died in March. This man became my favorite horn player in the span of eleven months! Super Nova, the pairing with Milton Nascimento on Native Dancer, prime Weather Report standouts (the live album from Japan and Mysterious Traveller, among others), the landmark “Aja” solo, and his time with Herbie Hancock, who I saw in Waterbury in June, where he told the crowd how amid his last conversation with the man, Shorter said to Double H that he needed a new body because he hadn’t completed his (musical) mission yet, are all proof of what a staggering body of work the man gifted us mere terrestrials.

Carly Rae Jepsen’s The Loveliest Time is a collection of B-sides, but damn are they bouncy, catchy, shimmery, and effervescent. The back-to-back of “Shadow” into “Psychedelic Switch” was my favorite seven minutes of music soundtracking the first few weeks of car rides to and from the house Sue and I rented in mid-August. I’ve long liked Carly, but this is the album to properly sum her up: her “throwaway” material, much like how she’s an afterthought to many pop fans, proves what a star she truly is.

When Sue was in the hospital, I couldn’t listen to any music except one recording: the Luaka Bop compilation of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda’s Hindu chant songs. I purchased the CD on the day of its release in May 2017, obsessively loving it for a couple weeks before retiring it to the console in my car where I store valued road trip discs. It got played a couple times per year from 2018 to 2022, but in October I needed these eight songs and these eight songs alone. They are unlike anything in the world, a séance with otherworldly forces as Ms. Coltrane plays harp, synthesizer, organ, and strings while members of her ashram chant praise to higher powers in unison with her. This hour of worship will transport you to another dimension; if it doesn’t, you’ve failed. If I sound like a fangirl, it’s because I am one. Empowering sacred music to shepherd me through nearly unbearable tragedy was high irony, but also the music I knew closely that was designed for such a fraught time. I will carry a copy of this with me wherever I go for the rest of my days.

Julie Byrne’s The Greater Wings, another album conveniently containing harp and synths, struck me as a masterpiece upon its release, but it was at the beginning of my grieving that it took on more potent life. I defer to critic Marc Hogan, whose exquisite description nails how the album “envisions mourning as a form of meditative practice and constant renewal.” One month into attempting to reconcile the fact that I will never love anything in this world more than I love Sue, whose name I will conjure and say and celebrate as long as I’m here, this album’s spectral power lingers. It’s concise attention to detail yields an evocative sonic scrapbook of perseverance. When people say certain singers’ voices are an instrument, Byrne’s is unmistakably emblematic of that philosophy. Grief cannot be fully understood without genuine empathy, which I suspect means this album’s truest gifts, including an abiding hopefulness, can only be discovered by many at the necessary time.

It is the random, yet meaningful and joyous elements innate to the most profound music that will enrich this new phase of my life, as if listening to music was the inevitable method to transcend any milestone whether triumphant, tragic, or typical. Music is why I met Sue and how I will remember her, the notes she spoke, laughed, and wrote intertwined with how I hear the world, especially the artificial worlds that will be forced by my brain to overcompensate in bringing me the pleasure yearned for even moreso in her absence. Luckily for her, at least she won’t have to endure me praising records like Ryo Kawasaki’s jazz fusion gem Juiceanymore, the thirty-three on display beside my turntable since late August because I purchased it at Amoeba Records in Hollywood, the final time Sue and I shopped together in a record store. The album’s cover, an orange peel revealing layers of colorful circuitry, is an easy metaphor to dig deeper, to keep searching, to find the beat yielding the beauty. Sue changed my life more than anything else has; second is music, and now it must sustain me. It is my fail-safe.