One of life’s most precious gifts is that in spite of it all, and perhaps in credit to it all, artists will create art. …

2020 took a lot from us. Experiences, time, peace, loved ones, sanity. It took and took, uncaring of how little we had left to give. That’s the cruelty of the passing of time, I suppose, but we know 2020 hit harder than ever. One area that gives in spite of…

It is always my goal to listen to as much music as I can every year. And while it’s irrelevant and unimportant, since I have the data, I always challenge myself to listen to more music than I did the previous year. I came up short this year in almost…

2018 celebrates ten years of compiling lists of my favorite albums at the end of year and writing about them. Wow. It started on Facebook, moved to my own blog, and 2 years ago, I finally migrated everything here to Medium. Creating this every year is an arduous task that…

With no claim of singularity, I tend to look to music to make sense of things and provide some necessary order to life. Music surrounds us, moves us, and lights our lives with background and foreground sounds. It is a constant when nothing else is certain. …

An all-time bad year with an all-time great outpouring of music. — 2016 was…bad. Globally, the world felt uneasy. At times, completely broken. Too many killings, too many wars, too many leaders put in place who have no business being there, too many Brexits. Culturally, we saw some of the greatest taken from us—and right until the end, it never seemed to…

10. Grimes — Art Angels — “Why does anyone like Grimes?” “I…don’t know.” This was a brief but actual exchange I had with a co-worker the day this album came out. Visions and earlier had always come off as a try-hard attempt at weirdness and it never sat right with me. Maybe it was the haircuts…

10. Steve Gunn — Way Out Weather — Steve Gunn is just so charmingly guitary. It’s like he’s barely tickling the instrument — effortlessly bending notes and creating little hums to form the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard. Hyperbolic? Maybe. But it’s probably the most beautiful thing I’ve heard this year. When it came out in October…

10. Baths — Obsidian This album achieves success in my book for a few reasons that seem to draw me to “these types” of albums time and time again. For one, it’s an album from an artist I had little interest in before this album. I had heard some things from Baths, didn’t really…