My 20 Favorite Albums of 2020

You can't write an intro to an end of 2020 list without paying some lip service to what a tumultuous year it was, but out of the three lists you'll be seeing over the next three days, this music roundup feels like the one that was affected the least by the pandemic.  Back at the beginning of everything, when most people assumed this whole COVID-19 thing would blow over in a few months (oh, how naive we were), there were some albums that got pushed back a few months, but once everyone realized we were going to be in it for the long haul, even those came out.

If anything, we got more music due to the pandemic, not less.  After all, Taylor Swift -- previously known for her rigid gaps between release dates -- put out two albums in the last five months.  And it wasn't just her, all over the map we saw artists dropping more music or putting out projects sooner than we expected.  While some used their newfound time due to canceled tours to supplement their income in creative ways, others simply got to work, and we got to reap the rewards.

Musicians weren't the only people with time on their hands either.  Between working remotely minimizing the amount of interruptions I experience during the day, and the lack of TV programming leading to lots of time needing something to occupy my ears while watching NBA games, I had many more opportunities to listen to music in 2020.  I tried to use that time to expand my horizons and listen to genres I've largely bypassed, like electronic music and emo, because I previously just didn't have the bandwidth to dive into a whole new world.  Naturally, this led to me feeling more overwhelmed than ever by the sheer amount of music there is out there just waiting to be heard.  Every year, there are albums I really want to get to that I don't end up spending time with before the deadline for this list, but it seemed to double this year.  Between the 10 million Griselda albums, the weekly deluge of Detroit rappers dropping Youtube loosies, and all the emo bands Ian Cohen recommends on Twitter, there is so much good stuff that didn't get my full attention.  So think of the list you're about to read as less definitive and more like a snapshot of my favorite things I managed to get to.

The rules: Everything is the same as usual.  The window of eligibility for this list is anything released between January 1, 2020 and now.  This list can include albums, mixtapes, EPs, and anything in between.  As always, I'm praying that nothing substantial comes out in the twilight hours of the year.

75 Songs I Liked in 2020

 

On December 29th, I'll be starting off my end of the year lists with my 20 favorite albums of 2020.  But there's so much great music out there that my album post will only cover a very tiny portion of the stuff that's worth listening to.  So this list is an additional rundown, one that highlights songs from albums that won't be appearing on the top 20 in a few days.  I'm including songs from my five honorable mention albums, so if you see something on here from an album you love, who knows, maybe that album is ranked somewhere between 21 and 25 for me!  Because I listened to and liked more songs this year, I've expanded this list to be 75 tracks instead of the usual 50.  Even this doesn't fully cover the quality that the year had to offer, but it's a good representation of what I generally enjoyed in 2020.

Dispatches from elsewhere: A review of Taylor Swift's "folklore"

For a while if you were a Taylor Swift fan, there was one certainty in life: a new album of hers would come out in the fall of an even-numbered year.  And though that pattern was finally broken during the three-year break between 2014's 1989 and 2017's Reputation, the two-year gap returned with the release of Lover last year.  The general idea seemed to be that if you wanted a new Taylor Swift album, you'd need to wait at least two years.  That's why it was particularly shocking to wake up on July 23, 2020 to a social media post from her announcing that not only was she dropping a new album, but that it was coming out at midnight.  Now that folklore has been in the world for a little over a week, it's finally time to plumb its depths.

It's an interesting time in Swift's life, as she's now 30 years old, a milestone that can cause anyone to spiral, let alone a former teen star whose appeal has often been centered around her youthfulness and prodigy status.  We also happen to be living in a complicated time in the United States, suffering the worst effects of a global pandemic and going stir crazy from months of self-isolation.  This personal upheaval and a larger global upheaval both appear to have contributed to the themes and stark black-and-white aesthetic of folklore, which seems to be written from the perspective of someone who's finally letting the sheer accumulation of life dawn on them.  Album opener "the 1" serves as a tone-setter in that regard, as she sorts through thoughts about a former partner and ponders how things could have been different between them.  "You know the greatest films of all time were never made," she sings at one point, which feels like a key to understanding the whole album.  It's a record obsessed with sliding doors, what ifs, and lost time.  The longer you're on this earth, the more there are lives unlived that branch out from your path of reality, and it's a concept she reflects on often in these 16 new tracks.

Folklore embraces the idea of its title in the literal sense, offering up tales of the nouveau riche, visions of war, and ballads about mournful ghosts. On these tracks, she plays the role of a raconteur with a 360 degree view of everything, taking these creative writing exercises and transforming them into vivid, compassionate narratives.  But as always, she also finds a way to turn things inward.  This is an album filled with totems and memories, and Swift weaves them all together into the idea that our personal history is a form of folklore itself.

She's able to accomplish this because she is one of the most cogent communicators of emotion out there, able to put a finger on complex, tangled thoughts and translate them into fragrant phrases that bore into your brain.  Here she is on "this is me trying," describing a lost love she can't stop thinking about: "You're a flashback in a film reel on the one screen in my town."  On "seven," reflecting back on the freedom of childhood: "Please picture me in the weeds / Before I learned civility / I used to scream ferociously / Any time I wanted."  The imagery on "august" is so rich you can basically feel the heat of an endless summer day and being "twisted in bedsheets."  And she always knows how to add the perfect descriptors to make a line really pop.  It's not just a high, it's a "dwindling, mercurial high."  The wedding wasn't just charming, it was "charming, if a little gauche."

Swift's gift as a lyricist is nothing new, but some of the sounds she's playing with this time around are.  When the shock of the surprise album announcement wore off, the next biggest thing to process was the fact that 11 of the 16 songs on folklore would be co-produced by The National's Aaron Dessner.  His signature plaintive piano, stately guitar lines, and gently stirring strings are all over this album, to the point where it basically sounds like a new National album if Taylor Swift were the lead singer instead of Matt Berninger.  Swift has had an unlimited budget since around 2010, but even still, her music has never sounded as good as it does in Dessner's hands.  Regular collaborator Jack Antonoff contributes production on the other five songs, and even though he plays a smaller role, it's still crucial.  He knows the contours of her strengths so well at this point that he's able to coax her trademarks out of her when Dessner is busy pushing her to new territory.  And though you can usually differentiate the Dessner songs (usually from the piano sounds) from the Antonoff ones (typically by the way he adds reverb to the vocals), the styles mesh surprisingly well.

If anything, though, the work that these two producers do on this only prove the skills we've known to be possessed by the person at the center all along.  Folklore is The Taylor Swift Show through and through.  At the end of the day good songwriting always prevails, and she's able to graft her crafty song construction and playful language games over just about any sound.  She brings her sense memory-evoking skills to the Cranberries-esque "august," shows her talent for wringing out the head-spinning feeling of being in love through an off-kilter metaphor on "mirrorball," and spills naked emotions all over the bluesy "peace."  The album is astonishing in its sheer amount of killer songs, including some of the best she's ever written, like "invisible string," a gorgeous, tightly written rumination on the vagaries of life that bring us together.

I used to wonder what Taylor Swift's music would look like once she got older, and even had a little bit of doubt about she whether she could sustain herself creatively past 30.  But of course, the signs were always there that she was more of musical chameleon than anybody gave her credit for.  If she could sound like herself over moon-eyed country ballads like "Tim McGraw," dubstep drops on "I Knew You Were Trouble," and the 80s nostalgia pop of "I Wish You Would," it makes sense that she would continue to evolve without much struggle. And her last two albums have shown that her ability to render universal thoughts and feelings aren't exclusive to teen emotions.  This time around her musings don't have the raw immediacy of her early work, but they've been replaced by a cooler, top-down perspective that's different, yet just as interesting.  Last year's Lover proved that she's hadn't lost her pop songwriting abilities, but folklore finds herself stretching in fascinating ways.  If it's any indication, this next decade of Taylor Swift music is going to be thrilling.

(Also if you'd like to read my ranking of each song on folklore, check out this Letterboxd post.)

Better Call Saul finds another gear in its fifth and best season

It's hard to imagine feeling so right now, but Better Call Saul seemed like a monumentally bad idea when it was first announced.  Spinoffs are, more often than not, creatively bankrupt cash grabs and making one for a beloved series like Breaking Bad ran the risk of souring people on the whole franchise.  Luckily, the series has proven that no matter what challenge you put in front of this creative team they'll churn out great television.

Though while it was always terrific on a purely technical and objective level, the show never was able to engender the kind of intense fervor that its predecessor was able to for me.  I've always really liked Better Call Saul, but I loved Breaking Bad.  All of that changed in the former's excellent fifth season, which just concluded its thrilling ride earlier this week.

Saul has always been two shows in one, with Jimmy and Kim living out their morality plays in one corner and Mike and Gus embroiled in the power plays of the Albuquerque drug trade in another corner.  Both were pretty compelling, though the drug half often suffered from prequel-itis more than its counterpart, simply going through the motions to put things in the place of Breaking Bad's starting point.  Now that those two halves have merged, season five felt like the series was finally humming along and realizing its full potential.  Previously the show's two modes conversed with each other only on a thematic level -- the entire universe is populated by people chiseling away at the list of things they are unwilling to do -- but it's way more electric when they're actually intertwining on a literal level.

Last season saw Jimmy finally adopting the Saul Goodman moniker, and this year his slide into the inevitable accelerated at a rapid pace, becoming a "friend of the cartel" and getting tangled up with wildcard Lalo Salamanca.  The intersection of the legal and cartel hemispheres of the world led to one of the season's best episodes, "Bagman," where Jimmy's mission to pick up Lalo's seven million dollars of bail money turns into a grisly shootout, followed by a long sojourn in the desert with Mike.  It's an episode that recalled Breaking Bad's classic "4 Days Out" -- surely not a coincidence that Vince Gilligan, who has ceded day-to-day control of Saul to Peter Gould, returned to direct this hour -- blending all of this creative team's strengths together.  It's at once full of nailbiting tension, atmospheric patience, and ingenious plotting.  One of the things that's admirable about Better Call Saul is that it has thoroughly staked out its own identity, so it almost feels wrong to praise the show for injecting some more Breaking Bad into its veins, but it's hard to deny that it sings when working in that style.

The fact that it's a prequel has always loomed over the show narratively.  At the end of the day, we know where the show's going to end up.  A problem that frequently plagues prequels is that it's hard to invest in what you're watching since it's all in service of a known endpoint.  Better Call Saul has circumvented this in two ways.  The first is simple: it has made the audience savor the journey through its sheer craft and leaning into the clockwork fatalism that was even baked into Breaking Bad instead of running away from it.  But more importantly, it knows that because we're largely aware of how things end, it can wring out tension and emotion from homing in on the unknown variables in the equation.

It's not a surprise that this season Kim, Nacho, and Lalo were the most compelling characters to follow.  We know the broad strokes of what can and can't happen to the likes of Jimmy, Gus and Mike, which makes the open possibilities of anything involving Kim, Nacho, Lalo feel all the more gutwrenching.  Lalo's status as a chaos agent is amplified by the fact that he's an invention of Better Call Saul and we therefore have no idea what he'll do next.  Meanwhile, Nacho's role as a double agent and his desire to get out of the game has even higher stakes knowing that he may not be long for this world.

Where this pays the biggest dividends, however, is with Kim.  She's been the show's best character from the outset, partially because it's hard not to be when Rhea Seehorn is giving a pantheon performance playing her, but Kim's only gotten more fascinating as the show has gone on and toyed with our perception of how things could turn out for her.  Most people just assumed in the beginning that things would eventually end poorly between her and Jimmy once his full evolution into Saul Goodman was complete.  What season five did was reveal a failure of imagination within all of us.  From suggesting that she and Jimmy get married once he gets involved with the cartel to her confronting Lalo head-on when he imposes on them in their home, Kim was constantly upending our expectations.  It seemed as if truly anything could happen with her in these 10 episodes.  Would she leave Jimmy after he finally did something to cross the line?  Would she get killed right on the spot when Lalo shows up at their doorstep?

The actual answer is simpler and more tragic.  Though she's always found thrills in Jimmy's grifting game, Kim has also been the closest thing the show had to a moral center.  But really, when we thought we were watching Jimmy's process of "breaking bad," this whole time we were slowly watching Kim's.  That feeling that something very obvious is being revealed before our eyes is what makes the scene where she's suggesting to Jimmy that they illegally sabotage Howard to force a resolution to the Sandpiper case makes it so heartbreaking, even more so because Jimmy seems to understand she's past the point of no return too.  The moral corrosion was always within her, Jimmy just provided the activation energy.

With next season being the show's final one, this year was the ideal penultimate season, perfectly ramping things up and setting everything in motion for an exciting conclusion.  And with the end nearing, Saul is pulling out all the stops.  We thought we were going into this show with a full map, but the brilliance of it is that it has proceeded to reveal all sorts of hidden rooms and passages we never could have imagined.

2020 Academy Award predictions

Every year I feel more and more out of touch with the temperature of the Oscar race, so these predictions could be a disaster.  I think it will be a pretty big night for 1917, but I could be wrong.  For the sake of my ballot I'm hoping for a predictable Academy Awards, but for the sake of chaos I want a ton of surprises.