2025. Bad year for politics. Great year for music…

• Our sage Craig Finn teamed up with Adam Granduciel (War on Drugs) to drop his best solo album yet.

• Turnstile, CMAT, Saya Gray, Greg Freeman, Sasami, and Indigo De Souza leapt forward.

• Viagra Boys, Big Thief, Blood Orange, Wet Leg, Haim, Alex G, Sharon Van Etten, and the Beaches continued to stride. Lily Allen, Bon Iver, Kathleen Edwards, Panda Bear, James McMurtry, the Deftones, and Hamilton Leithauser stretched their primes into three decades and beyond.

• Bad Bunny made me want to understand Spanish.

• Rosalia made accept that I will never understand the 71 different languages that she croons on her indie-pop-flamenco-concerto.

• Justin Bieber, who I never appreciated before, made a killer record after dumping Scooter Braun for the gonzo R&B of Dijon and Mk.Gee.

• A song about Townies (see Wednesday) made the rounds on the best-of-year lists for NPR, Paste, Pitchfork, and the like.

• Finally, and in defiance of grammar, Goose gave us two great records while Geese gave us one. But Geese is the one that crushed Adam, Nate, and me. You may say that our love is only half real, but that’s only half true.

Here are our picks for the year. You can listen on Spotify.

September 2006. I’m in a bar or tavern or pub or maybe it was a club in Boulder with my girlfriend, who’s a month into law school. Seventy-three L1s are losing their mind because the DJ is playing Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer.” Again.

This is the first time I felt estranged from my generation. It’s not that I didn’t know the song. Slippery When Wet was one of the first cassettes I bought with my allowance money. But that was little kid music. One step above Rafi or “Kokomo” or water song Uncle Jesse’s band played on Full House. Had we learned nothing from Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and alt-rock radio of the 1990s? Corporate magazines still suck, and so does anything that sounds like it wants you to listen to it.

For a kid led to believe that good music comes from Seattle and teeth brushing is bourgeois, 80s music struck me inauthentic, robotic, sell-outicism. Even Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Johnny Cash—brilliant both before and after—sounded kinda lame in the 80s.

It’s taken decades for me to not cringe when I hear the tedious synth on “Take on Me” (A-ha) and “Tainted Love” (Soft Cell) or the overbearing drums on “Born in the USA” (Bruce Springsteen) or “In the Air Tonight” (Phil Collins). Fortunately, artists today are more open-minded than I am. Blood Orange, the 1975, the War on Drugs, Janelle Monáe, Sharon Van Etten—yes, even Taylor Swift—have helped me appreciate 80s sounds, melodies, and vibes by repurposing them, often without the unfortunate production decisions.

The artist who is most 80s, for me at least, is Prince. He illustrates everything crazy and beautiful and delirious and irresistible and dirty about the decade. The innovation. The variety. The flair. The groove. The synths. Also the gated reverb and excessive compression. I’ve come to see Prince for the genius he is, but I still don’t like the way the drums sound. Maybe that’s why many of my favorite 80s albums don’t sound like the 80s. Anyways, here they are. You can listen on Spotify, if you fancy. 

This blog is about reviewing music, but I spend a lot more time reviewing articles in consumer research, the study of why people buy crap and why it typically doesn’t make them any happier.

Reviewing academic articles is an unhealthy habit in which I’ve overindulged. Yesterday, I submitted my 300th report as a reviewer, associate editor, or area editor.

I notice the same four problems in many of the papers I review. This post is a rant about these problems and an homage to the research that explains how to fix them. If you were hoping for thoughts on Ethel Cain’s new record, try Pitchfork. But if you want to improve your chance of publishing a paper when you land someone like me as a reviewer or AE, keep reading.

Music in 2024 was big, wild, and incoherent. We saw dis-track exchanges that ranged from brutal (RIP, Drake) to empathetic (grazie, Charlie and Lorde), superstar releases from Billie, T-Swift, Queen B, and triumphant returns from rock giants of the 80s (The Cure, Nick Cave), 90s (Pearl Jam, quasi-Radiohead), and 2000s (Jack White, Vampire Weekend). And this just scratches the surface.

This posts discusses the music that Caleb, Adam, and Nate have been bingeing this year. Michael has listening to classics from yesteryears (Queens of the Stone Age, System of a Down, Three Six Mafia) while John has been focusing on snowboarding, entrepreneuring, and forgetting the solo in “Banditos.” These are noble pursuits, but their discussion will need to wait for a later post.

My daughter Lily (6 yrs) is the biggest Swiftie I know. In honor of Taylor’s new album, which we listened to on the way to school this morning, we write about our five favorite Taylor Swift songs.

Did we pick any of your favorites? What did we miss?

There is no theme for the music from 2023. As you can see from our picks below, it was brilliant and chaotic and all over the place from post-teen-punk-pop and indie supertrios to southern sludge and neo-disco. Listen to our favorite music here (Caleb’s picks) and here (Adam’s picks). Nate and John were listening to older stuff this year, although John’s son Joe recommended bar italia’s Tracey Denim.

For my birthday this year, I relived the glory days of 2020 by having a party on zoom with four of my college besties. We celebrated by revisiting our not so glorious college days. Specifically, we stole an idea from the Bandsplain podcast and conducted a fantasy draft of the music from the opening years of the millennium.

Five of us—Nick Byron Campbell, Scott Goldstein, Mark Edelbrock, Josh Edwin, and I—drafted a lineup that included six categories: album, pop song, rock song, rap song, indier than thou, and wild card. There were rules. But we’re kinda rebels, so they were not always followed.

For years, I’ve wanted to write about the music that was popular when I was in high school. Rather than ramble again about Radiohead or Ween or the other artists my high school self non-sexually crushed on, this post is about the ten albums that I remember my classmates at Marblehead High School playing incessantly between September 1996 and June 2000. These songs are still stuck in my head, regardless of whether I wanted them there (see #3) or not (see #5).

It’s difficult to judge the character of music in a year without some distance. Will 2022 be epic, like 1994 or 2015, or middling, like 2009 or 2017? Also, what have we yet to discover? Sam Fender’s 2021 release Seventeen Going Under (think Springsteen, but British) dominated my Spotify from February to July, but I didn’t know it existed a year ago. One reason for writing this list is to help me (and hopefully you) find treasure. Two years ago, Josh introduced me to Harry Styles. Last year, Nate introduced me to Billy Strings. Every year, Adam introduces me to something that brightens, blows, and befuddles my mind. Here is some music to brighten, blow, and befuddle, from our ears to yours.

Read below or listen on our Spotify playlist.

I have a friend who teaches history. She offers her students extra credit for creating their own Pantheon, a personalized collection of Gods housed in their neocortex and etched into Helvetica in powerpoint files and word docs. I decided to break from writing about music to take a crack at this assignment.

I spend more time than I would like thinking about how digital technologies are messing with us. My Pantheon attempts to grapple with some of this fuckery. The ancients are timeless, no doubt. But they offer little help to modern folk trying to navigate Mr. Internet, much less TikTok or InstaFace. Here are the gods and goddesses that have come to rule in the digital age…

We love the 90s. Not everything about it. We’re not nostalgic for dial-up-modems, Blockbuster late fees, JNCOs, 90210, Troy Aikman, Crystal Pepsi, or the Rodney King riots.

But the music…

When we started our Townie ensemble, we were a few original songs and a Wagon Wheel shy of being a 90s cover band. We honored icons (Radiohead, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Weezer, Sublime), one-hit-wonders (Spacehog, Cracker), artists whose fame has faded (Collective Soul, Counting Crows, Big Head Todd & the Monsters), grown (Ween, Daniel Johnston), and neither was nor is (Mad Season, Kenny Wayne Shephard). We declared 1994 the best year for music, and we’ll stomp our Doc Martins through the Tamagotchi of anyone who disagrees.

We came of age in the 90s, albeit at different paces. We started the decade recording the radio on Casio cassettes and ended it burning Napster downloads. John fled the country and got married. Nate toured with Ozzy. Adam watched Woodstock burn. Caleb spread awareness of HIV and spinal meningitis by blasting Chocolate and Cheese from an ’83 Volvo station wagon in his high school parking lot. We lost Tupac and Jerry, found Jigga and Trey, and gained Cardi and Harry. We grew. We loved. We crushed on Alicia Silverstone. We used box cutters to lacerate stain-washed jeans. We wore flannel—one shirt around our waist and another around our torso. We partied like it was 1999, even when it was 1998, and survived Y2K.

We reminisce, but if these ever become our best days, we must have died too young.

Here is some of our favorite music from the 90s.

What did we miss?

We’re already a few weeks into 2022, but it’s not too late to discuss our favorite music from 2021. You can listen here.

I turned 40 today. I’m ambivalent about getting older. It’s certainly better than the alternative. Plus, each year of my life has exposed me to more great music. As a birthday gift to myself, I created a playlist with 41 songs, one for each year I’ve been alive. You can listen here.

When we discussed our favorite years for music, we somehow omitted one of our favorite decades: the Naughties (2000-2009). Although none of these years pop like 1994, 1977, or 2015, the decade brought a steady stream of great music. Rock gasped for a final breath of pop relevance, EDM emerged from the void left in its wake, hip-hop became a bona fide cash cow, and country music ex-communicated a band whose name evoked slavery for not being conservative enough (the Chicks have since dropped the “Dixie”). Read about our favorite music below and listen to our picks on Spotify.

Here are the rules:

• One song per year.

• The song must have been a top 10 Billboard Hit for the year.

• No choosing the same artist more than once.

Who is best?

Most say Dylan. Steve Earle stomped his boots on Dylan’s coffee table to proclaim it is Townes Van Zandt. Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, Chuck Berry, Springsteen, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Lennon/McCartney, Paul Simon, Bob Marley, Tom Petty, Tom Waits, Tupac, and T-Swift all have legitimate claims.

But my pick is Craig Finn. Over the last 25 years, Finn has crafted a sordid encyclopedia of characters and capers, hang-ups and hangovers, triumphs and busted drug-deals in his solo work and as the lead singer in the Hold Steady and Lifter Puller. Finn’s initial commercial and artistic peak came in a trilogy of albums in the mid-naughties that give the Hold Steady one of the most compelling tenure packages in music history. Last week, the Hold Steady released their strongest album since then. The new album, along with a pair of solid releases in 2019 and a forthcoming collection of solo songs, feel like a resurrection.

In honor of my favorite songwriter, I’ve ranked all of the Hold Steady, Lifter Puller, and Craig Finn solo studio albums, from most-best to least-best.

A silver lining from the lockdown was discovering that Dominion, my favorite deck-building card game, works even better online than on a non-virtual table. Andrew McIntyre, Penny Geng, and I have tracked our scores across 276 games since March each accumulating over 80 victories and 10,000 victory points.

A great feature of Dominion is that every game is different, and this variance is especially bonkers if you mix the 14 different kingdoms.

Which Dominion kingdom is your favorite? Here are my rankings, from best to worst, along with my praise and grievances with each.

Andrew Gravel, of the Gravel Project, has been sharing music with me since we became friends in Mr. McLaughlin’s 9th grade biology class nearly 25 years ago. He introduced me to the Cure, Phish, and my favorite Pearl Jam covers, including “Hide Your Love Away” and “Masters of War”. Since then, Andrew has written, performed, and recorded music on his own and with bands like Rival, Entrain, and, most recently and most extensively, the Gravel Project. I’ve seen Andrew perform more than any other musician, co-written songs with him (including, “Not the One” and two on this list), and shared the stage with him when Parties with Townies played Catalina State Park before Covid (the new BC?). He even performed at my wedding.

Last week, The Gravel Project released their best song yet. In honor of the new single, this post discusses my ten favorite songs that Andrew recorded during our 25 years of intermittent collaboration and uninterrupted friendship. Thank you, Andrew.

2020. Bad for living. Great for music. Well, not live music. And not so much for musicians either. But it was great for listening to music while holed up in a bunker waiting for a vaccine.

Here’s what Parties with Townies has been listening to during our pandemic hiatus, starting with Caleb’s picks.

Want to listen? We created a playlist for you on Spotify.