RIB's 2025 Album of the Year:Says Gray -- SAYA

My Album of the Year has never been about landing on an objective “best” record. Even at my most snobbish, it’s always been the record that meant the most to me in any given year. Some years, I’m apt to argue my pick is indeed the “best” — and such considerations have broken a few ties, to be sure — but that’s become less frequent as I’ve gotten older.

One of my four 2025 Album of the Year nominees — Geese’s “Getting Killed” — has shown up at the top (or near the top) of many year-end best-of lists. It’s nice to believe that I still might be hip, but this nominee is not, in fact, my Album of the Year.

Another of my nominees — Alex G’s “Headlights” — hasn’t shown up nearly as much, but has gotten its fair share of accolades from critics this year. It, too, is not my pick.

The other two nominees — Jason Isbell’s “Foxes in the Snow” and Saya Gray’s “SAYA” — well, I’ve seen them sneak onto a year-end list here or there, typically at the very back end, but neither seems to have made a real dent. That might or might not be a shame, but still, these two records make up my top 2 of 2025, and of course one of them is my winner.

So which one? My wife, who I like to have guess each year, to mixed results, absolutely nailed this year’s thought process.

I’m paraphrasing, but this is what she said: “It’s either Jason Isbell or Saya Gray. It depends on whether you’re feeling more like an aging white guy in a mid-life crisis — and Isbell is speaking to you — or more like the dad driving around Arches National Park with Saya Gray playing and Peter singing along to the ‘yups’ from the backseat.”

Well, dear, you described it perfectly. And the answer is the latter.

On the family trip to Moab earlier this year, I played both “Foxes in the Snow” and “SAYA” as we drove through the mountains of Utah. “Foxes” went over well enough for me to include it on a mix of songs I added to Jacob’s mp3 player for his first summer of sleepaway camp. But it was “SAYA” that kept getting requested — mostly by Peter, who asked for the record, repeatedly, by calling it his “favorite band.” Singing along to the “yups” (on “PUDDLE ( OF ME )”) was part of it, as was him singing along enthusiastically to “..THUS IS WHY ( I DON’T SPRING FOR LOVE )" or requesting “SHELL ( OF A MAN )” by asking me to play “paper house” — clearly a lyric snippet that stuck with him. It was also cool when Jacob and Peter agreed that “LINE BACK 22” sounded like music you’d hear in a shrine in Tears of the Kingdom and started referring to it as such.

And, yes, as we drove through Arches, the experience and the album became intertwined for me. The trip has stayed with me all year, and I haven’t stopped listening to “SAYA” either — finding new reasons to like it along the way.

That’s not to say Isbell’s record didn’t almost beat it through the sheer power of its lyrics, which were the strongest among the four finalists. But as much of an old fart as I am, this year wasn’t about bars of steel, boys, or bars to sing, or bars with swinging doors for all the time between. No, I put on “SAYA” and instead I’m back driving the rental car that keeps telling me I need to stop for coffee — to raucous laughter from the passengers — on our way across a stunning landscape, singing along as the sun begins to set, then shutting off the gas, hopping onto the trail, and sitting under the stars.

Past winners:

1993: Counting Crows -- August and Everything After
1994: R.E.M. -- Monster
1995: The Innocence Mission -- Glow
1996: Dave Matthews Band -- Crash
1997: U2 -- Pop
1998: R.E.M. -- Up
1999: John Linnell -- State Songs
2000: Radiohead -- Kid A
2001: Bjork -- Vespertine
2002: Wilco -- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2003: Bonnie "Prince" Billy -- Master and Everyone
2004: Wilco -- A Ghost is Born
2005: Sufjan Stevens -- Illinois
2006: The Decemberists -- The Crane Wife
2007: Radiohead -- In Rainbows
2008: Shearwater -- Rook
2009: Animal Collective -- Merriweather Post Pavilion
2010: Laura Veirs -- July Flame
2011: PJ Harvey -- Let England Shake
2012: Animal Collective -- Centipede Hz
2013: Mogwai -- Les Revenants
2014: Sun Kil Moon -- Benji
2015: The Tallest Man On Earth -- Dark Bird is Home
2016: Bon Iver -- 22, A Million
2017: Bjork -- Utopia
2018: Caamp -- Boys
2019: The Lumineers -- III
2020: Phoebe Bridgers -- Punisher
2021: Bo Burnham -- Inside (The Songs)
2022: Sylvan Esso -- No Rules Sandy
2023: Lana Del Rey -- Did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd
2024: Loma -- How Will I Live Without a Body?

Nominees: 2025 Album of the Year

Last year, Amelia asked me if I just nominate every record I buy in a given year for my Album of the Year. I was a bit hurt by that. It’s not true, but I do tend to over-nominate at times, and, frankly, I don’t really buy records I don’t like all that often. Good luck with just a smidge of good taste.

Anyway, with that in mind, I’m doing three tiers this year: Nominees, Honorable Mentions and I Also Liked These. This would make my wife happy if she cared but she doesn’t and who could blame her? Happy Thanksgiving!

NOMINEES

Alex G — Headlights

Geese — Getting Killed

Jason Isbell — Foxes in the Snow

Saya Gray — SAYA

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Bonnie “Prince” Billy — The Purple Bird

Caamp — Copper Changes Color

Joanne Robertson — Blurrr

Lucy Dacus — Forever is a Feeling

Mt. Joy — Hope We Have Fun

I ALSO LIKED THESE

Anna Tivel — Animal Poem

The Ballad of Wallis Island (Original Soundtrack)

Big Thief — Double Infinity

Denison Witmer — Anything At All

Ganavya — Nilam

The Innocence Mission — The Raindrop Cars (EP)

Lyra Pramuk — Hymnal

Margo Price — Hard Headed Woman

Purity Ring — Purity Ring

Rosalia -- LUX

Sharon Van Etten — Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory

The Swell Season — Forward

Tift Merritt — Time and Patience

The Weather Station — Humanhood

Wednesday -- Bleeds

RIB's 2024 Album of the Year:Loma -- How Will I Live Without a Body?

Republished from Unwinnable Monthly

This is How it Starts to Move Again

BY MATT MARRONE

My 9-year-old struggles with school. There are happy days and soul-crushing ones. As his parents, we’re doing our best but it isn’t easy. Most of our answers seem to be at least half-wrong.

One of hardest parts of being a parent is reaching out for advice from your own parents — and realizing they don’t have the solution, either.

Recently, though, my dad recounted his own issues in school. To cope, he told me, he’d hide away and decompress when he got home. Escaping his classwork, his classmates, his teachers, his parents and his younger brothers, he’d find a private place, dim the lights and listen to his records.

Inspired by this, I surprised my 9-year-old by picking him up early from his afterschool program one day. I told him about his grandpa. He was comforted knowing he isn’t the first kid to face this, and, more importantly, not the first one in the family.

“Maybe,” he said, “I got it from him.”

Having just started to learn the flute in band class, he was also interested in my dad’s time-tested form of music therapy. So I told him I’d ordered a vinyl copy of a record I’d fallen in love with. It had recently arrived in the mail but I hadn’t put it on yet. Did he want to listen to it with me?

“Sure,” he said.

The record, “How Will I Live Without a Body?”, is the third — and the best, to date — by Loma, a side project of Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg, Cross Record’s Emily Cross and musician/recording engineer Dan Duszynski. It’s my 2024 Album of the Year, and it’s quiet yet complex, with field recordings of animals and oceans and voicemail, and instrumentation best categorized as rock, but with snippets of strings and jazzy horns that at times feels meticulously placed and other times improvisational.

A quarter century after Radiohead won this award by naming an album after the first cloned child, who they surmised might already be alive — “Kid A” — “How Will I Live Without a Body?” was named not by some corporeal entity but by AI. Meiburg & Co. used snippets of poetry generated from prompts they gave to a bot created by legendary artist Laurie Anderson. Among those snippets was the album’s eventual title — as enigmatic and mysterious but also as organic and deeply human as the music within.

It’s far from the radio-friendly Imagine Dragons hits my kids usually want to hear, but perfect for a close listen in the dark. I admit, it was probably an overly ambitious choice, but it seemed a fit for a first stab at this exercise.

I showed my 9-year-old the funky marbled vinyl and handed him the sleeve. He looked at the cover and the dust jacket, and matched the symbols in the artwork with the song they appeared next to on the lyrics sheet. We wondered what the connections might be, and he imagined the leafy stems of the plant on the cover tangling into the distance as it extended beyond its cardboard square.

I pressed play. He put his head on my shoulder and we listened. He identified some of the instruments we heard. A violin. A piano. Some brass. The soft, repetitive marching sound of the drums on “Arrhythmia”. He seemed to be enjoying it, and sounded earnest when he soon told me he was.

“How Will I Live Without a Body?” is not a record you can fully grasp in one sitting, whether you’re nine years old or 46. Loma, like so many of my favorite bands, grows on you.

Cross’ voice is lovely, but the lyrics are dreamy and easy to let drift away. Still, listening with my son, in our decompression session, a few lines resonated more than usual. Like: “Can I trust how I feel every day? Is the world what I think it to be?” Or: “I can't live with this feeling anymore.”

I knew he wouldn’t have the stamina for more than a few songs, but I really wanted to make it to track 5, “How It Starts.” It’s a remarkable song, and I wanted to talk to him a little about it. To note how the piano rises repetitively, how the music starts softly, stops momentarily, then kicks it up just enough of a notch to punctuate the lyric at the heart of the song — eight goosebump-raising words like a recipe for rebirth:

“This is how it starts to move again.”

By the time “How It Starts” had ended, my 9-year-old wasn’t curled up next to me anymore. Instead he was staring out the window, restless and ready to ditch his dad for something else.

I turned the music off and watched him leave the room. I wondered if we would do it again. Had it helped at all? What could I have done differently?

I decided to just let it be. It had felt less than half-wrong in the moment, so I sat a few seconds in the silence, felt the breeze through the window, and took the win.

Past winners:

1993: Counting Crows -- August and Everything After
1994: R.E.M. -- Monster
1995: The Innocence Mission -- Glow
1996: Dave Matthews Band -- Crash
1997: U2 -- Pop
1998: R.E.M. -- Up
1999: John Linnell -- State Songs
2000: Radiohead -- Kid A
2001: Bjork -- Vespertine
2002: Wilco -- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2003: Bonnie "Prince" Billy -- Master and Everyone
2004: Wilco -- A Ghost is Born
2005: Sufjan Stevens -- Illinois
2006: The Decemberists -- The Crane Wife
2007: Radiohead -- In Rainbows
2008: Shearwater -- Rook
2009: Animal Collective -- Merriweather Post Pavilion
2010: Laura Veirs -- July Flame
2011: PJ Harvey -- Let England Shake
2012: Animal Collective -- Centipede Hz
2013: Mogwai -- Les Revenants
2014: Sun Kil Moon -- Benji
2015: The Tallest Man On Earth -- Dark Bird is Home
2016: Bon Iver -- 22, A Million
2017: Bjork -- Utopia
2018: Caamp -- Boys
2019: The Lumineers -- III
2020: Phoebe Bridgers -- Punisher
2021: Bo Burnham -- Inside (The Songs)
2022: Sylvan Esso -- No Rules Sandy
2023: Lana Del Rey -- Did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd

Nominees: 2024 Album of the Year

Holy hell, what a year for music. I've tried to keep my nominees lists short in recent years, but this time ... not gonna happen. I did work to move as many down to my Honorable Mentions list as I could, though. Here goes!

Nominees

Adrianne Lenker -- Bright Future

Charlie Parr -- Little Sun

Future Islands -- People Who Aren't There Anymore

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings -- Woodland

The Innocence Mission -- Midwinter Swimmers

Loma -- How Will I Live Without a Body?

MJ Lenderman -- Manning Fireworks

Original Cast of Stereophonic -- Stereophonic (Original Cast Recording)

Sierra Farrell -- Trail of Flowers

Waxahatchee -- Tigers Blood

Honorable Mention

Andrew Bird and Madison Cunningham -- Cunningham Bird

Billie Eilish -- HIT ME HARD AND SOFT

Billy Strings -- Highway Prayers

Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Nathan Salsburg & Tyler Trotter -- Hear the Children Sing

Hurray for the Riff Raff -- The Past is Still Alive

Jessica Pratt -- Here in the Pitch

Kim Deal -- Nobody Loves You More

Laura Marling -- Patterns in Repeat

Olivia Chaney -- Circus of Desire

Sleater-Kinney -- Little Rope

St. Vincent -- All Born Screaming

The Cure -- Songs of a Lost World

RIB's 2023 Album of the Year:Lana Del Rey -- Did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd

(Reprinted from Unwinnable Monthly)

Lana Del('s) Rey

It’s Sunday morning at the 2023 Newport Folk Festival and something isn’t right.

The early birds are perched from the merch tents to the far end of the Museum. It’s well past time for the gates to open, as they always do precisely at 10, each day, each year, so the diehard folkies can flock to the Quad or the Fort to secure their best blanket positions. But this morning, the gates and the guards aren’t budging, and the rumors on the merch side is that it’s all Lana Del Rey’s fault. On the Museum side, those rumors are confirmed as her voice carries over on the bay breeze from the Fort Stage.

The diva, it appears, has the nerve to be sound-checking.

It’s unprecedented. For folkies already perplexed or even peeved by her place in the weekend’s lineup, the delay — which someone squished nearby in the crowd tells us is kind of a trademark of hers — is further proof she has no place here. The spirit of the Folk Fest is all about the music, from the morning sets to the closers, not all about Lana.

Eventually, Lana Del Rey is ready, and, because she says it can, Day 3 begins.

---

Seven hours later, I have had at least five servings of Del’s Lemonade, not exactly the official drink of the Newport Folk Festival but close enough.

So when Lana Del Rey finally takes the stage — after another delay, and to the sounds of screaming fangirls somehow piped through the speakers — I’m sugared up and ready for anything.

I liked Video Games well enough when it first came out, and I’ve been digging her new record, in anticipation of this set. I can’t legitimately call myself a fan. But this evening, I am up for grabs.

Later I’d hear some folkies actually complain about this, but she’s brought a fairly elaborate stage setup — and dancers! This kind of choreography at the Fort is basically unheard of, but it doesn’t feel out of place 24 hours after Jon Batiste barbecued on the same stage. And while it’s not exactly Bob Dylan plugging in his electric guitar, it’s refreshing: Lana sprawled out on a piano; Lana reflected in a mirror as she combs her hair; Lana dragged off the stage at the end by the male members of her dance troupe.

It’s no wonder David Lynch is a fan: Her songs find space to be both artificial and heartfelt. I can’t tell how much of a diva the diva really is. And I love it.

I know they think that it took somebody else
To make me beautiful, beautiful
As they intended me to be
But they're wrong
I know they think that it took thousands of people
To put me together again like an experiment
Some big men behind the scenes
Sewing Frankenstein black dreams into my songs
But they're wrong

---

That night I drive back from Rhode Island, along back roads that twist and turn in the darkness, roads that are almost pitch black when my brights aren’t on. My wife sleeps next to me in the passenger seat. Lana’s record, “Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd” — my 2023 Album of the Year, beating out boygenius and Sufjan Stevens — keeps me company, providing the lovely and sometimes surreal soundtrack for the journey.

It might be the perfect way to listen to this record: wired, thrilled by the past three days, running on adrenaline and Del’s, every once in a while taking a sharp turn a little sharper than I’d have liked, imagining the car careening off the guardrail into the woods. Not long after Lana pleads, “fuck me to death, love me until I love myself” and asserts “it’s not about having someone to love me anymore”, there’s her preacher, sounding like he’s being surreptitiously recorded by Lana’s iPhone, imploring us not to live a life of lust, to appreciate the love and the family that we have. Later, she is taken in by candy necklaces even though she knows they’re superficial. And then Lana leaves everything behind because “when you know, you know” — then sings a love song she wrote for her boy Jack Antonoff’s wedding with the same lyric.

You know, twists and turns.

Eventually we get to my parents’ house, turn off the car, and quietly walk inside and upstairs to not wake up the kids. There’s always at least one thing — usually many things — that keeps me coming back to Newport Folk every year. This year there was Lana Del Rey, who for a time seemed determined to keep it from starting. Only to say later playing the Fest was a lifelong dream — and then blowing it up.

Past winners:

1993: Counting Crows -- August and Everything After
1994: R.E.M. -- Monster
1995: The Innocence Mission -- Glow
1996: Dave Matthews Band -- Crash
1997: U2 -- Pop
1998: R.E.M. -- Up
1999: John Linnell -- State Songs
2000: Radiohead -- Kid A
2001: Bjork -- Vespertine
2002: Wilco -- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2003: Bonnie "Prince" Billy -- Master and Everyone
2004: Wilco -- A Ghost is Born
2005: Sufjan Stevens -- Illinois
2006: The Decemberists -- The Crane Wife
2007: Radiohead -- In Rainbows
2008: Shearwater -- Rook
2009: Animal Collective -- Merriweather Post Pavilion
2010: Laura Veirs -- July Flame
2011: PJ Harvey -- Let England Shake
2012: Animal Collective -- Centipede Hz
2013: Mogwai -- Les Revenants
2014: Sun Kil Moon -- Benji
2015: The Tallest Man On Earth -- Dark Bird is Home
2016: Bon Iver -- 22, A Million
2017: Bjork -- Utopia
2018: Caamp -- Boys
2019: The Lumineers -- III
2020: Phoebe Bridgers -- Punisher
2021: Bo Burnham -- Inside (The Songs)
2022: Sylvan Esso -- No Rules Sandy

Nominees: 2023 Album of the Year

Nominees

boygenius -- the record

Lana Del Rey -- Did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd

Sufjan Stevens -- Javelin

The Tallest Man on Earth -- Henry St.

Honorable Mention

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit -- Weathervanes

Olivia Chaney -- Six French Songs

Sumbuck -- Lucky

RIB's 2022 Album of the Year: Sylvan Esso -- No Rules Sandy

(Reprinted from Unwinnable Monthly)

No Rules Newport

An undeniable highlight of each summer is Unwinnable’s can’t-miss coverage of the Newport Folk Festival. Yet in 2022, it was nowhere to be found.

Did Unwinnable sit out a year that included legendary surprise performances by both Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell? Did the Rookie of the Year lose a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to dance with the Wife of the Year to Joni’s performance of “Amelia” — which happens to be the Wife of the Year’s name (and his ringtone for her)? Did Unwinnable not shed a single tear during any of this?

No! Unwinnable was there! Unwinnable danced! Unwinnable cried! Unwinnable did not write about it!

It’s time to rectify that. Because something else happened at the most recent NFF — Sylvan Esso debuted their as-yet-to-be-released and previously-unheard album — “No Rules Sandy” — for the first time. They performed it in its entirety, as we danced under a blazing hot sun. And guess what? It's my 2022 Album of the Year.

Amelia is also the name of the voice of Sylvan Esso, Amelia Meath. Leading into her performance I had been wondering why so many musicians insist on dressing in unseasonably warm attire at these shows. Newport is not a place where one would be judged for cargo shorts. And so when Amelia Meath took the stage in a suit jacket and bra, she’d already won me over. When she removed the suit jacket, she became practically heroic.

She needed the fresh air. As I said, it was hot that day. I was covered in dirt from dancing in the dusty ground in front of the Fort stage. Amelia Meath was under cover and clean, but she moved like it was her first and last show, and her husband, bandmate, Nick Sanborn (the Sandy in the album’s title) made his bleeps and bloops with just as much enthusiasm.

I’m a latecomer to Sylvan Esso’s music. I had “Ferris Wheel” on repeat heading into Newport, to the point where my two boys started requesting the “knees are bruised” song in the car. And while there might not be a song on “No Rules Sandy” quite that infectious, many come close — like “Didn’t Care” or “Sunburn” or “Alarm." There’s also arguably my favorite track, or at least the one that initially drew me in, called “Your Reality” which the duo has described as being a mashup of two very different ways of seeing the song. The result is splendid and not only suits the lyrics, but the album itself, a less-than-highly-polished post-pandemic parade of quickly written and recorded songs separated by short in-studio doodles and even a voicemail message from Mom.

The cover, too, is just the track list — black type left-justified on a white background (in iTunes the song titles disappear and reappear on a loop). It’s clear my inaugural recipient of the Executive Producer of the Year Award wasn’t consulted, though perhaps that’s for the best. The mixtape mashup of “No Rules Sandy” doesn’t have the gravitas of the Album of the Year runner-up — Shearwater’s quiet but powerful “The Great Awakening” — but it’s a ton of fun.

Listening to it, Unwinnable is right back at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival. Hearing it for the first time with everyone else. Crying to the "The Sound of Silence." Hugging the wife as a legend performed in front of a crowd for the first time in years, and for the first time at Newport since the 1960s. When it comes to the lineup, or the set lists, there are no rules at Newport. Not for Sylvan Esso last year, and certainly not for the other artists delivering unforgettable surprises.

We didn’t write about it then. Now we have.

Past winners:

1993: Counting Crows -- August and Everything After
1994: R.E.M. -- Monster
1995: The Innocence Mission -- Glow
1996: Dave Matthews Band -- Crash
1997: U2 -- Pop
1998: R.E.M. -- Up
1999: John Linnell -- State Songs
2000: Radiohead -- Kid A
2001: Bjork -- Vespertine
2002: Wilco -- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2003: Bonnie "Prince" Billy -- Master and Everyone
2004: Wilco -- A Ghost is Born
2005: Sufjan Stevens -- Illinois
2006: The Decemberists -- The Crane Wife
2007: Radiohead -- In Rainbows
2008: Shearwater -- Rook
2009: Animal Collective -- Merriweather Post Pavilion
2010: Laura Veirs -- July Flame
2011: PJ Harvey -- Let England Shake
2012: Animal Collective -- Centipede Hz
2013: Mogwai -- Les Revenants
2014: Sun Kil Moon -- Benji
2015: The Tallest Man On Earth -- Dark Bird is Home
2016: Bon Iver -- 22, A Million
2017: Bjork -- Utopia
2018: Caamp -- Boys
2019: The Lumineers -- III
2020: Phoebe Bridgers -- Punisher
2021: Bo Burnham -- Inside (The Songs)

Nominees: 2022 Album of the Year

Happy (belated) Turkey Day. Here goes!

Nominees

Anais Mitchell — Anais Mitchell
Bjork — Fossora
Hurray for the Riff Raff — LIFE ON EARTH
Shearwater — The Great Awakening
Sylvan Esso — No Rules Sandy
Warpaint — Radiate Like This

Honorable Mention

Alvvays — Blue Rev
Arny Margret — Intertwined (EP)
Big Thief — Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You
Bonnie Light Horseman — Rolling Golden Holy
Caamp — Lavender Days
Goose — Dripfield
Sharon Van Etten — We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong
Taj Mahal & Ry Cooder — Get On Board

I Can’t In Good Conscience

Arcade Fire — WE

RIB's 2021 Album of the Year:Bo Burnham -- Inside (The Songs)

(Reprinted from Unwinnable Monthly)

It’s a beautiful year to stay Inside

I’ve been wanting to write about Bo Burnham’s “Inside” for months. But I couldn’t quite figure out what to say about it. It’s more performance art than a comedy special, and every time I breathlessly recommend it, I get the sense people aren’t entirely eager to fill a bowl with Bugles for 75 minutes of sometimes zany but increasingly dark songs by a privileged white dude — “self-aware about being a douchebag … but self-awareness absolves no one” — on the pandemic, depression, aging, race, climate change, the evils of the Internet, and basically just the whole fucking world falling apart around us. We have long been wanting nothing more than to throw open our doors and breathe fresh air again. Meanwhile, Burnham sings, “It’s a beautiful day to stay inside.”

But now I have my excuse. It’s December, and every December — as my reader knows — I use this space to write about my Album of the Year, something I’ve been naming for nearly 30 years now.  In those 30 years, the closest to a “comedy” record winning was John Linnell’s 1999 “State Songs.” But when I listen to this year’s runner-up — Lucy Dacus’ brilliant “Home Video” — it fills me with intense sadness. I needed a little more to laugh about. “Inside (The Songs)” though, well, it hits so many different notes, all of which in some form or another capture the time in which it was written, recorded and filmed — by Burham, alone in a room. (A room, recently discovered by internet sleuths, in the “A Nightmare on Elm Street” house.) And while it sometimes flirts with being an extended Weird Al video or a vanity project, it ultimately becomes something much more. Five years from now, much of the novelty likely will have worn off; I might not want to listen to songs about FaceTiming my mom, the joys of sexting or white women’s Instagram posts anymore, but those tracks, front-loaded at the top of the show, serve more like appetizers. 

As the music continues, and gets darker and more complex, the more it feels like it’s actually — surprise! — an Album of the Year contender. Ultimately, I realized, it isn’t just a contender, but my winner.

If I hadn’t decided that already, it was cemented further when last year’s Album of the Year-winning artist, Phoebe Bridgers, released a cover of Burnham’s “That Funny Feeling” for charity. Not only did her understated cover version work outside the context of Burham’s record, but her tacit endorsement of “Inside” — and the anthemic quality the song takes on when she performs it live, the audience singing along — validated what I already believed: that this record is more than just the sum of its jokes.

The second track, “Comedy,” is a tongue-in-cheek, self-effacing take on the futility of what Burham is trying to accomplish. “Healing the world through comedy — making a literal difference, metaphorically.” In the bridge of the same song: “If you wake up in a house that's full of smoke/Don't panic/Call me and I'll tell you a joke/If you see white men dressed in white cloaks/Don't panic/Call me and I'll tell you a joke/Oh, shit/Should I be joking at a time like this?”

But it ultimately becomes clear that he isn’t just joking at a time like this. “30” has him despondently watching a digital alarm clock strike midnight as it becomes his 30th birthday. “Shit” is a club track that parodies pop hits about happiness designed to make you dance and morphs them into a song about depression, turning top 40 tropes on their head. “Welcome to the Internet” laments a carnival world of technology where we are inundated with “a little bit of everything all of time” and where “apathy’s a tragedy and boredom is a crime.”

“That Funny Feeling” is about that world ending, and it feels like complete non-fiction. Yes, it has playful rhymes in it, but the lines that stick out are profound: “The whole world at your fingertips, the ocean at your door” and “Twenty-thousand years of this, seven more to go” — which build up to an outro of: “Hey, what can you say?/We were overdue/But it'll be over soon.” In this context, it might not always be comical, but it’s almost comforting. 

And there’s then “Goodbye” — the climactic song before the special’s last over-the-credits tune, the comparatively hopeful “Any Day Now” — in which some of the earlier motifs return, and he promises to “never go outside again.”

There is also a challenge to his audience, even though he immediately undercuts it: “Hey, here’s a fun idea/how about I sit on the couch/and watch you next time?/I want to hear you tell a joke/when no one’s laughing in the background.” It’s at once a riff on one of the show’s key themes — that the outside world exists only as a mine for material to take home, alone, and share online — but also seems to herald the end of comedy as we know it. 

After the song, in the special, Burnham’s door opens, and he is blinded by light as he steps outside. Birds chirp. But the light is revealed to be a spotlight and it’s nighttime. An unseen crowd applauds. And then: The crowd begins to laugh uproariously as he turns around and tries, in vain, to rip the now-locked door open and get back inside. 

For a beat, right before the words “the end” appear on the screen, we see him inside again, watching this play out, projected onto his wall. We see his bearded face up close. He looks deadly serious. And then ... he smiles.

Past winners:

1993: Counting Crows -- August and Everything After
1994: R.E.M. -- Monster
1995: The Innocence Mission -- Glow
1996: Dave Matthews Band -- Crash
1997: U2 -- Pop
1998: R.E.M. -- Up
1999: John Linnell -- State Songs
2000: Radiohead -- Kid A
2001: Bjork -- Vespertine
2002: Wilco -- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2003: Bonnie "Prince" Billy -- Master and Everyone
2004: Wilco -- A Ghost is Born
2005: Sufjan Stevens -- Illinois
2006: The Decemberists -- The Crane Wife
2007: Radiohead -- In Rainbows
2008: Shearwater -- Rook
2009: Animal Collective -- Merriweather Post Pavilion
2010: Laura Veirs -- July Flame
2011: PJ Harvey -- Let England Shake
2012: Animal Collective -- Centipede Hz
2013: Mogwai -- Les Revenants
2014: Sun Kil Moon -- Benji
2015: The Tallest Man On Earth -- Dark Bird is Home
2016: Bon Iver -- 22, A Million
2017: Bjork -- Utopia
2018: Caamp -- Boys
2019: The Lumineers -- III
2020: Phoebe Bridgers -- Punisher

Nominees: 2021 Album of the Year

A day late but here we go: RIB’s 2021 Album of the Year nominees!

NOMINEES

Billie Eilish — Happier Than Ever

Bo Burnham — Inside (The Songs)

Charlie Parr — Last of the Better Days Ahead

Jimbo Mathus and Andrew Bird — These 13

Lucy Dacus — Home Video

Matt Sweeney and Bonnie “Prince” Billy — Superwolves 

Middle Kids — Today We’re the Greatest

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Karen Peris — A Song is Way Above the Lawn

Various Artists — I’ll Be Your Mirror (A Tribute to the Velvet Underground & Nico)

The Weather Station — Ignorance

RIB's 2020 Album of the Year:Phoebe Bridgers -- Punisher

365 Days of Halloween

Practically every time we saw Phoebe Bridgers in 2020, she was wearing a full-body skeleton costume.

On her album cover. In her videos. In her remote appearances on late-night television. In her one-off performances — one of the worthiest among them a quiet cover of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” recorded in a London church. In each case, she’s sporting a classic black suit of white skeleton bones, marking this time of perpetual Halloween.

In her video for “I Know The End,” she’s wearing the skeleton suit while nearly drowning in a bathtub. At one point, she climbs out of the water and steps dripping wet into a locker room — where in each locker hangs the same skeleton suit, one after another after another. She has, it seems, an endless supply.

“I Know The End” is the stunning finale of Phoebe Bridgers’ sophomore solo album “Punisher” — my 28th annual Album of the Year. “Punisher” was released amid a deadly, incompetently mismanaged pandemic and raging civil unrest over the continuing murder of Blacks by an out-of-control police force. Its original release date was discarded in deference to Juneteenth.

Though “Punisher” was written and recorded in 2018 and 2019, its mix of hope, sadness, irony and a lingering sense of dread feels inspired by current events — even as they are still unfolding today.

Those of us quarantined at home have watched helplessly as the body count grows, hoping it won’t take us, too — or our parents or grandparents. That it won’t keep our children out of school any longer or force us out of our jobs. The only thing we’ve prayed to lose this year is our psychopathic president.

So Bridgers’ Halloween fashion, all things considered, made a ton of sense — even down to simply wearing the same comfy outfit every day. Why change your pants for a Zoom call, why do laundry, why try to put a fresh scent and unwrinkled polish on what for many was the worst year in America they’d ever seen?

Make no mistake, “Punisher” is a record worthy of any year. “DVD Menu” starts it with an orchestral foreshadowing, only to be reprised at the end of the record, bringing the haunting full circle. “Garden Song” has one of the most sublimely lo-fi guitar hooks you’ll hear, a pulsing heartbeat from under a blanket of snow. “Kyoto” (like other tracks on “Punisher”) touches on the ludicrousness of being a touring musician — how finding yourself in an alien land, far from the comfort of your bedroom is not always all it’s cracked up to be. “I wanted to see the world / Then I flew over the ocean / And I changed my mind.” Later, in “Chinese Satellite” Bridgers sings, “I've been running around in circles / Pretending to be myself / Why would somebody do this on purpose / When they could do something else?” Heard in 2020, traveling the world, performing songs over and over — as absurd and as strange a calling as it might be — seems very much worth doing on purpose, especially when you can’t do it anymore.

The title track — an ode to the late Elliot Smith — is both a song about fan obsession and an earnest tribute to a dead musician. A love song to a dead person you admire works anytime; it especially works now. There is also, fittingly, a song called “Halloween,” which features a purposely tasteless joke about living near a hospital, and sucks the joy from the holiday by focusing its limited powers on trying to conjure one final flicker out of a dying relationship.

There’s so much more to love on “Punisher,” but let’s go back to the finale: “I Know the End” contains the most telling and memorable moment on the record. As the album approaches its climax, Bridgers is riding down the highway in her car, screaming along to an “America First rap country song” with her windows rolled down. Bridgers sings:

The billboard said “The End Is Near”
I turned around, there was nothing there
Yeah, I guess the end is here

Yes, this might sound tongue-in-cheek — a wink-wink chem trails reference and an earnest wish to be whisked away by aliens from earlier in the record is also consistent with surviving our time of alternative facts and unending conspiracy theories. But the record never faces fear more head-on than as the song and album concludes with a chorus of voices singing “The end is here” in unison as the “DVD Menu” reprise swells beneath.

As you listen, you are free to choose whether to laugh or scream along with her. She does both in the closing seconds. Vaccines are coming but we’re still dying, and in numbers greater than before. We’ve elected a new president for 2021 but the current one’s dangerous mental health issues will continue to poison the country for the foreseeable future. Which is why — even on the best days of this Halloween year — it’s hard to deny what we’ve all wondered sometimes: Maybe the end really is here.

Past winners:

1993: Counting Crows -- August and Everything After
1994: R.E.M. -- Monster
1995: The Innocence Mission -- Glow
1996: Dave Matthews Band -- Crash
1997: U2 -- Pop
1998: R.E.M. -- Up
1999: John Linnell -- State Songs
2000: Radiohead -- Kid A
2001: Bjork -- Vespertine
2002: Wilco -- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2003: Bonnie "Prince" Billy -- Master and Everyone
2004: Wilco -- A Ghost is Born
2005: Sufjan Stevens -- Illinois
2006: The Decemberists -- The Crane Wife
2007: Radiohead -- In Rainbows
2008: Shearwater -- Rook
2009: Animal Collective -- Merriweather Post Pavilion
2010: Laura Veirs -- July Flame
2011: PJ Harvey -- Let England Shake
2012: Animal Collective -- Centipede Hz
2013: Mogwai -- Les Revenants
2014: Sun Kil Moon -- Benji
2015: The Tallest Man On Earth -- Dark Bird is Home
2016: Bon Iver -- 22, A Million
2017: Bjork -- Utopia
2018: Caamp -- Boys
2019: The Lumineers -- III

Nominees: 2020 Album of the Year

Gobble gobble.

Your 2020 Album of the Year nominees and honorable mentions:

Nominees

Bob Dylan — Rough and Rowdy Ways
Bonny Light Horseman — Bonny Light Horseman
Fiona Apple — Fetch the Bolt Cutters
The Innocence Mission — See You Tomorrow
Loma — Don’t Shy Away
Phoebe Bridgers — Punisher

Honorable Mention

Adrianne Lenker — songs
Jonathan Meiburg — Mangled Classics
Laura Marling — Song for our Daughter
Laura Veirs — My Echo
Michaela Hrabánková and Doležal Quartet -- Mysliveček's Oboe Quintets and String Quartets
Sturgill Simpson — Cuttin’ Grass — Vol. 1 (Butcher Shoppe Sessions)
Waxahatchee — Saint Cloud

RIB's 2019 Album of the Year:The Lumineers -- III

It's Us or Them

There is a moment in The Lumineers’ reputation-redefining record, III, when the second and third generation of a drug-addled family pass a hitchhiker on the side of the road.

“You never give a hitcher a ride,” Jimmy Sparks warns his son, Junior, “‘cause it's us or them.”

Jimmy is a product of his alcohol-soaked mother, Gloria. He’s a wreck. All of the pivotal moments of his life seem to happen at 3 a.m. This one’s no exception.

And it’s 3 a.m. again, 20 years later, when Junior reaches his own crossroads. He’s driving alone, the sense from the record that he could still break free, could still snap off his branch of the family tree. He sees, on his way home from his graveyard shift, a beat-up barefoot man at the side of the road. It’s his father, in the latest mess of his own making.

“His old man waved his hands with tears in his eyes / But Jimmy's son just sped up and remembered daddy's advice / No, you don't ever give a hitcher a ride, 'cause it's us or them / ‘Cause it's me or him”

It’s not entirely clear from the song or from the video — one of a series of short films that add a whole other layer to III’’s storytelling — whether Junior recognizes his father or not in that moment. But the lesson seems to be different somehow, not about the dangers of strangers or worse, the pervasive Sparks family selfishness. Instead it seems like healthy self-preservation. Maybe Junior is going to make it out after all.

III is a stunning record with beauty and tragedy and hope — and hooks. It raises The Lumineers — that previously rather disposable toe-tappin’ “Hey Ho” band from Ramsey, New Jersey, one Pitchfork would hardly lower itself to cover — to another level. They were decent but never this good before, and might never be this good again.

In 2019, though, they delivered. The Lumineers’ third record, III, is my 27th annual Album of the Year.

The Lumineers had a ton of competition worth mentioning. Big Thief’s weird and wonderful U.F.O.F. might have cruised to a victory in some other years — and, admittedly, is probably the better record from an objective standpoint. Objective obschmective. The Highwomen’s debut made it possible I’d actually pick an all-female country supergroup. Last year’s winner, Caamp, released a more than fine follow up. Previous winner The Tallest Man on Earth dropped another great one. There was also Sharon Van Etten, Yola, Chromatics and my favorite new artist this year, Jade Bird. And Todd Snider’s Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3 is a delightful mix of humor, melancholy and modern politics.

Of all things, it was a random Twitter post by a Twin Peaks connection that alerted me to The Lumineers’ new one. I’d seen them perform years ago at the Newport Folk Festival and I own their first album, but they never made much of an impression on me. I had no intention of following their career further. Which was why her tweet spoke to me:

“I’ve honestly never been that into this band but this album and its subsequent music videos is amazing,” Melanie Mullen wrote.

I was feeling adventurous, so I gave another shot to what I had concluded was just another ubiquitous MOR rock-folk-Americana fusion band in the vein of the dreaded Mumford and Sons.

But all I needed to do was listen to a brief preview clip of the album’s opening track, “Donna,” and I knew something was different.

As I said to my wife, “You don’t start a concept album with a song this good unless you can back it up.”

They backed it up.

“Donna” is the first of a three-part opening short story about Junior’s grandmother, Gloria. It’s followed by “Life in the City” and “Gloria,” making up the album’s first of three acts, the latter two songs more upbeat musically but certainly not lyrically, painting a picture of an alcoholic mother and the suffering she inflicts on herself and others. It’s not a 2019 story of opioid abuse, but it resonates all the more for it timelessness. And the film clips that accompany the record, by director Kevin Phillips, underscore her tragedy. By the end of her vignette, she’s passing out drunk while holding an infant and then running across a barren field from the scene of a brutal car crash, her bleeding husband left in the passenger seat, yet it’s almost impossible not to sing along as the album’s first single plays around her. That dissonance, like a good Radiohead song, gives “Gloria” all the more power.

Act 2 jumps forward in time to Gloria’s grandson. “It Wasn’t Easy to Be Happy For You” is an identifiable song about a teenage breakup — no history of family addiction needed. When you add the video, though, it becomes particularly poignant. We see a beautiful young girl enchanting Junior on the roof of his car and, later, in the front seat. She’s exciting, provocative. You can feel the limitless possibilities she represents to a young man who doesn’t seem to have all that many. Then she opens the door and saunters her way out of the car into the great wide open. Junior tries to follow her. But the camera pans and, like magic, she’s already gone.

Junior’s mother has also left her father and the next two songs unpack that dynamic, before the record rolls back a generation to his father, Jimmy Sparks, a prison guard trapped in a cell mostly of his own making, his only joy keeping others in their metal cages. It’s even darker than what we’ve heard so far, and brings us to the 3 a.m. moments in the car and elsewhere.

The record, which is a tight 10 songs and 38 minutes long, lands its finish. The chorus on “Salt and the Sea” — a song that shares a little part of its soul with another cleansing cinematic album-closer, “Love Reign O'er Me” — hints at reconciliation with the refrain, “I'll be your friend // In the daylight again,” but of course it’s not nearly as simple as that.

With the family history the Sparks have, it can’t be.

Past winners:

1993: Counting Crows -- August and Everything After
1994: R.E.M. -- Monster
1995: The Innocence Mission -- Glow
1996: Dave Matthews Band -- Crash
1997: U2 -- Pop
1998: R.E.M. -- Up
1999: John Linnell -- State Songs
2000: Radiohead -- Kid A
2001: Bjork -- Vespertine
2002: Wilco -- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2003: Bonnie "Prince" Billy -- Master and Everyone
2004: Wilco -- A Ghost is Born
2005: Sufjan Stevens -- Illinois
2006: The Decemberists -- The Crane Wife
2007: Radiohead -- In Rainbows
2008: Shearwater -- Rook
2009: Animal Collective -- Merriweather Post Pavilion
2010: Laura Veirs -- July Flame
2011: PJ Harvey -- Let England Shake
2012: Animal Collective -- Centipede Hz
2013: Mogwai -- Les Revenants
2014: Sun Kil Moon -- Benji
2015: The Tallest Man On Earth -- Dark Bird is Home
2016: Bon Iver -- 22, A Million
2017: Bjork -- Utopia
2018: Caamp -- Boys

Nominees: 2019 Album of the Year

Gobble gobble.

So many amazing albums, so little time.

Here are your nominees for the 2019 RIB Album of the Year.

Nominees

Big Thief -- U.F.O.F.

Jade Bird -- Jade Bird

Caamp -- By & By

Chromatics -- Closer To Grey

The Highwomen -- The Highwomen

The Lumineers -- III

The Tallest Man on Earth -- I Love You. It's a Fever Dream.

Todd Snider -- Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3

Sharon Van Etten -- Remind Me Tomorrow

Yola -- Walk Through Fire

Honorable Mention

Better Oblivion Community Center -- Better Oblivion Community Center

Andrew Bird -- My Finest Work Yet

Bill Callahan -- Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest

Leonard Cohen -- Thanks For The Dance

Bob Dylan -- Travelin' Thru (Bootleg Series Vol. 15)

Julia Jacklin -- Crushing

Charlie Parr -- Charlie Parr

Prince -- Originals

R.E.M. -- Monster (25th anniversary)

Maggie Rogers -- Heard It in a Past Life

RIB's 2018 Album of the Year: Caamp -- Boys

2018 and Everything After

For a quarter-century, “August and Everything After” has been a symbol of the unbreakable bond I share with my oldest friend. Shawn and I met a decade before the record was released, as 4-year-olds running around an apartment complex in upstate New York, but we were traveling together in Colorado when the Counting Crows debut was the rage. I recommended he pick it up. He did.

Fast forward nearly another decade, and we’re in a biker bar in Hagerstown, Maryland. We’re hiking the Appalachian Trail, and they’ve let us set up our tents in the grass outside. Beer and bar snacks never taste better than when you’ve been trudging up and down mountains in the summer heat for days on end. Music never sounds better.

One of us found “August and Everything After” on the jukebox. It’s likely a bit apocryphal, a shared myth we like to repeat, but I swear we played the whole damn album. “I know every single word,” one of us said, and, as the story goes, we proved it. Whether it was the whole album, or half, or just a couple songs, we belted it all out, not missing a beat.

We were 23 and singing along to my first Album of the Year; “August and Everything After” was the very reason I decided, as a 15-year-old in 1993, to start naming an Album of the Year each winter. I needed a way to name how special it was to me.

When I turned 40 this summer, we went to Nashville to celebrate. We played “Anna Begins” in the wee hours of the morning at the house a group of us had rented for the occasion. But Shawn and I had a new record to bond over, too, to sing along with in Music City, a record I’d discovered that had immediately made me think of Shawn. He was on assignment in Honduras when I sent it to him.

He loved it. I loved it. We love it.

And so my Album of the Year comes full circle. Twenty-five years later, Caamp’s “Boys” — a record that screams Shawn to me — is my 2018 Album of the Year.

Caamp, who I saw this summer at the Newport Folk Festival, are a group of 20-something lifelong friends, but I swear they didn’t look a day over 15, at least not banjo player/backup singer Evan Westfall. They were the first act of the day, and don’t play with the gravitas of a guy like Charlie Parr, or the inventiveness of Loma, whose debut record is my Album of the Year runner-up, but they play music that strips away cynicism. Songs for the morning, to open the window curtains to. Songs about new love and enduring friendship.

Some years I feel like quoting lyrics endlessly in these columns. And I could do that. It’s certainly deserving. But this time, there’s only one line I feel like repeating, a line that brings me back to bars with Shawn, or in the woods, or in canoes, dealing with broken hearts and family hardships, or even to a tiny mound of dirt near a fence corner that seemed so big to us as kids we called it Memory Hill and invented a million games to play on it.

“Don’t let yourself go crazy, you’re good for another round,” is the line. “It’s only love — and it hurts.”

It’s a song of comfort. It’s a song called “Song for a Friend.”

The old magic never dies.

Past winners:

1993: Counting Crows -- August and Everything After
1994: R.E.M. -- Monster
1995: The Innocence Mission -- Glow
1996: Dave Matthews Band -- Crash
1997: U2 -- Pop
1998: R.E.M. -- Up
1999: John Linnell -- State Songs
2000: Radiohead -- Kid A
2001: Bjork -- Vespertine
2002: Wilco -- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2003: Bonnie "Prince" Billy -- Master and Everyone
2004: Wilco -- A Ghost is Born
2005: Sufjan Stevens -- Illinois
2006: The Decemberists -- The Crane Wife
2007: Radiohead -- In Rainbows
2008: Shearwater -- Rook
2009: Animal Collective -- Merriweather Post Pavilion
2010: Laura Veirs -- July Flame
2011: PJ Harvey -- Let England Shake
2012: Animal Collective -- Centipede Hz
2013: Mogwai -- Les Revenants
2014: Sun Kil Moon -- Benji
2015: The Tallest Man On Earth -- Dark Bird is Home
2016: Bon Iver -- 22, A Million
2017: Bjork -- Utopia

Nominees: 2018 Album of the Year

And the nominees are ...

Caamp -- Boys
First Aid Kit -- Ruins
The Innocence Mission -- Sun on the Square
John Prine -- The Tree of Forgiveness
Laura Gibson -- Goners
Laura Veirs -- The Lookout
Loma -- Loma
Olivia Chaney -- Shelter

Honorable mentions

Arthur Buck -- Arthur Buck
Colter Wall -- Songs of the Plains
Johnny Jewel -- Themes For Television
Boygenius
Thought Gang -- Thought Gang

RIB's 2017 Album of the Year: Bjork -- Utopia

No piece of art meant more to me this year — or, arguably, any recent year — than the return of “Twin Peaks.”

That includes the music — spread over three records, it’s a treasure trove of score and songs and sound effects, from Angelo Badalamenti, Dean Hurley and David Lynch to Nine Inch Nails, Sharon Van Etten and Eddie Vedder.

Taken as a whole, it’s my soundtrack of 2017.

But it isn’t my Album of the Year.

When I started my award a quarter century ago — yes, this is my 25th(!) winner — I set two basic rules for myself I reserve the right to change on a whim but have stuck with ever since anyway:

1. The record must be released during the calendar year.
2. It must be made up of original recordings — covers, for sure, but not old material or compilations that include the prerecorded work of others.

There was a lot of that in the music of “Twin Peaks.” But because it was curated so well, I was ready to throw those rules right out the window — until the week of Thanksgiving.

That’s when I took a brand new record with me to Mexico City, and during a fabulous family vacation that took us from Frida Kahlo’s house to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, I fell asleep each night to Bjork’s “Utopia.”

I’ve been falling asleep to my 2017 Album of the Year nearly every night since.

It’s been 16 years since I loved a Bjork record like this. “Vespertine” was my top record of 2001, when I’d listen to it sitting in the window of my apartment in Prague, or riding the tram across the Vlatava, watching the snow fall. And hearing the snow fall — in particular the sound of boots making tracks in the soft, thick powder — through my headphones.

On “Utopia,” there are growling wolverines and the bitter leftovers from an devastating divorce. But similar in some ways to “Vespertine,” which wraps you in the warmth of winter, this record is blanketed with tropical birdsongs and flutes; where “Vespertine” sings of secret loves and hidden places, “Utopia” explores sex and romance through the swapping of mp3s and the swiping of apps. Where “Vespertine” pleads for a do-over on its most powerful track, “Undo,” a choir-filled prayer for a new beginning, “Utopia” carefully plots out its do-over, point by point — exploring the messy details of it, from the excitement and fear of letting yourself be vulnerable again to keeping your children from the emotional “luggage” of a custody battle to moments of #MeToo-like empowerment in rejecting the sins of fathers, passed down through generations, to protect our daughters — culminating in a pair of songs as moving as any in Bjork’s incomparable catalogue.

“Music loves too. I am here to defend it,” Bjork states on “Saint,” her voice low in the mix as the swirling sounds overpower her words and attempt to leap from the speakers to form tangible objects in the air. The song distills much of what has come before — the sweetness of “two music nerds obsessing” as they fall in love to a song to the expression of pain and regret in “Sue Me” and “Tabula Rasa,” not to mention Bjork’s previous record, “Vulnicura,” filled with raw anger still being worked out in verse.

At the end of the opening track of one of my Album of the Year runners-up, Mount Eerie’s “A Crow Looked At Me,” Phil Elverum laments the loss of his wife Geneviève Castrée, from pancreatic cancer — leaving behind their 1-year-old daughter -- by asserting that, in the face of real death, all poetry and art loses its meaning. Of course, he’s making a record about death, which neatly contradicts what he says. Bjork’s “I am here to defend it” is more bold — a mission statement from an artist who’s had more time to mourn, and is a little more ready to reconnect to life and love.

Bjork didn’t play The Roadhouse on “Twin Peaks.” But the unique and at times surreal world of this record draws you in. And in the same way Lynch embraces the comic and the dramatic in the same moments, so does “Utopia.” The epic, nearly 10-minute “Body Memory” explores her deep relationship to nature, but starts off both by making fun of it and exalting it:

First snow of winter
I'm walking hills and valleys
Adore this mystical fog!
This fucking mist!
These cliffs are just showing off!

Then the body memory kicks in
I mime my home mountains
The moss that I'm made of
I redeem myself

And then there’s the stuff that maybe just works on that “Twin Peaks” plane only for me, but is no less a part of the record’s story in my mind. When Björk sings, “Hold fort for love” on the closing track, “Future Forever,” it’s again the proclamation of a survivor, coming back to life after a loss — or a “Losss,” spelled with three s’s in the title of the astounding Track 8. But when I mishear the lyric, over and over, in Bjork’s Icelandic accent as “Hold fart for love,” the humor does nothing to diminish it. Nor do the bird sounds all over the record — lush and exotic, yes, but still I imagine what it would be like to be surrounded by so many flying creatures, and all the bird shit that would surely land on me.

But that’s love, isn’t it? Opening your heart, getting betrayed, getting shat on, and then, sometimes, at least in those early days of courtship, holding in your gas to make her love you more than you think you might deserve.

On the 2017 Album of the Year, that love — old and new, flourishing and foundering — extends well beyond mere romance.

”Utopia, it isn’t elsewhere,” Bjork sings, as she both laments the state of our planet and longs for better. “It’s here.” Despite another bleak year — after all the shit we’ve been through politically or professionally or personally — it’s here. It’s just that more than ever, we‘re on our own to fight for it.

Past winners:

1993: Counting Crows -- August and Everything After
1994: R.E.M. -- Monster
1995: The Innocence Mission -- Glow
1996: Dave Matthews Band -- Crash
1997: U2 -- Pop
1998: R.E.M. -- Up
1999: John Linnell -- State Songs
2000: Radiohead -- Kid A
2001: Bjork -- Vespertine
2002: Wilco -- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2003: Bonnie "Prince" Billy -- Master and Everyone
2004: Wilco -- A Ghost is Born
2005: Sufjan Stevens -- Illinois
2006: The Decemberists -- The Crane Wife
2007: Radiohead -- In Rainbows
2008: Shearwater -- Rook
2009: Animal Collective -- Merriweather Post Pavilion
2010: Laura Veirs -- July Flame
2011: PJ Harvey -- Let England Shake
2012: Animal Collective -- Centipede Hz
2013: Mogwai -- Les Revenants
2014: Sun Kil Moon -- Benji
2015: The Tallest Man On Earth -- Dark Bird is Home
2016: Bon Iver -- 22, A Million

Nominees: 2017 Album of the Year

I was in Mexico City over Thanksgiving and didn't set this up to post in advance. So here goes, better late than never.

The nominees for my ***25th*** Album of the Year are ...

***

Angelo Badalamenti/Dean Hurley/Various — The Music of Twin Peaks (three albums, one joint nomination)

So this might seem like a copout, or an unfair advantage, but trust me, it’s neither. The music of Twin Peaks was the soundtrack of much of my summer, and some of the older pieces in this collection are part of the soundtrack of my life. Mostly what makes this three-pronged TP attack a nominee is the simple fact that there was no more important piece of art to me this year than Season 3 of the greatest television show ever, and one of its grounding elements was the sound design (done by David Lynch himself) and the Roadhouse performances at the end of nearly every part. It was the best concert of 2017 you couldn’t attend in person but felt no less real — and often far more surreal. It was the music event of the year, and it takes three records to cover the full breadth of it — from those dreamy or disturbing Bang Bang Bar acts to the perfect placement of old or reimagined tunes to the buzzing electricity of Dean Hurley’s sound effects to Angelo Badalamenti’s compositions — some familiar, some new — that continued to set the incomparable tone of Twin Peaks.

***

Bjork — Utopia

I’ve had various levels of interest in Bjork’s work since her masterpiece — 2001 Album of the Year winner Vespertine. This is the most excited I’ve been about a new Bjork record in years. Sure, she doesn’t really do hooks anymore, and her vocals are often too low in the mix, but the songs here explode, and the lyrics are profoundly moving — Utopia feels like a latter-day Vespertine, with the thick blanket of snow replaced by a tropical island filled with exotic birds and flutes.

***

Hurray For The Riff Raff — The Navigator

This is the record that turned HFTRR from a strong folk act to an “Important Band”. A drama told in music — but not a musical — it spins the story (one quite personal to lead singer Alynda Segarra) about growing up Puerto Rican in the Bronx. Although the elements for a record this strong had been there, the transformation is nothing short of astounding. As a Bronx-born white dude who grew up in suburban privilege, I have a hard time singing along without at least a tinge of embarrassment and shame. Which I think is at least part of the point.

***

Laura Marling — Semper Femina

One of the better live shows I saw this year (a surprise from Amelia!), Laura Marling is just one of the best songwriters there is right now. I find these songs a lot more subtle, less bitter, less defiant, than her last Album of the Year nominee, Short Movie, but they’re all memorable and if anything show off her range. “I was wild once,” she speak-sings, and it seems to make sense as some rumination and reflection on the brief but fiery film that preceded it.

***

Mount Eerie — A Crow Looked At Me

This is a record so hauntingly beautiful it’s hard to listen to. Phil Elverum faces the death of his wife, musician Geneviève Castrée, from pancreatic cancer — leaving behind their 1-year-old daughter — with a low-fi and direct and personal and poetic set of vignettes about picking up the pieces and moving on, without ever forgetting. The record is both a profound work of art, and a rejection of the meaning and power of art in the face of death.

***

Offa Rex — The Queen of Hearts

Olivia Chaney gave me my favorite concert memory — really, memories — of the year, which I’ve written about at length in Unwinnable Monthly. And sure, that helps make this record more special to me. But it would have been right in this space regardless. It’s a collection of ancient folk ballads I wasn’t — save for one more recent tune — acquainted with, but Chaney and The Decemberists deliver them so expertly and beautifully, I’m thrilled this is how I heard them for the first time.

***

Tift Merritt — Stitch of the World

Like HFTRR and Offa Rex, Tift Merritt is a cherished Newport Folk Festival discovery, who gave Amelia and me our wedding song. We also saw her perform this set of new songs in a brilliant show at City Winery. There are instant Merritt standards — most of the record, in fact — and Icarus ranks among the absolute best songs of her career.

***

Hon. Mention

Aimee Mann — Mental Illness
Big Thief — Capacity
Broken Social Scene — Hug of Thunder
Daniel Hart — A Ghost Story (Original Soundtrack)
Feist — Pleasure
Fever Ray — Plunge
Filthy Friends — Invitation
Groundhog Day: The Musical (Original Cast Recording)
The Innocence Mission — The Snow on Pi Day
Iron & Wine — Beast Epic
John Maus — Screen Memories
Sharon Van Etten — (It Was) Because I Was In Love
Willie Watson — Folksinger, Vol. 2

RIB's 2016 Album of the Year: Bon Iver -- 22, A Million

This year, a great year for new music and an absolutely awful year for just about everything else, my Album of the Year pick came down to a final three artists: Radiohead. Leonard Cohen. Bon Iver.

(You can read more about what informed that choice here.)

The muse of Radiohead's "A Moon Shaped Pool" is Rachel Owen, Thom Yorke's partner -- and later wife -- of 23 years, a relationship that produced two children, and ended last year. The record is a post-postmortem on their love affair, at times angry or foreboding, but mostly resigned, restrained, and beautiful. On Sunday, Dec. 18, 2016, amid 365 days of death and destruction, Rachel Owen died of cancer. She was 48.

The day before the worst news of 2016 happened (hint: a Tuesday night in November), Leonard Cohen died. He left us with a final work worthy of a canon of music that has and will stand the test of time. His voice on "You Want It Darker" is deeper and, yes, darker than ever; his words as poetic and meaningful.

There is loss, too, in Bon Iver's "22, A Million" -- though it's buried a bit in numerology and vocal effects and his sometimes inscrutable lyrics. But there's a reason, for me, Justin Vernon's first missive in five years rises above the pack to win my 2016 Album of Year: hope.

It seems, at the end of such a brutal year, that we don't have much of it right now. I wrote at length about how the acceptance in Radiohead's "True Love Waits" made it finally ready to be put to tape, and to close "A Moon Shaped Pool." No longer a live take -- a desperate, pathetic plea to a leaving lover, sang over an acoustic guitar strummed so hard it could shred fingers -- it's now a recording of quiet acceptance, with no catharsis, no dramatic flourish at the end. It's just a goodbye, long after all the goodbyes have been said.

A breaking heart, though, is different than a broken heart. It's far more painful in the moment, yes, but then the feeling hasn't turned empty yet. The hole is forming, but it's more a fresh, gaping wound than a crater, covered in several layers of thick gray moon dust, too deep to ascend.

So when Thom Yorke sings, "Please, don't leave. Don't leave," on the album version of "True Love Waits," he's talking to a ghost. It's harrowing and beautiful in its own right.

But when Justin Vernon, on "715 Creeks", sings, "Turn around, you're my A-team. Turn around now, you're my A-team. Goddamn turn around now, you're my A-team," his voice digitally manipulated so it forms tendrils around itself, it's heart wrenching. The moment is unfurling in real time. Will his A-team turn around? It might. And it might not.

It's the last words of the song, so we never know. The mystery is unsolved. The yearning continues.

"It might be over soon," Bon Iver's record warns you on its opening track. But maybe it won't be.

There is so much wisdom on the Radiohead record -- one of the best of the band's career, a record which might have won easily another year, and was the front-runner most of this one -- and on Leonard Cohen's, a spiritual incarnation of so much secular import, but they hit the intellect for me more now than they do the heart. Right now, I need the heart. I need room to believe. It's why "Glass Eyes" is probably the best Radiohead song this year -- maybe there's hope in the woods, if you only get off the train from the city and walk.

Bon Iver's record is full of heart. It takes the cabin in the woods intimacy of "For Emma, Forever Ago" and mixes in the richness of production that helped define "Bon Iver" to find a home in the center. It's the band's finest record yet; far from perfect, meandering in some places, but peppered with moments that grab on tight. I didn't know I needed it, or even wanted it, until I heard it. It's warm and inviting, even amid the mystery of the coded song titles and the artwork, littered with symbols, that could very well turn some away -- and kept me at a distance at first, too. It has a sense of humor, too, at one point rhyming "quandary" with "waundry" in an off-hand manner in the midst of a much deeper sentiment.

But the two lyrics on "22, A Million," I find most compelling come on the final track, "00000 Million":

"I worried bout rain and I worried bout lightning/But I watched them off, to the light of the morning"

Bon Iver's darkness yields to the dawn; it's not Radiohead's darkness, which is at worst the sun covered over by a spaceship in your darkest hour, at best the glassy-eyed light of a dreary, cloudy day, or Leonard Cohen's darkness, the moment the flame is extinguished.

And then there are the final words of the song, and indeed the final words of the record:

"Well it harms it harms me it harms, I'll let it in"

The takeaway? Hope that comes out of hurt takes work. It's time to feel it, let it in, and get going.

Past winners:

1993: Counting Crows -- August and Everything After
1994: R.E.M. -- Monster
1995: The Innocence Mission -- Glow
1996: Dave Matthews Band -- Crash
1997: U2 -- Pop
1998: R.E.M. -- Up
1999: John Linnell -- State Songs
2000: Radiohead -- Kid A
2001: Bjork -- Vespertine
2002: Wilco -- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2003: Bonnie "Prince" Billy -- Master and Everyone
2004: Wilco -- A Ghost is Born
2005: Sufjan Stevens -- Illinois
2006: The Decemberists -- The Crane Wife
2007: Radiohead -- In Rainbows
2008: Shearwater -- Rook
2009: Animal Collective -- Merriweather Post Pavilion
2010: Laura Veirs -- July Flame
2011: PJ Harvey -- Let England Shake
2012: Animal Collective -- Centipede Hz
2013: Mogwai -- Les Revenants
2014: Sun Kil Moon -- Benji
2015: The Tallest Man On Earth -- Dark Bird is Home

Nominees: 2016 Album of the Year

Happy Turkey Time! If all goes to plan, this should auto-post while I am happily enjoying a trip to Iceland with the family. (I am, however, writing it more than a month in advance, on a sleepless night -- so *fingers crossed*.)

Anyway ... say it with me: It's been an awesome year for music. Three former winners are up for the award this year, and many of the honorable mentions might have been nominees in past years. I have so much to choose from, they're all so different, and -- though no one ever believes me when I say it -- I have no idea which one I'm gonna pick.

So let's get right to it. Here (with admittedly brief descriptions; I said it was a sleepless night, but now all of a sudden I'm getting kinda drowsy) are my 2016 Album of the Year nominees -- in the usual iTunes alphabetical order:

***

THE AMAZING - AMBULANCE

There's that cliche about books and their covers, but I saw the cover of this record -- a black cloud descending down a flight of stairs (see right) -- and I was sold. (Technically, I finished the glowing review I was reading before I downloaded it, but you get the idea.)

The Amazing is a Swedish band I had never heard of before I stumbled upon this album. I tweeted that the band is a sort of Mark Kozelek-meets-The War On Drugs, which of course is a physics puzzle because those two very much have met -- and were repulsed by each other. Which I guess is too bad, because The Amazing sound ... well ... amazing.

***

BASIA BULAT - GOOD ADVICE

Canadian Basia Bulat was one of my annual Newport Folk Festival discoveries, but like one notable previous folk-fest find, Tift Merritt, I actually missed her performance -- hearing a bit of it on the radio in the car as we parked, and then listening to the very end of her set wafting over the walls of The Fort as we walked toward the front gate.

Unlike Tift Merritt, I didn't find myself hanging out with her briefly outside the Museum Stage. But I hope that, like Tift Merritt, I get to see her several times at folk festivals of the future and otherwise.

***

BON IVER - 22, A MILLION

I really didn't think I needed another Bon Iver record. And then I heard this one.

Look, the album titles are weird. And with my limited listening time these days, there is so much more to unpack that I haven't yet (but plan to). But the way Justin Vernon mixes in his little electronica dabbling with his soulful voice -- and even a saxophone -- is entrancing. Listen to the song below, and you might understand why I keep hitting repeat.

***

case/lang/veirs -- case/lang/veirs

Unlike Basia Bulat, I got to see case/lang/veirs perform at the Newport Folk Festival -- and it was awesome. k.d lang's voice filled the summer air as Neko Case and 2010 Album of the Year winner Laura Veirs dropped to her knees on stage with her guitar in mock rock-goddess pose.

The record is a perfect mix of the three songwriters and voices. Veirs is my favorite of the three, but some of the best songs on here are from the others, like Case's Delirium and lang's Honey and Smoke and Why Do We Fight -- although they all are served by the harmonies they make together. Of course, I love me some Laura, which makes the song below one of the ones I keep returning to the most.

***

KANYE WEST - THE LIFE OF PABLO

I have no idea how the version I have differs from the final version, or if there is a final version, but this record really didn't need any tinkering IMO (but what do I know -- the video below is different from what I've been listening to, and it's awesome).

All of the many sides of Kanye can be found on this record -- musical prodigy, asshole, salesman, showman, sincere, insincere, dark, vulgar, you name it. It all works together to paint the picture of a complicated, thrilling, frustrating and confounding genius.

***

LAURA GIBSON - EMPIRE BUILDER

She may never get a Nobel Prize for Literature (go Bob!), but Laura Gibson is a poet who happens to set her words to music.

Just listen to the song below. Listen to the lyrics with your eyes closed as she sings, or read them as the video plays. Nothing I could write in this space could approach them.

***

LEONARD COHEN - YOU WANT IT DARKER

(Late-breaking edit on this one.) We lost Leonard Cohen the same week America lost an election. The video below -- though not a song from his last album, or even his own performance of it -- shows how much we still need letters from L. Cohen.

And we do have one last missive in You Want It Darker.

From Treaty, an instant Cohen classic: "I heard the snake was baffled by his sin/He shed his scales to find the snake within/But born again is born without a skin/The poison enters into everything."

He was a giant. Good thing he'll never really leave us.

***

RADIOHEAD - A MOON SHAPED POOL

Radiohead has already won Album of the Year twice -- a win this year would separate it from fellow two-time winners R.E.M., Wilco and Animal Collective. Is Radiohead better than those other bands? Obviously, I'll likely never put any band past R.E.M., but Radiohead is a notch above the other two.

If Radiohead does win, I'll have to come up with some new things to say about the band, and this particular record, but for now I feel like I've said most of what needs to be said right here.

***

SHEARWATER - JET PLANE AND OXBOW

It's time to finally stop asking where Thor and Kimberly are; this band is basically unrecognizable -- except for lead singer Jonathan Meiburg, who in recent years has taken Shearwater from mysterious and beautiful to poppy and political.

It works. This album rocks; it's catchy and fun but still smart; and it has perhaps the most uplifting song of the year -- the song of the spring, at any rate -- Pale Kings. But if you haven't heard Jet Plane and Oxbow yet, start with the first single, embedded below.

***

WARPAINT - HEADS UP

I've been madly in love with this band from the moment I first saw the video for Elephants while randomly flipping channels one day seven years ago.

Their last album, which was self-titled, narrowly missed out on Album of the Year. I'm not sure if the band will ever quite reach those heights again, but I'm digging this new joint at the moment. Don't forget -- it's still October for me. I have to live with this one a bit longer, but it's on heavy rotation at the moment, as the days get shorter and Halloween approaches.

***

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Also in iTunes alphabetical order:

Andrew Bird -- Are You Serious

Angel Olsen -- MY WOMAN

Animal Collective -- Painting With

Anna Meredith -- Varmints

Cross Record -- Wabi-Sabi

Daughter -- Not To Disappear

David Bowie -- Blackstar

Gillian Welch -- Boots No. 1: The Official Revival Bootleg

Ingrid Michaelson -- It Doesn't Have To Make Sense

John Prine -- For Better, or Worse

Mike Mills -- Concerto for Violin, Rock Band, and String Orchestra

Mogwai -- Atomic

Okkervil River -- Away

Savages -- Adore Life

Violent Femmes -- We Can Do Anything