December 29, 2023

I’m going to start writing each Friday on 2024 music as albums come out, but this last Friday of 2023 is a great time to recap my favorite music of the year.

To start I want to share my top 25 favorite albums of 2023, compiled using a meticulous system of obsessively rating every album I listen to. I listened to 152 albums that were released in 2023, starting with Late Developers by Belle and Sebastian and ending with Autopoietica by Mon Laferte. By “listened” I mean I listened to the entire album from start to finish — while walking, working, driving, or simply at home. Those listens totaled over two thousand in 2023 — I’m able to listen to lots of music while writing code for work.

I try to give each album at least six listens before drawing conclusions about it, though a few I gave up on after only a few listens. Most, I end up listening to a lot more than just six times. I have a pretty strong sense of what I will want to listen to and don’t add anything to my queue unless I’m fairly certain I’m going to want to give it several hours of my time. I also try to reach out a bit beyond my comfort zone — especially when an album has some buzz surrounding it.

Anyway, here are my top 25 albums of 2023:

Note that by my official rules, live albums, greatest hits collections, and EPs are ineligible for consideration. That prevents the inclusion of two recordings that would otherwise have made my top 25 and they are each worthy of mention:

Each week, I’m going to write about an album or two that I find particularly interesting. It will take several weeks for enough interesting 2024 albums to come out and for me to digest them, so I expect to spend several weeks on 2023 albums.

This week, I want to focus on two very heart-on-sleeve songwriters who produced outstanding albums late in 2023. Even though they are at very different places in their lives and musical careers, Glen Hansard and Angie McMahon demonstrated the power of emotive songcraft. While I’m definitely much more Hansard’s peer in age and gender, McMahon is a great example of how rewarding I find listening to song written and performed by young women.

Glen Hansard is in his fifties and has been recording albums since the early 1990s — between The Frames, The Swell Season, and solo work, I counted 16 albums in his discography. After a life spent mostly in Ireland and New York, he has apparently living in Finland and became a father for the first time in 2022. Looking back, both in time and space, gives us the title of his album All That Was East is West of Me Now.

The album starts out with tons of energy that it doesn’t (and shouldn’t) try to sustain. The first two songs are full of fire and conflict, opening with “See the low fires burning at the Feast of St. John/See the heroes returning, all but one.” The second song, “Down on Our Knees,” is full of apocalyptic violence (“Armed to the teeth, here come the holy men”), but by the third song Hansard is counseling hope and solidarity:

Night has fallen, let’s go out into it
Bring a blanket and a bottle
I’ll need a friend to get me through it
And lately in this life
There’s no quick fix or easy answers
Gonna put all our troubles to right

After that opening drama, the rest of the album is Hansard looking back more than forward and offering little aphorisms to get us through life: “Behind us there's nothing I would change/Nothing more to be done” on Between Us There is Music and “Cause it's not what you're given/But what you do with it” on Bearing Witness. By the final song, Short Life, he’s in full looking-back mode, facing mortality with a bit of hope:

It's a dangerous lie that we've got endless time
But there's a real hope hovering
That we may one day get some good across the line

Hansard has made a career out of writing cathartic and emotional songs and this album is one of his best.

Highlights:

Angie McMahon had a standout debut album, Salt, in 2019 and she has delivered another exceptional album in Light, Dark, Light Again. Like Hansard, she writes songs that turn the emotions up to 11, but McMahon is her twenties and early in her career. She’s looking ahead more than she’s looking back — the first song has the line “Just wanna be wide awake when I’m forty” and she continues the theme of just living through life with its ups and downs. Or maybe ups, downs, and ups again?

Light, Dark, Light Again plays like a conventional breakup album, but she brings such a depth to her delivery of her songs that it rises above the usual. Florence Welch has built a career out of emotionally and sonically overpowering pop music (I sometimes think if it as “brutalist pop”) and McMahon seems to be channeling Welch here. I particularly like “Exploding” where she looks ahead, wishing to always be expanding/growing/exploding. It’s funny, her Australian accent made me initially mishear the repeated line “I hope I am always exploding.” Not seeing the song title, I heard her sing “…exploring” and found it a little disappointing — “…exploding” would be so much better, but then I looked at the song title and realized that she got it right.

The album wraps up with the song that gives it its title. Making It Through shows her dealing with life now, but also looking forward:

And when I grow up
I wanna be like a tree
And change with the seasons
Helping people breathe but
All I've achieved lately is making it through
Just making it through

By the end of the song, McMahon has concluded that making it through means embracing everything, cycling through — “light, dark, light again; light, dark, light again,…”

Highlights:

I’m going to see what new albums come out on January 5, but so far it looks like a very light release schedule, with only two albums (by Ghetts and French Montana, neither of whom I know) listed. That list should grow as we get closer and I look forward to Marika Hackman on January 12, plus Katy Kirby, Sarah Jarosz, and Torres later in January.