Best Music of 2024

11/14 2024

2024 was a great year for music. Here are some of my favorites.

The Past Is Still Alive - Hurray For The Riff Raff

I don't know how many times I've listened to this album, but it's definitely my most played album of 2024. Alt-country in all the right ways. Catchy as all hell, with lyrics that sometimes paint up vivid images, and sometimes just hit right for some reason:

Write our names on a grain of sand
No one will remember us like I will remember us

Hold my head like a live wire
Duck quick now, I hear gunfire
Caught somewhere in the space between
Do you love me and do you love me?

I'm not going to write anything about the state of the U.S. but I'll leave a joke I heard here about Russian jokes about Putin:

2023, a dialogue in a prison truck.
"Do you know, which concentration camp are we sent to?"
"No, I’m not into politics."

I'm not into politics either, and I don't live in Russia nor the US. Doesn't mean I can't appreciate a good documentary when I see it. Like this album. Get me to Brooklyn, and buy me an IPA. The past is still alive, you know.

SABLE, - Bon Iver

I thought that his 2019 effort i,i was lackluster. There were some great songs, Faith especially, but all in all, it just didn't feel like the best fit for him, in my opinion. I had the same feelings on his 2016 album 22, A Million, but perhaps I was just younger and less cynical then. The electronic aspects just didn't do it for me. But I realize now that these two albums, while not a triumph in themselves, made SABLE, possible. Because SABLE, is "new Bon Iver" in all the right places, and "classic Bon Iver" in all the right places.

But maybe you can still make a man from me
Here on Speyside quay
With what's left of me
As you live and breathe
I really know now what had hold on me

It might not even be an exaggeration that I prefer the tight 12 minute EP over anything else he's done, which is saying a lot given how much I enjoy his debut album. Talent triumphing over nostalgia, a very rare feat.

All In Good Time - Iron & Wine

Without a doubt my favorite song of 2024, by far. In his latest book, Dylan talks about the primary difficulty in writing a good song: it's not about writing good, it's about writing good and writing about things that connect to others. It's easy, or relatively so at least, writing good about things that might not connect to others in the end. Perhaps too specific. Perhaps a bit too ironic. Getting that precarious balance right, especially when lyricists make heavy use of sarcasm and irony, is incredibly rare. But in All In Good Time, Sam Beam manages to do just this. The frustrating, and incredibly beautiful, contradictory nature of life is reflected the images in this song.

All in good time I gave it my best
I was alone until I found myself
Grew up to be a man more or less
All in good time

All in good time, our plan went to shit
I told my future by reading your lips
You wore my ring until it didn't fit
All in good time

And that's not mentioning the incredible performances from both Sam and Fiona, which elevate this song into a true classic.

The music video is great too.

Love Takes Miles - Cameron Winter

My absolute favorite type of songwriting is that which borders on the banal/naive. For example, in Dylan's Brownsville Girl you have lines such as "I've always been the kind of person that doesn't like to trespass but sometimes you just find yourself over the line" and "strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than people who are most content." Simple words. Simple thesis. But, for some reason, it works. I think Cameron Winter's Love Takes Miles fits this description as well.

Love Takes Miles is exactly about what the words in the titles seem to imply. Simple thesis. Simple words. But it works. You have lines like "Love will call when you’ve got enough under your arms," which in Winter's thin falsetto just works. But perhaps this song works best because of its chorus which is both catchy and fits this kind of banality:

Lonely as hell, walking around
Without moving, I’m not here
Watching the moon, writing it down
Love takes miles
Love takes miles
Love takes years