The FosterTalk 2020 Year-End Musical Spectacular
The FosterTalk 2020 Year-End Musical Spectacular
Music: It feels better with you.
Hey —
So, here’s the deal: In my 20s, I didn’t have much of a life in New York City. Or, at least not the life I’d always wanted that was just within reach. When I was in high school, I dreamed of moving here and going out every night, to concerts, to massive warehouse parties, staying out after my friends left, getting lost dancing in a crowd of strangers, and hopefully not being too fucked up to remember some of the great music I’d heard that night on my way home, the way I heard it, the way it felt in my head. If I were to come home with someone, bonus. But the music was at the center of this aspirant city mouse fantasia.
The Most Crushingly Fitting Songs About Feeling Too Much In 2020 (And Also, 1996):
*makes Bernie Sanders voice* SOCCER MOMMY’s “Circle The Drain.”
Grimes’ “Delete Forever.”
Instead: I was too obsessed with having a career, making something of myself, being in a long-term relationship or two because — for among other reasons — that’s what I thought I was supposed to be doing, what’d redeem me and validate what I felt were pretty goddamn reasonable concerns that (among other fears) I’d lose my mind and become destitute, unemployable, forever single, and never become an adult, whatever the fuck that meant. Anyway: I got something resembling a career, and don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed some of that era, but mostly, this insecurity and self-consciousness and all the shit I was holding onto put a real ceiling on the fun I could’ve been having — and the enjoyment I’d get out of it — had I just bothered to, I don’t know, do it? Fearlessly?
The Je Suis Désolé, Je Ne Parle Pas Français Award For Most Crushingly Fitting Fuckjam About Feeling Too Much In 2020 That Made You Want To Cry In The Shower and Maybe Re-Up That Duolingo Subscription When You’re Done
is obviously Christine and the Queens “People I’ve Been Sad.”
And then: One’s 30s. Where if you’re anything like me, you’ve traded in the white-knuckled pursuit of all those whatever they are — alleged totems of adulthood, I guess? — as meaningful indicators of happiness and substantial ways to judge’s one’s self. I unclenched. Loosened the valve. Kinda did things backwards, there, I know — pretty on-brand, for me. But all of that’s to say:
2019 was the best year of seeing music, or being around music, that I’ve ever had. It wasn’t seeing Big Freedia in New Orleans during JazzFest, or tapings of Live from Here at Town Hall with Paul Simon, Mavis Staples, Wynton Marsalis, or Trey Anastasio, but those were pretty incredible, too. Nah. Last year culminated in a night at Knockdown Center (a giant warehouse, filled with sweaty people) where James Murphy and Blessed Madonna DJ’d vinyl back to back for, I don’t know, six hours? It was extraordinary.
Two Live Albums That Saved My Soul In 2020:
Darkside’s Live In D, July 17, 2014. Not for everyone. But if it’s for you, oh, I will be seeing you somewhere fun getting straight up weird next year.
Father John Misty’s Off-Key in Hamburg. The album I listened to more than any other this year. I used to (mostly) hate Father John Misty prior to this year. This, swear to god, made me a fan. Another post for another time.
And yeah: My friends left two hours before I did. I got lost in the crowd. I stayed, dancing, until the lights came back on, and poured out into the dark Bushwick night with everyone else, that small group of people who made it to the end, deliriously happy, endorphins surging, clothes damp with sweat. That was the New York I wanted to live in. Better late than never.
Best Inaccurate Use Of A Word A Song Is Oriented Around is, obviously, The Chicks’ “Gaslighter.” Am I mansplaining what gaslighting is? Maybe. Am I the gaslighter? Wait a second, ohmygod, am I?!?!
So you could see how, among the many cruelties of 2020, one for me was that it felt like a particularly mean motherfucker of a follow-up. I’d just started to really enjoy things. And now: Live From Here got canceled, there’s no dancing. There was a beat, and then, a beat skipped.
One hell of a beat to skip.
And yet: We didn’t just get some good shit.
I truly believe we got one of the best years of music we’ve had in a while. We were spoiled, an abundance of riches. We managed to get some good stuff. We didn’t get to enjoy it the way we normally do — with others, in the context of a normal life. Maybe that made it all the more valuable.
Here’s some noise about my favorite music from 2020.
Please enjoy.
Infrequently Asked Questions About “Blinding Lights”
Is it among The Weeknd’s best songs? 16 best. Maybe?
Is it The Weeknd’s best vocal performance? Not at all!
Did it deserve to be snubbed by the Grammys? Maybe.
Are the Grammys “corrupt” because they snubbed The Weeknd? LOL.
Is it just a synthwave 2020 runback of the Flashdance soundtrack? Maybe!
Does that make it the poor man’s “Odd Look”? Definitely.
Did you spend actual minutes of your life watching the TikTok dances to it? Hours.
Did that make it more enjoyable? -_-
Is it one of the best songs of the year? It is. I think.
Why does everyone have so much trouble admitting this? See above.
The Single Most Devastating Lyric of 2020
If you listen to one thing on this list, please, god, let it be this.
I didn’t hear it the first, fifth, or tenth time I listened to the song it’s in. It goes by so early in the song, and so quickly, but more than that, the version of Phoebe Bridgers’ “Kyoto” that she put on top-5-album-of-the-year Punisher is a pop bop with a crunchy guitar riff and a swinging, florid, maximalist chorus.
The version she put out on an EP a couple months later? It hits different. Bridgers did something radical: She deconstructed the original and reduced it to its bedrock components. This version revealed itself as the truth of the matter. A simple change in tone, stripping something of the noise around it: That’s all it took. Bridgers’ voice was softer, with a more yearning, desperate delivery of the lyrics that feel closer to the feelings at their core, and a sweeping, serrate, yearning line of strings under it. The most devastating lyric of 2020 doesn’t deliver on its abject hurt in the original version, but in the new, sparser version of the track, it has nowhere to hide, and reveals itself as an utterly specific kind of pain that is painfully simple and simply relatable:
The kind of depression that stops you from doing things you want to do with people you love and want to be with. For no other reason than the gravitational pull of your own inexplicable, overwhelming sadness:
The band took the speed train
to go to the arcade,
I wanted to go
but I didn’t.
This leveled me.
On the right day, with the right headphones, on the right view of the skyline across the East River, I’ll try not to weep at that line, and I’ll fail. Few things have felt better in my head this year that the second version of “Kyoto,” which is nothing if not a testament to disambiguating, taking out everything we so often surround something with in order to cover the raw core of an idea, and make it more palatable, catchier, stickier, softer, and less abrasive to everyone else — maybe under the guise of demonstrating “craft,” some ability to write an even poppier pop song, a screenplay, a blog post, whatever it is — thereby leaving us less exposed and our ostensible talents on brighter display, when really, it just leaves us less exposed.
I’m reminded of the Oblique Strategies card:
She found it.
The Most Third-Eye Opening Shit I Saw Online With Regards To Music This Year:
This has fucked my life up, utterly:
Related: Still can’t decide if that guy caused the pandemic or if he’s the only reason any of us are still alive.
The Two Single Best Moments of Music in 2020
Have you ever loved someone so much, and so deeply, that you’ve wanted nothing more than to see the world through their eyes? And to see yourself through their eyes, what they light up, and what they see in you, that you can’t see yourself? I did, once. Like you, I’ve made the mistake of putting someone up on a pedestal before. This wasn’t that. This was different. It was built from undiluted affection and respect, this... all-encompassing, shared desire that could never truly be fulfilled — maybe the best kind, you know? — which was: To truly and wholly see not just one another the way each of us felt the other made us feel recognized, but the world, too. The way a certain kind of light bends, the shadows it casts; the beauty of a roadside aqueduct, and the way it reminds you of ancient Rome, and the insignificance of everything except the way we’ve learned to move water. Is this too much? Well, it turned out to be that for us, too. That’s okay — we walked with some good stuff, including nothing less to know that as a possibility.
Anyway, I’m not in love with Adrianne Lenker, of Big Thief, whose two solo albums this year — Songs and Instrumentals — are perfect, of course. ‘Wasn’t a Big Thief fan before this year, and honestly, after getting deep into them, ‘don’t even think Songs and Instrumentals are among her best work. But her work reminds me of that feeling: Always on fire somewhere, smoldering embers, or a burning building, but more than that, the way she observes the smallest details of this world make me want to stop, and reciprocate what she’s given us, live my own life like that. On “Anything,” solar flares, a shiny black-barreled shotgun, a clothespin in jeans, a still-wet sliver of just-kissed skin, a drop of mango juice on the edge of your mouth, a shirtsleeve falling just so over a shoulder. And that’s just the first verse. The entire album is lush with tiny details: A sun’s light, “flat as a knife.” Vacancy like a “closed-down fair.” Indiana toll-roads. Rusty swing-sweats. She writes songs the way Sally Mann takes photos. They’re so beautifully, painfully, carefully observed, and she takes you right there, right behind her eyes.
Anyway, the first best moments of music in 2020:
At exactly 3:01, at the end of “Anything,” Lenker lets out the softest ad lib: “Whoo.” It’s that feeling of shifting into fifth and cruising away, getting up at the end of a water-slide, skiing out of a wooded chute into an open hill field of snow, or having just pulled off the most beautiful, pained valentine of music any of us will hear this year. I suggest you don’t fast-forward to it, but catch it on its way out of the song.
As for the second of these best moments: Here, I have to give credit to Phillip Sherburne’s Pitchfork review of Lenker’s Instrumentals, where he not only points out that she made the first of its two tracks, “Music for Indigo,” for an ex to fall asleep to, but also that:
“She gives a lot of significance to that moment where she’s holding her guitar,” Big Thief’s Max Oleartchik told the New Yorker. “I never really think of her, like, fucking around and playing riffs or something. It’s always this instrument of witchcraft. It’s always holy.”
Can you imagine? Having that kind of relationship with anything, ever? I can only aspire to write like that. Anyway, the second Single Best Moment Of Music In 2020 comes at 16:29 in “Music for Indigo,” a quiet, perfect, guitar instrumental that takes you through four “seasons” of crunching snow underfoot, rain brushing a window, wind chimes of an otherwise bluebird Spring day. Don’t cheat yourself and fast-forward to this moment. It needs musical context:
Lenker spends the sixteen minutes prior slowly transforming the guitar line, one pass at a strum at a time, swirling around a note, and after taking you — and herself — on this long journey, you’re fully engrossed and understanding this relationship with her instrument, which is why when she laughs to herself soto voce at that moment, you know: It could be because she’s laughing with her guitar, at her guitar, at herself, or playing something that so perfectly conjures a beautiful, fun, sweet memory of someone from her past, so viscerally, that it’s not sad, but joyous, sweet, utterly perfect.
A Bon Iver/Taylor Swift/Jack Antonoff/Bruce Springsteen/Late Capitalism Song for Everyone!
In 2020, there was a song about — or not about — late capitalism for everyone.
DO YOU WANT….
A new Bon Iver song
about late capitalism
with Bruce Springsteen and Jenny Lewis? “AUATC.”
A new Taylor Swift song
not about late capitalism
with Bon Iver? “Exile.”
A new Taylor Swift song
about late capitalism
made with a member of The National? "The Last Great American Dynasty.”
A new Taylor Swift song
not about late capitalism
made with Jack Antonoff? “Mirrorball.”
A new Jack Antonoff song
with Bruce Springsteen
whose entire songbook is
on some level
about late capitalism? “Chinatown”
A fuck-jam of a song
with absolutely none of these people
about late capitalism
and made by actual anti-capitalists? “4 American Dollars.”
The Best New Robyn Song of 2020
is, of course, The Best New Jessie Ware Song, which is not “What’s Your Pleasure?” People who hold this opinion are people who are wrong.
It is “Save A Kiss.”
I’m far from the first person to make the Robyn comparison, here. But if there’s one thing that’s true about Robyn, it’s that there’s not enough of her music in the world, and that it’s too good to inspire shitty imitators. “Save A Kiss” isn’t shitty nor an imitation of Robyn, but it is in the direct lineage of one of the best records of the last decade. Given the high bar, there: Not mad at it.
Funny thing: This song, assembled from an almost too-on-the-nose shopping list of dance pop sounds (a surplus of high-hat, a big chamber pop string swell of a chorus, dense, razor sharp synth blips), that could almost serve as satire, if it weren’t so on the nose? This song’s inspired in me the rarest of qualities one could possibly mine from the vast majority of this year: Hope.
After everything, all of it, how can you take lyrics like:
“I think I’m gonna burn out
but then you touch me like that...
…promise me it won’t be long
just save a little bit of your love.”
at face value?
Because at face value what you’ve got here is a nu-disco banger with nonsense lyrics about delayed gratification. But those lyrics, for me, felt like a soliloquy to the year to come, and the tiny bits of promise we’ve had through music, reminding us: We will dance again. We will crowd music halls and venues and nightclubs and floor openings at house parties, and we will sweat, among each other, and get lost in it, again.
For example: ‘You remember the last night, before all this, that you really went out, where music was at the center of whatever it is you were doing? And: Have you, by chance, replayed that night in your head anytime over, oh, I don’t know, the last nine months?
Well:
“That last kiss you gave me,
I keep on hittin' rewind.
Now I need you, baby,
I need another last night.”
Yeah: Don’t we all? I listen to this song when I’m walking to its beat every night, through North Brooklyn, thinking back to March, thinking of what her full streets were like, thinking of them on a Saturday night, walking, across the BQE, past the park, up Manhattan, cut down Norman, bang a right on Franklin, beeline to the water, catching the Manhattan skyline shimmering in the East River, feeling that slight nudge of body heat in my coat, remembering, remembering, remembering, remembering: We will do it to this, to all the songs we didn’t get to, we will dance again, we will dance again, we will dance again soon.
The video’s pretty great too:
Also, it’s wild how none of Jessie Ware’s albums capture just how great her voice really is, which isn’t really the fault of her albums (I don’t think?) as it is a testament to her voice. See here, or for something *really* fun, here.
The 16 Greatest Things About “WAP,” The Best Song of 2020.
Plenty of people will call “WAP” the best song of the year. I’d be hard-pressed to argue with them. That doesn’t mean it’s my favorite, or the one that’s meant the most to me. But it is functionally perfect, and puts me in a better mood every single time I hear it.
I grew up on dirty rap: AMG, DJ Quik, Uncle Luke, Booty Mix 1, 2, and 3. “WAP” is the song I have waited for my entire life. It’s horny, it’s puerile, it’s blue, it’s dirty, it’s fun, it’s hot, it’s fucking hilarious, and it contains, pound-for-pound, some of the best rapping of the last decade.
That sample: Someone Tweeted something the day it came out like: “Me, every time I log into Twitter.” Or “Me, every time I open my fridge.” Yes, yes, that. Exactly. When I hear this sample, endorphins surge through my prefrontal cortex. They are the whores in the house of my brain, and they can do whatever they please.
One day, when we’re all paying by inserting a chip or tapping a phone, “swipe your nose like a credit card” will have been a bygone, instructive moment in history only we were here to understand.
Great achievements in multitasking: “I do a kegel/when it’s inside.” Aspirational.
A true mainstreaming of “spit in my mouth.” I only learned this was a thing our Starbucks-drinking friends actually did, like, three years ago, and I grew up in Las Vegas. There are now people several decades younger than me who know this is a thing. Cardi B, not 39 seconds in, already achieving Dr. Ruth-level sex education.
Cardi’s growl at the end of “park that BIG! MACK! TRUCK! Right in this/little/GAR-AGE” makes me want to drive off the BQE a la Thelma & Louise.
The truck horn immediately following “garage.” I have made the “pull the horn” motion to this moment in the song, like a goddamn child, many, many times. Just….so many times.
Among the things acquired by Cardi and Meg over the course of the song: A car, college tuition, a ring, a great credit rating.
The way this song’s yet another sad day for garden sneks. :(
The way Cardi made someone a diabetic. :(
The a general rule of writing that orders one to never use more words than needed to in order to describe a thing, observed here in how Cardi B renders the word “uvula” useless: Nothing short of MacArthur Grant-worthy work.
One day we’ll look back and wonder how humanity made it all the way to 2020 without rhyming “Dasani” and “punani.” And: “soggy.” (?!?)
“Put him on his knees, give him something to believe in.” *makes cross over body*
The beautifully-observed Attenborough-esque couplet invoking the food chain, and then, a line later: “If he ate my ass, he's a bottom feeder.” For every generation, their own “Circle of Life.”
“I could make you bust before I ever meet ya” is genuinely one of the greatest rap boasts ever recorded. I will die on this hill.
Literally any of the “I Made My Parents Listen To WAP” TikTok compilations. For whatever reason, this moment made me laugh particularly hard.
The way it produced what is possibly the single greatest self-own in recent memory: When neo-conservative Ben Shapiro tried to stir up moral outrage over the song, failed, and then:
And so on. “WAP” is a gift that will never stop giving.
Most Transcendent Arpeggio:
The First 40 Seconds of Fiona Apple’s “I Want You To Love Me.”
Have you really — really — given full consideration to what goes into the percussive beauty of the Debussy-esque twinkling piano ascension that opens this song/album? I became mildly obsessed with it — or it yielded an obsession in me — and I think you will, too, once you see it the way I have: Watching it get played on any number of YouTube tutorials, and seeing exactly how the simple, but shimmering precision of the sound is made.
Watch it here. Then watch Fiona play it here. Related, by the way, are
The Two Best Fiona Apple Tracks I Re-Discovered This Year, That You Should, Too:
Fiona Apple’s cover of Percy Mayfield’s “Please Send Me Someone To Love” from the Pleasantville soundtrack and
Fiona Apple’s cover of Cy Coleman’s “Why Try To Change Me Now” from the Cy Coleman tribute album. And finally,
The Best Piece of Writing About Fiona Apple This Year in a year with a surplus of good writing about Fiona Apple was, hands down, Jenn Pelly tracking down the titular, real-life Shameika (of the new Fiona Apple song) for Pitchfork. Long story short: Fiona wrote a song, the chorus of which is “Shameika said I had potential,” about a girl telling Fiona Apple in elementary school that she, well, had potential. And then she became Fiona Apple. Fiona hadn’t spoken to her since. Then, the album came out. And then, this story: About inspiration, and lives forking in wildly different ways, and meeting back around on the other end in this incredible, unlikely confluence of sisterhood, and art, and the long-tail of nothing more and nothing less than just believing in someone else, even for a moment, and the implication that can have for someone else’s life. Pelly — who has now been one of my favorite music writers for longer than I remember — wrote it with all the grace and deft touch the story deserved. God, what a piece.
The Two Best Covers of 2020, Ranked:
Rostam’s cover of The Strokes “Under Control.” Strokes covers are a dicey business few if any should be in. This may be the best of them, which sounds like a low bar, unless you consider how good this is, and how difficult a good Strokes cover is to pull off. The new Rostam album can’t come soon enough. Also, this should go on every toasty December playlist you have.
Lianne LaHaves’ cover of Radiohead’s “Weird Fishes.” Radiohead covers are a dicey business few if any should be in. This may be the best of them, which sounds like a low bar, unless you consider how good this is, and how difficult a good Radiohead cover is to pull off. The rest of the Lianne LaHaves’ album is every bit as good as this. Also, this should go on every sexytime playlist you have.
ASSORTED AWARDS: LIGHTNING ROUND.
Second-Best Mind-Bending Moment In Nine Inch Nails News This Year: The guy who wrote that he wants to fuck you — like an animal — to bring him closer to god has now scored a Disney movie.
The Two Best Songs I Will Dance My Motherfucking Ass Off To In Public Once Dancing In Public Returns, So Help Me God:
Romy’s “Lifetime” which feels like an earful of yellow smiley-face-stamped ecstasy and
The Avalanches’ “Music Makes Me High.” Same, pretty much.
By the way, fans of “Lifetime,” check out the stripped-down version, and just wait until she gets to that chorus.
Best of those Carly Rae Jepsen B-Sides everyone forgot about: “Comeback.”
The Other Best Phoebe Bridgers Song Of The Year Is “I Know The End,” which I wrote about at the end of the very! first! issue! of FOSTERTALK. Read it, because honestly, it’s all been downhill since. If you know it, and love it, then may I highly suggest watching the Tiny Desk Concert performance of it, featuring a very special ending. It starts about eight minutes in.
Best 2020 Episode of Song Exploder, The Netflix Show: “Losing My Religion” but THE SHOW IS NOT AS GOOD AS THE PODCAST LISTEN TO THE PODCAST INSTEAD.
Best 2020 Episode of Song Exploder, The Podcast: “Closing Time.” You will never hear this song the same way again. Reader: I wept.
A Song On This List That Deserves More Love: “4 American Dollars,” which, now that I think about it, I…actually don’t have that much more to say about “4 American Dollars,” except, like every US Girls song, we don’t deserve it, and the falsettos in the final minute of the song are big chef’s kiss, and truly, one of my favorite moments of music this year.
The Best Song of 2020 That Big Spooned Itself Around Me was Kacy Hill and Francis and The Lights’ “I Believe In You.” You will feel believed in, too.
The Second Best Pop Song Of The Year is the “Savage” remix. Beyonce’s key verse is one of the best things she’s recorded since “Formation.”
The best Jack Antonoff song to come out this year is the lesser-known “45” (a controversial pick, maybe!). A line from it (“a little crying out for crying out’s sake”) has stuck with me since I heard it. Who among us, you know? I’ve got a bias, maybe, but I find a lot of the best Jack stuff gets overlooked: Most of my friends now have 2019’s Red Hearse — his side-project with Sam Dew and Sounwave — fully in their respective rotations, and it makes a lot of my playlists. Don’t sleep there.
FUCK, UM, OTHER SONGS I FORGOT ABOUT UNTIL NOW: I liked that 1975 song about being naked in front of webcams! Big Toobin energy! Haim made an album! “The Steps” is the best thing on it. Waxahatchee’s “Fire” is a song about our shared experience of this year! Sharon Van Etten’s “Let Go” is a song whose advice we could all stand to take more! I have no idea who “Gem of the Ocean” is by but it sounds transported straight from the soundtrack of 1999’s The Beach.
One Last Thing. A little breath.
Then:
Hope he’ll be happier — peace to Bill Withers, one of my absolute favorites…
…and to all of you. Thank you, again, as ever, for taking the time to read this. It really does mean the world to me, and I hope you got something even remotely as decent in exchange. Otherwise, here’s to all of us spending more time with the music and each other next year, together, as much as we can possibly stand.
And then maybe, a little more.
As ever, -f.