What A Time To Be Alive - My Favorite Songs of 2015

Judging by this list, one could say I liked music in 2015.

And judging by the fact that I cobbled together three mixtapes of songs that I marginally enjoyed in 2015, you could build an even stronger case to say that I liked music this year.

In a sense, you might be right. Or maybe it was just easier to compile yet another useless ‘year end’ list.

Last year, I took a different approach with this—name dropping a lot of songs I liked in my introduction, but opting to only rank my favorite song of the year, the song that meant the most to me personally, and then the best pop song of the year.

Apparently, it would have been hard to shuffle seven other songs in around those to have a list of 10, or something. Who knows though, right? I mean, who really knows what I was thinking last year at this time.

You want your ‘best of’ lists at the end of the year to be perfect and impressive, to show off your superior musical tastes, or whatever. You want them to be timeless—to be able to be looked back on, and not cringe at whatever you were spinning in any given year; however, they are so temporary. They are simply just reflections of that moment in time, passing all too quickly.

What makes my seventh favorite song of the year just slightly better than the eighth? These are questions I’ll never be able to answer. After a certain point, you’re just looking at the song and assigning it a number, filing it somewhere on the list.

This is one of those lists. Chance are, it’s probably not timeless—simply a reflection of one very, very long year, placed into a numerical order for the ease of the reader. Will I feel the same way about these songs next year as I do now? It’s a question I can’t answer.

2015- WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE (right click, save as, and I spared you the two ambient songs at the end. thank me later.)

1. Ryan Adams- “All You Had to Do Was Stay”/”This Love”

Two sides to the same coin. With an album as impossibly good as 1989 is, trying to select just one song off of it as my favorite song of the year proved to be too much of a task, and I had to pick my top two—in a way, they both showcase what is so great about what Ryan Adams did with Taylor Swift’s album.

Harkening back slightly to that Love is Hell sound, Adams drowns in reverb and slick production tricks on the snarling, accusatory “All You Had to Do Was Stay”; desperate, unhinged, and on the verge, he hurls lines like “Why’d you have to go and lock me out when I let you in” with a reckless abandon not heard very often in contemporary popular music. It’s raw and visceral—the kind of way you would say it in between sobs of air after you’d just been dumped.

Some of Adams’ best tracks, throughout his 15 year solo career, have been his contemplative, slow burning, piano driven material (e.g. “Elizabeth, You Were Born to Play That Part.”) And “This Love” is no exception—he turns a middle of the road, saccharine ballad by Swift into another howling, frisson inducing, unforgettable performance. “When you’re young, you run,” he sings into the cavernous abyss with that same reckless abandon creating a haunting, evocative moment that takes a hold of you and never lets go.

2. Kanye West- “Only One”/”All Day”

“Only One” was the last song I heard in the final, fleeting hours of 2014, and my iTunes library claims I purchased it at 7 in the morning on New Year’s Day. Truthfully, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it—and 12 months later, I’m still not sure. Is it completely improvised? Did Kanye’s mother really sing through him? These are the questions I ask myself when I listen to it.

It’s a beautiful song though. Kanye is a better singer than he gives himself credit for, and in 2015, he doesn’t need to hide behind as much auto-tune as always ends up doing.

What really got me with this song is the live version of it Kanye performed on “The Jonathan Ross” show earlier in the year—“Nori is my daughter’s name,” he explains during the coda. “I have her name right here on my chest.”

It was this moment—this very humanized, touching moment that prompted me to get a tattoo of my rabbit Sophie, who passed away in February, on my wrist.

The flipside of this is the only “real” Kanye song we got this year—I say that because the first quarter of the year was dubbed “Yeezy Season,” and we all thought it was going to peak with the announcement of a new album. And while “FourFiveSeconds” and “Only One” seemed like weird studio experiments with Paul McCartney, “All Day” was the only full realized and commercially released single Kanye put out in 2015 (while “Wolves” was played at his Adidas show and live on “Saturday Night Live,” it never turned up as a single.)

Based around a whistled McCartney melody, “All Day” is pure braggadocio—“You a fake Denzel like that All State ni**a,” he says at one point, taking shots at actor Dennis Haysbert for no real reason, then later he drops, “Like a light skinned slave, boy—we in the motherfuckin’ house.”

“All Day” is a combination of West’s artistic leanings (it’s meandering instrumental breaks are incredibly self indulgent) with his pop sensibility (that huge sounding melody that serves as a hook, bringing you back to the repeated phrase, “All day ni**a.”

Is Kanye’s new album going to come out in 2016? Was it ever even going to come out in 2015? Will either of these songs be on it if it ever materializes?

These are questions he answered with a sample on the 2013 song “On Site”—“He’ll give us what we need. It may not be what we want.”

3. Sister Crayon – “To Show You Violence”

“I’m tired of thinking about you.” It’s a line that appears twice on Sister Crayon’s phenomenal sophomore album, and it appears in two different context: first, it arrives in the lusty, frenetic opening track, “Amor”; then in the album’s second to last, and most fragile moment, it arrives in “To Show You Violence,” as a bit of a defeated resolve, which is the thing that makes it such a compelling listen.

Somber and haunted, it’s the most tender sounding track on the otherwise angsty, aggressive Devoted, as frontwoman Terra Lopez is able to contain her otherworldly howl, softly and elegantly making her way through the song’s lyrics—“ There is no need for to tell me nothing I don’t already know—we lack control,” she sings honestly.

It’s a song that, musically, it seems like it’s working toward something—like something bigger, or some kind of moment where it takes off, but that moment never comes. The song peaks with an all too brief, thickly delayed guitar solo before drifting back off into the ether from which it came.

4. American Wrestlers – “There’s No One Crying Over Me Either”

When you think “pop” music, you think of what you hear on FM stations and what moves units in department stores or in iTunes—not quirky, five-minute indie meditations. But with a song as infectious as “There’s No One Crying Over Me Either,” you’ll want to reconsider what you think is “pop” music. Think last year’s “Runaway,” and you’ll get the idea of what I’m going for.

Based around a rather simple progression of chords, rollicking piano and a dusty sounding drum machine—the song’s lo-fi charm is just one of its selling points. American Wrestler himself Gary McClure’s reserved vocal delivery is also what makes it such an interesting listen.

And then there’s that huge hook in disguise—every verse being brought back around to the simple phrase, “But there’s no one crying over me either.” 

5. Lera Lynn- “My Least Favorite Life”

Ok so “True Detective” season two was a bit of a bust, and I won’t use this opportunity to get into exactly all the reasons why it didn’t work—one thing it did give us was this dark and haunted murder ballad by Lera Lynn, an obscure singer/songwriter plucked to be this season’s Vonda Shepherd if you will—she was the beat up looking singer in the bar where Vince Vaughn and Collin Ferrell went on all their dates.

Co-written by Lynn along with the show’s music supervisors, it paints vague pictures using strong imagery—is it talking about the shows characters? Or is it just some cool sounding ambiguous shit to sing over reverb heavy, tremeloed guitar strumming?

Either way, “My Least Favorite” life creates a memorable moment that can stand on its own once removed from its source material.

6. Flock of Dimes – “Don’t Dream, It’s Over”

Can you name another song that uses the word “deluge” in its lyrics?

Probably not.

“Don’t Dream, It’s Over” has always been one of my favorite songs from the 1980s, and here in the capable hands of Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner, it takes on new life, turning it into a mournful, yet slinky electro-infused slow jam.

7. Erykah Badu featuring Andre 3000 – “Hello”

A bit of a late edition to the list, “Hello” is tucked at the tail end of Badu’s bizarrely captivating telephone themed mixtape, and Andre’s guest appearance comes as a complete (and welcome) surprise.

The song itself serves as a chance for both Andre to flex his incredible abilities on the microphone (and holy shit, does he ever on this), but also to makes a point—“Leave your phone unlocked and right side up, walk out the room without throwin’ your bitch off balance,” he raps, breathlessly in his opening line, tackling the challenges of a modern romance. He also references Build-A-Bear, Kermit The Frog, and asks an important question about using call waiting—and that’s all within 90 seconds of when he opens his mouth.

Even when it descends into Anrde and Badu referring to each other by pet names, it’s still a gorgeous, smooth, slow burning jam about the complexities of love.

8. Carly Rae Jepsen – “Run Away With Me”

Okay yes, every ‘best of’ list needs a big, dumb pop song on it, and this is that song. And in this case, it’s a big, smart pop song. Sure, it has a saxophone featured throughout, which was apparently “a thing” recently in pop music, but you can’t fault Jepsen, because this thing is so good—it’s got it all: a catchy pre-chorus, a huge, shout a long refrain, and mildly suggestive and partially insipid lyrics. It’s the kind of pop song you can’t help but fall in love with instantly the first time you hear it.

9. Chihei Hatakeyama and Federico Durand – “Maria” and 

10. Celer – “Bleeds and Swell Bends”

I saved my two favorite ambient/experimental tracks for last, and part of me thought about putting them on their own list—but they are both so good, and so impressive, that they needed to be included on this all encompassing list, albeit at the end.

“Maria” begins as a slow motion whisper, deliberately fading in with its soothing, comforting patterns of alternating tones, taking its time as it leads toward something much greater—“Bleeds and Swell Bends,” on the other hand, wastes no time, throwing you right into its cascading, swirling waves of sound.

Both pieces border on the “self indulgent” side when it comes to their length, but for me, both need to be this long in order to create the kind of atmosphere that they do. And both pieces are shining examples of the emotional listening experience you can craft with ambient music when it’s done the right way.