A friend of mine annually posts the question on Facebook: “What were your top-3 albums of 2018?”. This got me thinking about the music that I’ve been listening to this year.
I think that most people would agree that as a year, it’s not been a great one. Not a tough year per se, but it wasn’t a year for thriving. I might describe it as a “wonky” year. Across politics, science and the humanities, it seems like everything is upside-down (what would you expect when a reality TV-star is president of a global superpower).
With these thoughts in the back of my mind, I’ve considered which songs were not just enjoyable this year, but which I found have substance. This was also brought to my mind by the first song on this list…
About a week ago, an email landed in my personal account from Avalanche City. I’m a big fan of this New Zealand folk-rocker. His song “Love love love” was the first dance at our wedding, and after a hiatus, I’ve been listening to his second album Inside Out, quite a lot. So it was a mixture of surprise and delight to find he had a new single out: “Prayed for Love”. This is the first release from his upcoming album My Babylon (February 2019).
While Avalanche City has always had a deep-side to his really easy-listening, soft-drink sounding music, “Prayed for Love” has cut me to the core in a way many songs don’t. I really can’t express how powerful it is until you listen to it for yourself. Please do.
I don’t know who hurt Dave Baxter, but this song encapsulates all the pain of betrayal by an intimate friend. In it, he vocalises all the stages of grief that someone who’s been hurt can experience. Anger, destruction, wishing that person had never crossed your path, lack of sleep, praying for their peace, while wishing that they would come begging for forgiveness. This song is a musical expression of one of the saddest, yet most common human experiences.
I suppose I love this song so much, because I’ve had to wrestle with forgiving people who were supposed to be close to me, yet who continue to hurt me all the time. At the same time, it brings to mind the loss of a friend years ago, who felt I had betrayed her. I really feel like every human who has dealt with wounds from a friend can relate to this powerful song. What particularly catches my heart is the line “I prayed I’d see you drop from my horizon, but honestly, I’m not sure that I’d feel lighter.
So I never thought I’d say this about The 1975 (my all-time favourite band of all-time) but I found their third album bitterly disappointing and depressing. That said, they are pushing a serious agenda on A Brief Enquiry Into Online Relationships (as the name suggests). This album was preceded by frontman Matt Healy’s six month stint in rehab, so calling it dark is a bit of an understatement.
But one of the stand-out songs of this album (perhaps of their career as a band) is “Love it if we made it”. In an interview, Healy said that every time something happened in the news that burned him, he’d add a line to this song. It highlights the destructive power of humanity, not just on our planet, but towards one another. The theme of this song is “Jesus save us, Modernity has failed us” with lyrics that reference racism in America, the drowning of Aylan Kurdi (the 3-year old Syrian refugee), war, Kanye West, fame, capitalism, addiction. It’s a hard song to listen to, and an even harder video to watch. But you should, because I don’t think there’s a more true song about the human condition out there.
So the third song of substance I’d like to highlight in this post is not a new song. In fact, it’s 12 years old. “Faust, Midas & Myself” is a fable-like song that addresses the temptation of fame that Jon Foreman was no doubt wrestling with as his band’s popularity increased globally. As the title implies, the singer is followed home by the devil, who promises him the world. He wakes up to find himself in a golden world (like Midas), and the song spins out from there. With lyrics like “This is my personal disaffection/Life begins at the intersection” the song explores the weight of our decisions, the paths that we choose to take in life. Do we pursue gold, fame, fortune and sex, or do we pursue things of value that money can’t buy? While the song is old, it asks the kind of questions that form a key part of human nature, and which have never been more relevant to the world we’re living in now.
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