The year 2023 didn’t come and go with much that resembled joy but let’s at least recognize that it was a pretty darned good year for music. Then again, independent of the dreadful news that afflicts our global community month after month, one year to the next, music seems always to deliver–which is to say, every year turns out to be a pretty darned good year for music. (We receive at least that consolation, and it’s no small one.) Note that I am speaking from neither the thoroughly mainstream nor the rigorously avant garde; I’m talking about quality music that rises up somewhat but not entirely left of center. Music that’s accessible but thoughtful, engaging but interesting, music that hasn’t given up on the organic involvement of human bodies and human consciousness. That kind of music. You may not see in the “What’s Hot” playlists but it’s out there, thriving artistically (if not financially).
All of which is a roundabout way of acknowledging the presence of four 2023 songs in this first playlist of 2024. Typically, in seeking balanced chronological distribution among the 20 songs, I aim not to have more than three songs from any given decade in each playlist. So much, this month, for that rule. In and around the new-ish music you’ll encounter the usual admixture of decades and styles, a 20-song journey that hangs together, however elusively, from start to finish.
As discussed last month, the artist roster resets in January–any artist featured in 2023 (or before) is free again to populate a playlist in 2024. Even so, for what it’s worth, this month’s mix hosts 12 artists who never previously had a song featured in an EPS playlist dating all the way back to 2014. Here is what’s in store to start the new year; extra notes as usual below the widget:
1. “She Moves On” – Paul Simon (The Rhythm of the Saints, 1990)
2. “All Night Long” – Peter Murphy (Love Hysteria, 1988)
3. “Cars and Parties” – Edith Frost (Wonder Wonder, 2001)
4. “Monticello” – The Monty Alexander Trio (We’ve Only Just Begun, 1972)
5. “XO Skeleton” – La Force (XO Skeleton, 2023)
6. “Talking Backwards” – Real Estate (Atlas, 2014)
7. “You’re Gonna Make Me Love You” – Sandi Sheldon (single, 1967)
8. “I Love You Honey, Give Me a Beer” – Blondie (demo, 1980)
9. “Hudson” – Allison Miller (Rivers in our Veins, 2023)
10. “Make You Better” – The Decemberists (What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World, 2015)
11. “Nearer Than Heaven” – Delays (Faded Seaside Glamour, 2004)
12. “To Cry You a Song” – Jethro Tull (Benefit, 1970)
13. “Sasha, Sissi y el Círculo de Baba ” – Fito Páez feat. Mon Laferte (EADDA9223, 2023)
14. “6 Underground” – Sneaker Pimps (Becoming X, 1996)
15. “My World is Empty Without You” – The Supremes (single, 1965)
16. “Hard to Explain” – The Strokes (Is This It?, 2001)
17. “Someone to Talk To” – The Police (B-side, 1983)
18. “Our Town” – Iris DeMent (Infamous Angel, 1992)
19. “Spanish Dancers” – Bob Welch (Rebel Rouser, 1979)
20. “Requiem” – Allison Russell (The Returner, 2023)
Random notes:
* The above-mentioned artist reset gave me the opportunity to find a slot for a great, lesser-known Blondie song just a couple of months after the band’s last appearance here. I have a giant soft spot for Blondie, a band that seems to me underrated despite the mass popularity of a few of their biggest hits. The song here is a demo version of something that was re-envisioned and re-titled before making it to an album–as “Go Through It,” it landed on 1980’s Autoamerican. The lyrics were fiddled with and a semi-gratuitous, Mexican-style horn section was added on the LP version; the demo version is punchier, looser, and happily reminiscent of some of the band’s earlier recordings. I have nothing against trying new styles and directions, but was happy to discover how Blondie could sound like a classic version of themselves even in a time frame in which they were beginning to re-imagine themselves into nonexistence.
* While the unusually literate music blog Said the Gramophone has gone dormant as a regular source of posts for a number of years now, the site’s founder, novelist Sean Michaels, still assembles at year-end his annual list of favorite songs. Each year there are 100 of them, and they veer towards the 21st-century hipster’s characteristic mix of the blatantly popular and the inscrutably offbeat. The descriptions are singular, worth the trip alone, and even as most of the songs listed edge beyond the range of my own peculiar musical taste, I always locate 10 or 15 among them that transform into favorites of mine as well. One of which, now, is “XO Skeleton,” from the Canadian singer/songwriter Ariel Engle, who does musical business as La Force. Michaels calls it “a tune about mortality and care that flexes, shimmers, iridescent as a beetle.” Engle is also a current member of the Canadian collective Broken Social Scene. Note that only one song featured on Fingertips in 2023 made the STG list, but it was up there at number seven: Debby Friday’s “So Hard to Tell.”
* Fito Páez is an acclaimed and popular Argentinian musician; his profile here in the U.S. is decidedly lower. He peaked commercially with his 1992 album El Amor Después del Amor (“Love After Love”), which sold some 750,000 albums in Argentina, but he has nevertheless had a long and busy career since then, with more than two dozen studio albums to his name to date. He’s won a number of Latin Grammy Awards over the course of his career, and in 2021 was given a Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2023, he released the album EADDA9223, which is a song by song re-recording and re-vamping of his previously mentioned hit 1992 LP. Paéz has been quoted as saying that this project aimed to prove “that there are no sacred, untouchable albums.” The new version of the album features a variety of Spanish-speaking guest musicians, among them Ángela Aguilar and Andrés Calamaro, and also Elvis Costello. (Costello had previously worked with Paéz on Spanish Model, Costello’s 2021 Spanish-language version of This Year’s Model. That album features all the original Attractions backing tracks, topped by new vocals sung in Spanish by Spanish-speaking artists. Paéz sings “Radio, Radio.”) The vocalist sharing the spotlight with Paéz on the single “Sasha, Sissí y el Círculo de Baba” is the Chilean-born, Mexico-based singer/songwriter Mon Laferte, a musical star in her own right.
* Andy Summers sang only four or five lead vocals while with the Police; “Someone To Talk To” was one of them, and it was only a B-side to the 1983 single “Wrapped Around Your Finger.” (The piquant and more outre “Mother,” another Summers composition and lead vocal, did make it onto the Synchronicity album that year.) A skilled and inventive guitarist, he had had a busy career, largely as a session player, before joining the Police in 1977, replacing the band’s original guitarist, Henry Padovani. Since the Police’s hiatus in 1984 and effective dissolution by 1986, Summers has released 13 solo albums (all instrumental except for the first), along with eight albums in collaboration with other musicians. His most recent is 2021’s Harmonics of the Night.
* There is a music industry cliché about the so-called sophomore slump; the often expressed idea is that a musician has 20-odd years to make their first album, and six months or so to make their second. Thus, in theory, the lesser quality. Whether generally true or not, Allison Russell has easily escaped the trap, following her sparkling 2021 debut, Outside Child, with an equally impressive second album in 2023, The Returner. Spanning the emotions from the mournful to the jubilant, the album features a good number of songs that sound like instant classics, so sturdy are the melodies and arrangements. The timeless and uplifting title track is a particular triumph, but I’m also partial to the closing track, “Requiem,” which I’ve likewise employed as a closer this month. And by the way if you happened to miss Outside Child, you might want to correct that oversight.
* A reminder that you can have this delivered to your inbox every month if you sign up for the newsletter–details to the right in the sidebar. The email version features a couple of bonus notes each month, for the information hungry.
Fingertips 