Playlist on Spotify here
Christmas Eve post.
Simple enough.
I figured most people would be too busy to read this and I’d be too busy to dig deep this week, so I thought I’d give “a gift”: a playlist of my favorite songs this year.
It would be a thank you to 2019 for being a great year (personally, definitely not politically, environmentally, Game Of Thrones endingly, etc.) and to everyone who reads this blog from time to time.
Thank you all by the way!
But then my dad asked for a playlist for Christmas, (“songs you think I would like”) along with an Itunes gift card to purchase these songs because he respects an artist’s need to make money in a world of underpaying streaming platforms and he really enjoys when I make up things I think he agrees with and then attribute them to him in my blog.
Not to mention, he’s like the one person who you can text a song recommendation and he’ll actually listen to it and get back to you on it.
So I started putting together some songs for him, especially newer ones that he might not have heard, and I realized, it was basically the same playlist as my Favorites of 2019.
This is more important than a coincidence.
So for this Christmas Eve, as I traverse the great country of Central Wisconsin, I present to you 4 letters and playlist.
2 of the letters are to people I know, 2 are to people I do not.
Lastly, and to be clear, this is not a playlist of the Best Songs of 2019.
These were the songs I listened to, discovered, rediscovered and loved most intensely this year.
In other words, my favorite songs of the past year.
Dear Dad
You gave me music.
I always knew this but even now, looking at my favorite songs in 2019, it’s more clear to me than ever.
- Your insistence on making sure I understood the importance of the Abbey Road medley by playing it non-stop from ages 6-11;
- taking the time to point out the difference in lyrical densities between Donovan’s song and Dylan’s song in that scene from “Don’t Look Back” where they both play for each other in some backstage greenroom;
- landing on the right side of history – and making sure I did – in the critical “John vs Paul” debate (it’s always John by the way);
- the way you and mom would always play Anita Baker while cleaning;
- making sure I, as an 8 year old home sick from school, watched the Woodstock documentary TO COMPLETION;
- the ubiquity of Carlie Simon’s “Live From Martha’s Vineyard” on car rides;
- the Greatest Hits of Harry Chapin and your explanation of why “W.O.L.D.” was important;
- your ownership of the entire catalog of Bruce Cockburn and your assurance to me and my brother that the “ck” was silent;
- and the time you and mom took us all to Motown where you bought the 4-casette tape collection “Hitsville USA: Motown Singles Collection 1959-1971” and we listened to them non-stop for the rest of the road trip;
- these are the ways you and mom gave me and Micah music.
While these are instances filled with specifics, it was always your love of music, the passion for it, that I absorbed through environmental – and possibly genetic – osmosis (scientifically inaccurate metaphors not-withstanding).
It was clear from as far back as I can remember, that THIS was IMPORTANT.
So I’m happy I can give back to you the songs I loved and listened to the most in 2019, along with a couple I threw in just for you, and a couple I thought might push the limits of your ever-present musical open mindedness (a country song about drinking alcohol to get over heart break seems to be in especially bad taste but it’s so catchy!).
Love you Dad, Merry Christmas
Dear Tina Turner
It hardly happens these days.
There’s so much access, so much instant gratification, so much media coming at us in all directions it’s rare that we come across a song (or movie/show/famous catchphrase) that we haven’t heard in 26 years.
But I’m very happy to say that’s what happened to me in 2019 with Tina Turner’s “I Don’t Wanna Fight Anymore”.
There’s a reason it’s called “blast” from the past.
When this song came on (and I can’t even remember where) I was suddenly taken back to living on Hi Mount in the early 1990s, my dad’s basement tool bench, my mom’s all the rest of the house, the sun coming in through the big bay windows on a summer afternoon.
And yet, at the same time, I felt overwhelmingly alive in the moment. That’s why it’s called “music” and that’s why she’s called “Tina Turner”.
This song was released in 1993 and I can honestly say, I don’t remember hearing it since then. It was Tina’s last hit and a great way to go out. She was done fighting, she had said all she needed to, it was time for letting go.
Dear Lady Gaga
“Is That Alright?” was my most listened to song of 2019.
It got a lot of plays earlier in the year, but nonetheless hearing Gaga sing these songs that replaced her clever detachment with straight-forward sentimentality is a gift the universe is still under-appreciating.
I’m not sure people appreciate how hard it is to make a great song, much less an entire soundtrack, much less ALSO A MOVIE that hits all right notes. It’s the Triple Crown, plain and simple.
A year beyond its peak cultural relevancy, the A Star Is Born soundtrack is one that I still have to emotionally brace myself to play.
Me checking in with myself:
“Are we ok if we almost start crying right now?
“What’s that?”
“We’re at the gym?”
“So that’s a no I take it?”
“Oh, you’re on the stairmaster?”
“So you’re already crying then?
“Perfect”.
For my money there is no other song from the A Star Is Born soundtrack that is the movie more than “Is That Alright?”
The movie is melodrama on 10, and so is this song,
I want you, at the end of my life.
Wanna see your face, when I fall with grace, at the moment I die
While “Shallow” is the more single-ready song, and “I’ll Never Love Again” is the perfect one to end with, the tragedy of “Is That Alright?” is the tragedy of A Star Is Born: every scene of future happiness (“family dinners and family trees/ teaching the kids to say thank you and please”) is all the more sad because we know how the story actually ends.
We feel each romantic idea (“And I’ll pray that you lift me when you know I need the help”) slip through our – and Ally’s – grasp.
Love fleeting like inspiration for a song: there one second, gone the next.
Dear Ben
It’s rare to connect so immediately and deeply with a song the first time you hear it.
One that immediately jumps on the Best Songs Of Your Entire Life playlist.
That’s what happened when Jayme played “Killing The Blues” for me one night after the bars.
The death of a close friend can have an impact on health and wellbeing for up to four years, research has found. – Source
The second thing that happened was that I thought of you.
They collected data from 26,515 people over 14 years, and found a range of negative consequences experienced by those who had a close friend die.
I’m not sure if it has already been 4 years since you overdosed.
The death of a friend is a form of disenfranchised grief – one not taken so seriously or afforded such significance.
I do know it’s been:
- three rambling, long, stream of conscious poems I’ haven’t shown anyone,
- 1 song I “wrote” and uploaded me playing onto FB. Never before or since has a song so completely come through me.
- One long eulogy/essay your brother and sister were kind enough to let me share with them. That helped and I’m forever thankful to them.
- And then, “Killing The Blues”.
It reminds me of you and maybe more importantly, it feels like a song I know you would love, a song that would hit you in the gut and the heart the same way it did me, like when we listened to “Darling Be Home Soon” in High School and lamented our lovelorn lives. We were a walking coming of age movie sometimes.
I think you would have loved “Killing The Blues” if you were still alive.
It’s the kind of perfect sad song you can really get in there and lament to.
You very well may have found it and loved it and we just weren’t close enough in the latter years to know those things about each other.
You’d probably ask me why I think you would like it and I like to think I would tell you the truth and say it’s because you tend to lament in your sadness just like me.
Miss you forever big homie.