Top Fives of 2022: Music

This week I’m counting down my favorite works of arts and entertainment in 2022. Here’s what I’ve done so far:

Monday: Movies/stage shows

Tuesday: TV

Wednesday: Books

Today: Music!

This category is the hardest one for me to stick to my goal of picking only works released in 2022 (or at least ones that surfaced in the U.S. in 2022). You know how it is with music—you overhear something at a coffee shop, or catch a snippet of a song at a party, or hear a tune over the credits of a TV show. It’s not new, always, but it might be new to you.

Just this week I heard Warren Zevon’s cover of “Back In the High Life Again” in an episode of LONGMIRE. The song is from a record that’s 22 years old, by a singer who died 19 years ago, but hearing it lit me up in that beautiful way that happens when you first hear a song you love. So I spent a pleasant couple of hours in the Warren Zevon rabbit hole, and came out missing him all over again, and remembering to enjoy every sandwich.

I share my music finds in my Friday newsletter every week, and they can come from anywhere at anytime. Maybe next year I’ll make this list more like that.

But for now I’m sticking to my guns. And anyway, there was a ton of great music in 2022. Here’s what I enjoyed the most:

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The song I played the most this year was “Chaise Longue” by Wet Leg, an indie-rock duo from the Isle of Wight. The song rides a simple but lethal bass line with callbacks to the Go-Go’s “Our Lips Are Sealed” and the Breeders’ “Cannonball”—there’s some Devo in there, too. That would be plenty. But the lyrics make me laugh out loud every time. They’re perfectly crafted double entendres—absolutely about sex, but with just enough plausible deniability. (When the singer deadpans that she went to college and “got the big D,” that could’ve been her grade in English, right?)

I mean, look, y’all:

Is your muffin buttered?

Would you like us to assign someone to butter your muffin?

Somehow just the word “assign,” in that setting, cracks me up.

I have never, ever played this song just once.

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I listened to Big Thief’s album DRAGON NEW WARM MOUNTAIN I BELIEVE IN YOU* on a drive back from Fayetteville on a rainy winter Sunday. It was like listening to a car radio with the SCAN button on—one song was crunchy rock, the next straight-ass country, the next delicate folk. I didn’t love every song but I loved the vibe and the ambition of the band and its leader, Adrianne Lenker. I was paying more attention to the rain and the passing farmland than the lyrics, but then came the closing song, “Blue Lightning,” and words that stopped me short:

I wanna be the shoelace that you tie …

I wanna be the wrinkle in your eye

Something about those two lines, that expression of extraordinary love in the most ordinary things, damn near choked me up there on the back roads. They’re the lyrics I remember the most from this year. They’re pretty good life goals, too.

*No, I have no idea what that album title means.

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Somehow I didn’t know about Kate Rhudy even though she’s a North Carolina artist, living in her hometown of Raleigh. It took my New York City friend Brian Koppelman to send up a flare on Twitter: “One of the best songwriters on the earth. She should already be known.”

Brian knows his music. Her album DREAM ROOMS is perfect Sunday-night music—soft and bittersweet and beautiful. The song I latched onto was “Ships in the Night,” which takes the old cliché of the title and makes it feel real, while the song stays simple and unadorned. It slides in deep without feeling like it’s even trying to.

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I grew up Baptist, and the one thing I miss about going to a Baptist service is the music. There’s something about those piano parts, those chord progressions, that still works on my soul. John Fullbright is an Oklahoma singer/songwriter who grew up winning prizes from his mama for memorizing Scripture. His song “Blameless” marries those gospel chords with a sorrowful rant from a lover who lost:

I'd trade all my nights for tomorrow
I'd trade all tomorrows to borrow
An hour of yesterday

It reminds me of the music Jerry Lee Lewis made in his resurrection phase, when he went hard country after basically getting thrown out of rock ‘n’ roll for marrying his 13-year-old cousin. It’s Saturday night and Sunday morning mashed together and washed down with Budweiser. If Kate Rhudy and John Fullbright were winning CMA awards, I’d listen to country radio again.

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Joni Mitchell is like Bob Dylan to me—I understand why she matters, and I admire what she’s done, but her music has never moved me. (Although she moves me a lot more than Dylan ever has.) But in May, at age 78, seven years removed from a life-threatening brain aneurysm, Mitchell played a set at the Newport Folk Festival. She sat in a gilded chair at center stage as some of her famous fans (including Brandi Carlile, who put the whole thing together) made a half-circle around her. One of the songs she did was “Both Sides Now,” about how time and perspective change everything. Carlile could barely sing along, and Wynonna Judd was bawling behind them, and Joni held strong all the way through the end: It’s life’s illusions that I recall … I really don’t know life at all.

Music is supposed to make you feel. And if you don’t feel something after watching THAT … well, God help your stony heart.

Now it’s your turn: What music did you enjoy the most this year? Drop your picks in the comments.

Tomorrow: Stories!