1) Amos Lee, “My Ideal” / Since watching Ethan Hawke embody Chet Baker in the 2015 biopic “Born to Be Blue,” the late and troubled jazz artist holds my fascination. Amos Lee offers a fond, faithful tribute to Baker here, recreating an album’s worth of his songs, imbuing them with the same romanticism as Baker.
2) Caedmon’s Call, self-titled / There’s something oddly rewarding about being set down in the middle of a new album of old songs, re-recorded by one of your favorite bands to mark its 25th anniversary. Cliff and Danielle Young, Derek Webb and Co. alter their arrangements ever so slightly (this isn’t quite Taylor’s version), but more important, bring 25 years of added meaning to each note and phrase.
3) Adrian Quesada, “Jaguar Sound” / I’m never anything less than mesmerized by the tones guitarist, composer and producer Quesada conjures on his solo records (he also makes up half the core of Black Pumas). Here, he once again casts his spell, seamlessly joining rock, jazz, funk and Latin soul in living Technicolor.
4) Steven Hyden, “Long Road: Pearl Jam and the Soundtrack Of A Generation” / Hyden remains one of our best contemporary rock critics and, here, takes a thorough and soulful dive into the life, times and songs of one of the truly great American rock bands. As a Pearl Jam admirer, Hyden’s prose sent me deeper into specific moments, then helped me surface with more context and appreciation.
5) Adam Fleming Petty, “Rage Against the Machine and the Narrow ’90s” for The Bulwark / Always better for reading Petty, I enjoyed this dive into bands like Rage, musical politics and what he defines as the Narrow ‘90s: “narrow in the sense that fewer albums, books, and movies were available—the internet was only just arriving in our homes then—and when something genuinely out of left field arrived, we may not have recognized it for what it really was because our ability to engage with it was so circumscribed.”