1) Lilly Hiatt, “Lately” / One of the great, perpetually underrated songwriters of her generation, Hiatt continues her hot streak—which, I suppose, is more a tradition than a streak if it’s lasted nearly a decade—with “Lately.” The songs here nimbly ride the line between rock and country, sentiment and sharp wit. Hiatt never wastes a musical moment, which gives “Lately” a serious relistenable quality.
2) Anna Leone, “I’ve Felt All These Things” / Come for the title—which might as well be on my family crest. Stay for the Swedish singer-songwriter’s remarkable ability to be cinematic and quietly drawn at the same time. These songs are absolutely gorgeous, and immediately cut to the front of the line in terms of music I’ve heard in 2021.
3) Colson Whitehead, “Harlem Shuffle” / Whitehead might be our most complete contemporary novelist. On the heels of the wild, well-deserved success of “The Underground Railroad” and “The Nickel Boys,” it was hard to imagine him outdoing himself. And, to some degree, he doesn’t try with “Harlem Shuffle.” He goes smaller, burrowing into genre. This is a heist novel—and a damn fine one at that. But it plays at the edges with notions of loyalty, identity, class and what we owe ourselves and each other in ways only Whitehead can.
4) Dave Grohl, “The Storyteller” / I’ve joked about the serious truth that Grohl is a sort of style icon for me. People always ask, “Should you meet your heroes?” And I counter with “Should you read your heroes?” Would Grohl’s memoir disappoint—probably not at the level of revelation, but perhaps in its craft? My worries were unfounded. Grohl’s book is everything you’d expect it to be: funny, enthusiastic, sincere. But he also knows how to turn a phrase away from the mic, offering a few literary equivalents to “I'm a brand new sky to hang the stars upon tonight.”
5) Grayson Haver Currin, “Dave Matthews Band, Crash” for Pitchfork / I’m forever ready to read critical re-appraisals of the stalwart albums of my youth. Currin performs this service better than almost anyone, and brings the perfect amount of sentiment and side eye to his look at an album I must have played no less than a thousand times between 1996 and 2002. He writes:
“Their ultimate rejoinder to critics, however, was that they were right on Crash—right to pursue whatever sounds they loved, right to pile one unlikely element atop another, right to be weird in earnest.”