A Long December

I always get “A Long December” by Counting Crows in my head this time of year. (I have other Counting Crows songs in my head the rest of the year.) That’s not unique to me, obviously. It’s December, every December feels long and short at the same time, and the song is very famous, so what do you expect? There’s a conscious effort being made by the holiday music-industrial complex to turn it into a Christmas song in recent years, too, simply because there’s a dearth of new ones. Country cornball Jon Pardi covered it on his Christmas album last year. (It’s pretty good.) All of this is to say, I dunno, I guess I’m basic. 

“A Long December” is about getting hit by a car, or at least it was written after Adam Duritz got hit by a car. He was feeling reflective, as brushes with mortality are wont to make one feel, and the song is contemplative in a way that has always spoken to me. Using December as an excuse to reflect on the year—which is an arbitrary stretch of time, but delineating stretches of time arbitrarily is a useful way to think about life—has always appealed to me. The line in the song about driving up to Hillside Manor, whatever that is, with a friend to talk about the year always felt really picturesque about that. Life rarely feels that neat. (It also includes some of Duritz’s best writing; “the smell of hospitals in winter / and the feeling that it’s all a lot of oysters / with no pearls”? “You look across a crowded room and see the way that light attaches to a girl”? Jesus.) 

Anyway, I’m thinking a lot about cataloguing life in reflective ways right now, because that helps form more concrete memories, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that actively building memories is the best way to counteract the natural inclination of life to get faster and faster as it goes. I’m trying to be conscious about it—taking a picture every day of something for which I’m grateful, making playlists for this here newsletter that capture a moment, writing a journal in paper notebooks again—and so I’m thinking, once again, about “A Long December.” 

Here’s a playlist of songs that I loved a lot that came out in 2024. (“A Long December” isn’t on it, sorry.) You can listen to it in full on Apple Music here or on Spotify here.

1. “Cardinal,” Kacey Musgraves

The very first notes of this one remind me of, I don’t know, Simon & Garfunkel or something—like, I suspect she recorded it on vintage equipment from the sixties. The song itself is lovely, too, a peppy little meditation on grief and birds and mysticism, the sort of thing that sounds ridiculous from most people, but which Kacey Musgraves can do effortlessly.

2. “Alibi,” Hurray for the Riff Raff

For my money, Hurray for the Riff Raff is probably the best band going right now, and their 2024 album, The Past is Still Alive, is almost certainly the one I listened to the most this year. “Alibi” is another poppy country-ish number, this time about offering hope to a friend on a bad path, which feels more meaningful the way Alynda Segarra writes about it, which is as a support that has firm boundaries. “You know that time can take you for a ride” is a nice way to say “this too shall pass,” and following that up with “but I’m not going to enable you anymore” makes it hit.

3. “Bigger Than the Song,” Brittney Spencer

I have an essay publishing with Texas Monthly soon about 2024 as the year that country music broke, and the genre-mixing and crossovers that, I think, reshaped the most conservative (with both a small- and big- C) genre of pop music. We’ll look back at this year in country similar to how we look at 1991 in punk. I found “Bigger Than the Song” at the very beginning of the year, and I think it set the stage for that really nicely—a soulful country ballad sung by a black woman who is unafraid to put Reba and Johnny and June and Dolly in the same context as Beyoncé and Alanis and Britney and Whitney and sing about how important they are all, if you’re a person who needs a song to understand your own feelings. I didn’t spend a lot of time with Brittney Spencer’s album this year, but “Bigger Than the Song” is a stage-setter for the whole year.

4. “Tipsy (A Bar Song),” Shaboozey

I’m assuming you know “Tipsy” because it’s been everywhere this year. I thought about putting a different song from Shaboozey’s record on this playlist just to spice it up, because the whole album is full of bangers—which is surprising given that “Tipsy” is essentially a novelty song—but this one is just too catchy and when I revisit this playlist in a few years, I’ll be happy to hear “Tipsy” again. Still, give a listen to “Last of My Kind” if you want to hear Boozey go even more country, “Drink Don’t Need No Mix” if you want him to lean harder on the hip hop of “Tipsy.” I hope he avoids the one-hit-wonder fate that everyone with a hit like “Tipsy” risks facing, because he’s got a lot going on.

5. “Ain’t No Love in Oklahoma,” Luke Combs

Earlier this year, I wrote about how the soundtrack to Twisters came together, which is sort of a throwback to the nineties-style soundtrack that sells a mixtape to fans of a movie (and sells a movie to fans of the music), and ended up spending a lot more time listening to it than I’d have expected as a result. Luke Combs’s “Ain’t No Love in Oklahoma” was an immediate standout to me even before it became a hit single because it’s one of the best rock songs of the year, which is especially nice in a year when rock music has felt less relevant than it has at any previous point in my life. If you like guitars going hard, and you want to hear them in a way that is still engaged with the wider culture, you are pretty much left listening to country music right now, but when country music sounds like “Ain’t No Love in Oklahoma,” you’re doing all right.

6. “This Is Who We Are (feat. Naala),” Gary Clark Jr.

I’ve always had kind of a weird relationship to Gary Clark Jr.’s music, mostly because he lives in Austin and I write about music in Texas, so I’ve been paying a lot of attention to him since he first signed to Warner Music more than a decade ago. I, uh, have not always been impressed with the songs he has played, even if his talent as a guitar player is undeniable, just one of the living greats. He’s had a few songs I’ve connected with in the past—”This Land,” from his 2019 album, was a banger—but this year’s album, JPEG RAW, was the first one that really put it all together. In the interest of keeping the rock and roll vibes going, I went with “This Is Who We Are,” but you could go psychedelic on “Hyperwave” or jazzy on “Alone Together” or funky on “What About the Children” (which also pulls the most lively performance out of Stevie Wonder I’ve heard in decades) and hear something special.

7. “Sweet,” Been Stellar

Okay, real quick, let me show you the album art to Scream From New York, NY, which if you were a young person between, say, 1998 and 2004, might look a little bit familiar:

Pretty much every alt-rock album released during those years looked like this, and Been Stellar, who are apparently a bunch of like 22 year olds who grew up on their parents’ record collections, synthesize that style well while also writing very good songs. I, too, like the Afghan Whigs! And “Sweet” has a lot of the same feel of those songs, while also being written and performed with a sense of newness and exploration that it’s hard for your old faves to summon these days. This one’s a secret gem.

8. “Wild God,” Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Nick Cave has spent the past decade exploring a kind of songwriting that eschews rhythm and pop hooks in favor of this sort of ambient, song-sung poetry (some of which I like a great deal). I didn’t know if we’d ever get another rock album out of him, but he seemed to have found new things to explore in 2024. “Wild God” is my favorite of those songs, a story-song about a weird dude walking around a place called Jubilee Street and seducing the world, which is a frequent trope of Cave’s songwriting. This time, though, he lets the thing build and build as a story before climaxing with a full choir that evokes the religious iconography and gospel style that Cave adores, ultimately culminating in the sort of ecstatic finish that nobody in the history of pop music has ever done as well as Nick Cave does.

9. “Not Like Us,” Kendrick Lamar

Dunno if there’s ever been a song that everyone heard at the exact same time and was like “oh, that’s an instant classic” since, I don’t know, The Beatles played “She Loves You” on The Ed Sullivan Show. In an age where everything is time-shifted and culture is wildly fragmented, it’s been a real treat watching the way “Not Like Us” took over culture starting on May 4 and running through… right now.

10. “My Fun,” Suki Waterhouse

Kat likes to listen to the radio, and one day we had KUTX on in the car, and “My Fun” came on, and it was just like “well shit, who is this?” I was only dimly aware of Suki Waterhouse—she played the keyboard player in the Amazon adaptation of Daisy Jones and the Six—but give this one a listen, it’s just a pure throwback pop confection, a lil’ folky and a lil’ psychedelic and meant to be played while driving to the beach or something.

11. “Burn Alive,” The Last Dinner Party

A corollary to the note about Kendrick up there: It’s harder than ever, in 2024, to know where the culture is heading. Heading into the year, The Last Dinner Party was wildly hyped, this British art-school band full of attractive young people singing about gender and lust like a bunch of theater kids (complimentary), and I kind of expected them to be breaking into arenas by now. It’s a shame that they’re not, because “Burn Alive” is the sort of song that sounds best with a lot of production value behind it, and I hope there’s still a huge international audience for this kind of thing.

12. “Warsong,” The Cure

The Cure hadn’t put out a record since 2008, and had been promising Songs From a Lost World for almost half a decade before it actually came out. Turns out they still got it. In fact, they got it now as much as ever. There’s something to be said for waiting till you have something new to say and then saying it in your own time. “Warsong” is one of my favorites of the new bunch, this swirling stomper that patiently spends a full half of its runtime building an intro before Robert Smith even starts to sing. What a treat.

13. “Runaway,” Jon Muq

I never found time to write a profile of Jon Muq this year, but I wish I’d had. Kat and I saw him play one morning during SXSW and I was really taken with both his songs and his story. Musically, he veers somewhere between the Black Keys and Jimmy Buffett, and his story—about busking on the streets of Uganda, being captured in a viral video and invited to perform on a cruise ship, making a plan to immigrate to Houston only to end up in Austin by mistake, then finding a community here that made him decide to stick around—is just incredibly interesting. “Runaway” is more on the Black Keys side of the dial (Jon Auerbach produced the album, and he was slated to open their summer tour before it got canceled), and it’s an excellent showcase for his voice, which is rich and textured in a way you don’t hear very often.

14. “Last Night Reprise,” Arooj Aftab

I don’t think anyone currently making music sets a mood better than Arooj Aftab. Listen to this whole album (Night Reign) one night when you want to feel transported.

15. “Pressured Up (feat. Vince Staples and Schoolboy Q),” Mustard

Vince Staples had my favorite rap album of the year, but I just put a track on it in another of these newsletters a few weeks ago, so we’ll go with “Pressured Up,” a track from the new album by producer Mustard that Vince sings the hook on, along with a characteristically charismatic verse from Schoolboy Q. Mustard had a hell of a year—he also produced “Not Like Us”—but “Pressured Up” is the only song he released this year that samples the theme song from X-Men 97, so you know I was always going to find a reason to write about it.

16. “Put ‘Em In the Fridge (feat. Cardi B),” Peso Pluma

Peso Pluma has one of those voices that just sounds so fucking good when rapping, in Spanish or English. So does Cardi B. Throw in one of the hardest beats of the year and the suggestion of some mariachi horns and you have something really special.

17. “II Most Wanted (feat. Miley Cyrus),” Beyoncé

If you ever wondered “what would happen if Beyoncé and Miley Cyrus recorded a song together?” the answer is “it would be an immediate karaoke classic” and we’re all better for it.

18. “Where the Road Goes,” Old 97’s

The Old 97’s were my favorite band when I was twenty-two, and while I never stopped being interested in their music, there was a good stretch there when I had a harder time finding things I loved in what they were putting out. One of the joys of continuing to be alive is remembering that those conditions are impermanent, and that decades later, someone who made things that moved you when you were young can still make things that move you now. That’s a fitting sentiment for “Where The Road Goes,” which is a song about considering the alternative to experiencing the joys of continuing to be alive, being grateful that you didn’t choose it, and subsequently having your eyes opened to how many places life will take you as it unfolds.

One idea I’ve been trying on over the past month or two, which I’m not sure I fully believe but which I’ve also realized it costs nothing to pretend is true, is the future is inherently a good thing. It’s counterintuitive in frightening times, but given that it will come whether we dread it or look forward to it, I’ve decided to try to commit to it. It might come in smaller ways than we’d like, and it will certainly come mixed with tragedy and loss and grief, but also: Last year, I didn’t have this song. Now I do.

19. “All My Exes Live in L.A. (feat. First Aid Kit),” Lola Kirke

As part of the whole world goin’ country, English actress and musician Lola Kirke put out a brief record called Country Curious that included “All My Exes Live in L.A.,” a clever spin on George Strait that has been stuck in my head for most of 2024, and I’m not mad about that.

20. “Man in Black,” Carín León

If you’d asked me before I heard Carín León sing this song, I would have told you that Johnny Cash’s “Man in Black” is one of those fundamentally un-coverable songs. Honestly, it doesn’t even make sense to try. This is a personal mission statement by Johnny Cash as much as it is a song, tied very much both to his specific personality and the time in which he wrote it. But León won me over with his spin on it, which he sings with a pacing that almost makes no sense, sometimes languid and sometimes peppy, and with a conviction that made me google to see if he has ever actually been photographed wearing colors (he has). Carín León has one of the most expressive voices in country music right now—he mostly sings in Spanish, and it’s surprisingly easy even as someone who doesn’t speak the language to connect with those songs—and it provides such an interesting contrast to Johnny Cash’s gravitas-laced baritone that it feels right coming from him.

21. “For Months Now,” Madi Diaz

Ever think about how amazing it is that people have been writing break-up songs for so many decades and yet there are still new ways to say “I don’t love you anymore”? I hadn’t known who Madi Diaz was until this year, but she instantly became one of my favorite songwriters. "For Months Now" is great before the drums come in, but then they do, and then she sings the bridge, and it's just perfectly devastating.

22. “Bible,” Dan Bern

“No one in the bible was white,” Dan Bern sings over and over again in this song that is both clever and funny and also defiantly sung in a racist culture that is increasingly flirting with Christian theocracy. “Jesus walked on water / in the land of milk and honey,” he sings, “looked more like Colin Kaepernick / than the guys on your money.” I confess I’d not thought about it quite like that, but obviously he’s correct, and the children’s choir that comes in at the end only seals the deal.