2022 in Music

I’ve never written anything about music before, and so I want to begin with a caveat, and a clarification. The caveat is this: I do not know how to talk about music. Now, I learned to read and play music as a child, and since then I’ve spent a very large percentage of my waking hours listening to music, but I’m a very simple consumer who is easy to please, and am neither a critic or an artist. Frankly, I don’t know genre terms for different styles of music, because I never bothered to learn, and I have nothing really to say about it, other than very loose emotional impressions. For me, this is an area of art which is the exact opposite of literature, which I actually can write about. So, why am I saying anything at all about music, if I can’t even hold an intelligent conversation about it?

Quite simply, I’m not attempting to do any criticism, or really to say anything about music. All I want to do is share songs that I like, to point to them and say “this is so good, isn’t it?” Some of that is driven by a desire for others to also listen, but a lot of it is simply a matter of self-expression, since I get very excited about liking whatever I like.

Next, the clarification. I’m not going to be posting about music released in 2022. While a couple songs from last year may sneak in, I didn’t listen to nearly enough music from 2022 to write even a short post about. What I’m doing is just posting about a selection of the songs I listened to last year and really liked. Some of them were already familiar to me, and some were not, but they were all songs I listened to repeatedly throughout the year. So you can think of this as a sort of Spotify wrapped post, except it’s not actually my Spotify wrapped because that ended up just  being all the songs on the Dune score occupying the top spots.

So, with the caveat that you really may not want to spend time reading this, unless for some reason you’re interested in a list of what music I liked last year, here is my 2022 year-end playlist.

The song that has most stuck in my heart all year is Art Garfunkel’s cover of Waters of March, a song originally written by Antônio Carlos Jobim. Unsurprisingly, I discovered this song due to its use in the film The Worst Person in the World, which is probably the best movie of 2021. That film speaks to a certain kind of quiet catharsis, of coming to terms with life and realizing things are going to be ok, and the song perfectly fits with that. There’s a sense of resting in the knowledge of reality, and accepting that things will work out. “It’s the end of the strain, it’s the joy in your heart,” as the song says. The list of little ordinary things locates peace and quiet joy in all of life, makes the light breaking through the background of the world immanent and present. This is the song that plays when the train leaves the station, and the end credits play, and there’s a sense of mundane closure. I used this song whenever I would take off on a flight last year – I hit play the moment the wheels left the ground.

I said that The Worst Person in the World is probably the best film of 2021, because Drive My Car is basically tied with it. This film stars Toko Miura as the eponymous driver, which reminded me of her appearance as the featured singer on RADWIMPS soundtrack for the 2019 film Weathering With You, and the song that most leaps out from that is Grand Escape. It builds, using the intrinsic melancholy of Miura’s voice as a grey ceiling of clouds, which the song finally pierces in choral ecstasy. It’s a song which seeks hope in a drowning world, and pushes further, constantly repeating “just a little bit further,” and “let’s go!” Escapism is a very good thing, properly understood, and the song is aptly titled.

Maps by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is a famous classic, and it’s hard to know what to say other than to acknowledge its depth of honest feeling, and unaffected simplicity. As a professional sentimentalist, it’s exactly the sort of thing I love. Sometimes we need to be reminded of the value of the relationships we already have, and the need to cling tightly to one another. I feel I’ve lost touch with so many old friends over the years. I should do something about that.

It's hard to explain Shiro SAGISU’s what if?: orchestra, choir, and piano if you haven’t lived with the complicated saga of Evangelion in all the permutations it’s assumed since 1995. The important thing to know is that the series culminated in a mind-splitting conclusion in 1997’s film End of Evangelion, which left things in bleak and minor key. Since then, Hideaki Anno, the show’s creator, has found a greater degree of peace and happiness in life, and rebooted the show in a series of films, concluding last year in Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time, and that’s where this song comes in. The film, and this song, provide a final resolution to the entire saga, ending at last in a major key. Personally, I find the song to be heavenly – it feels as though it bears the promise that all shall be made well, that there is some final hope. However, I struggle with hope, longing for it, but fearing I exclude myself from it. This song feels loving and relational, a final reconciliation, but lyrically it’s nostalgic and wistful, looking back at what could have been. But perhaps the great eschatological catharsis is about redeeming lost time, like the end of A Christmas Carol, when things can be made right. Perhaps the redemption Christianity promises is that there is hope, even after you have wasted your life. That’s what I’d like to believe, anyway.

I had never really listened intentionally to Elvis, but if you want me to pay attention to music, the way to do it is to have a director I love make a film about it. I was bouncing up and down in my seat in the theater watching Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, enjoying the gonzo maximalism on display, when midway through the film the 1968 Christmas special rolls around, and he begins singing If I Can Dream, and suddenly I was transported into a different sort of feeling than I had expected to have in this movie. Not only is this the high point of the movie, but the song feels like a full-throated echo of the cry of creation, groaning until it is delivered into a better world. There’s something very C.S. Lewis in the insistence, ingrained in every single human, that there absolutely must be a better world than this – that its existence is necessary, beyond any direct observational evidence. We have got to believe that there is “a beckoning candle,” somehow, somewhere.

I had never had any affection or connection to the carol Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming, but when the original German version played in the film The Great Adventure, as a chorale heard amid the winter snows outside a little church in the woods, I was captivated. Es Ist Ein Ros Entsprungen is also a song of hope, invoking the Rose of the world (and the next), abloom in the snow. There is great hope here, though I have yet to understand the purpose of the thorns.

I’ve been a big fan of Mitski and her fascinating, drawn voice, and Working for the Knife is a great example of why. Musically, it has a really interesting song, flattened under low electric clouds. But lyrically, the song speaks directly to the experience of many in my generational cohort (Mitski is four months younger than me). It speaks to the sense of delayed adulthood, of loss of purpose and anxiety about that loss. Having left one career with no clear new direction, I find it incredibly resonant. And there’s the fear that things could have been different, “but I just chose wrong.” There’s a great need for hope among those who struggle in a society where identity is bound up in careers, and careers are fickle, delayed, contingent – or, even if successful, empty.

I alluded at the start of this post to the fact that objectively, I listened to the entire Dune score by Hans Zimmer more than any other song or album in 2022. There’s good reason for that: this is some of Zimmer’s best work ever, and a lot has already been said about its sense of immensity, and the strangeness of the instruments chosen. What I want to focus on is just the climbing riff of Leaving Caladan, which plays at the moment when the great hulking ships begin climbing out of the sea and into the stars. This fully sent me, and that’s why I became obsessed with it and played it on repeat for months.

There’s a youtube channel I love called The Beauty Of, which posts montages of gorgeous cinematography from films or just from directors, and I found one of their videos following the career of director Leos Carax. I’m not familiar with Carax beyond his most recent film, Annette, but I immediately fell in love with the song used in the video, Les Amants by Les Rita Mitsouko. I just like the sense of fluid, relaxed ebullience, bobbing up and down like a rubber duck in the swell of the sea.

ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION’s song, 子犬と雨のビート(A Lost Dog and Beats of the Rain) first came to my attention as the intro music to Masaaki Yuasa’s anime show The Tatami Galaxy, which is a masterpiece dealing with the sense of listlessness and disappointment in life. The song feels incredibly joyful and triumphant, an optimistic march for a despondent soul. As it says, “Even if nothing else changes, we will come across each other someday. Think about that and let’s go on one day at a time.” This is a real masterwork.

光るとき(Hikaru Toki) by Hitsujibungaku is also the intro song for an anime show, this time last year’s phenomenal adaptation of the Heike Monogatari by Naoko Yamada, and it’s hard to separate the song from the show’s themes of living amid times of change and suffering, and the acceptance of what fate must come, and persisting despite what cannot be changed. The entire song is ringing and thrumming with resonant sound, echoing the Gion Shoja bells that toll the beginning of the story.

I don’t know much about musical genres and periods, but I have learned from experience that I have a special love for a certain kind of British music from the early 80s, and it’s perfectly typified by Roxy Music’s song More Than This, which just washes over you with the terrific sense of contented melancholy which brings such specific nostalgia for a time in which I never lived.

I know I sound like I’m repeating myself, and I suppose I am – but once again, I fell in love with a song that speaks to a sense of quiet acceptance, a positive melancholy, and a sense of nostalgia and what could have been. In this case, I’m speaking of Masayoshi Yamazaki’s 90’s classic One More Time, One More Chance.

Team Me has been one of my favorite bands for about ten years, and last year they release a new album, Something in the Making. The whole album is terrific, but in particular I latched onto Should Have Been Somebody By Now, because it speaks to the sense I mentioned earlier, that I feel I have not really turned out quite like I expected I should have. In contrast, Every Little Dream looks forward, not back, and is pushing onward, driving forward with the sense that things may at last be about to change. It’s an optimistic album, helped along by Team Me’s trademark high sound.

This post is mainly about specific songs and albums, but one of the best discoveries the algorithm served up to me last year was an artist I had never heard of before: Emile Mosseri. I listen to an inordinate amount of movie scores, and so Spotify began slipping me song of his work, all from movies on my to-watch list that I have not yet seen – specifically, Kajillionaire, Minari, and The Last Black Man in San Francisco. There is something unique about Mosseri’s work that I can’t quite describe, but it just doesn’t sound like any other scores out there, and in particular parts of the The Last Black Man in San Francisco score are hauntingly elegiac. His work flows slowly, like a river of viscous sound.

As you can probably tell, I mostly listen to film scores, soft Japanese music, and certain specific kinds of indie and classic rock. I don’t listen to a ton of youth pop, but sometimes I stumble across an album that’s just an undeniably great bop, and Maisie Peters’ You Signed Up for This is one such album. It’s hard not to bounce right along with it, and why wouldn’t you?

There was another album released last year, this one by an artist I already knew and loved, and it’s a real banger. I’m talking about Florence + The Machine’s Dance Fever. This has the same sense of clanging, windy, celebratory scope as all her work. For instance, it’s absolutely typical of her work that halfway through King, the song suddenly explodes into a full on wailing, but a sort of positive wailing. I’m not describing it well. The different musical elements are layered into the sound like the crunchy, juicy fibers of a good brisket. And I really love her song, Free, which speaks frankly to the experience of anxiety, while also fully embracing the celebratory joy implied by the album’s title. In another song she talks about placing chaotic feelings in the context of a life where nothing really actually bad has ever happened, so there’s a balancing act being carried out between speaking to the seriousness of these feelings for people, but also acknowledging how they may be insignificant in the scheme of other human experiences. And it’s reaching for the sublime, trying to claw it’s way out of anxiety. Also she put Bill Nighy, one of the most precious and wonderful actors we’ve got, in her music video, so there’s that as well.

And, on the subject of trying to claw one’s way up into the light, we have to talk about Christopher Willis’ incredible score for Armando Ianucci’s under-discussed 2019 adaptation of The Personal History of David Copperfield. As a Dickens’ novel, it is of course about an orphan rising into society, and this music is just barely containing that energy. It surges forward, like a rising tide, or a jubilant stream bursting its banks, glittering with grandeur. This is some of my favorite music to work to.

Not to keep going on about film scores, but they are a huge portion of what I listen to, and one I began listening to in 2022 was Joe Hisaishi’s incredible score for Isao Takahata’s final film, The Tale of Princess Kaguya. This is probably the greatest adaptation of a classical fairy tale, and the score reflects that in its own restrained classicism, while being extraordinarily sensitive and lyrical within that framework. In particular it mixes joy and melancholy perfectly; triumphant moments are scored in a way that evokes sad longing, as in Flying, and the ultimate threat of a final parting is scored in the most festive way imaginable, with music that sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard before in The Procession of Celestial Beings. And the Song of the Heavenly Maiden speaks to both the center of sorrow and hope in the view of the world that is cyclical – the idea that all passes away, and all eventually returns – perhaps.

Staying in the world of Ghibli, I also became obsessed with Cecile Corbel’s score for Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s The Secret World of Arrietty, which is an adaptation of The Borrowers. This album is pure comfort food – it just feels hopeful and determinedly optimistic, down to its very bones, even despite its nostalgia. It also feels exactly like a rural British garden gone to seed, with cool dew fresh on green leaves, in the hour before dawn. It feels so profoundly hopeful, which of course makes me deeply sad in my own way.

Veering in a very different direction is Nicholas Britell’s electronic score for last year’s Star Wars series, Andor. This is notable for two things: it’s the first Star Wars score I know of to not try to ape John Williams iconic style, and also it absolutely rips. There’s an alien club mix (Niamos!), the main title feels like it carries within it the actual stress you would feel living under the Empire, and of course the finale of the show features a diegetic march, which is so specific and strange that it feels like something you couldn’t make up, but which is actually traditional to some observed culture. It also serves the story perfectly, embodying the implacable grim determination of the people to resist.

There were two dueling expensive fantasy prequel series last year, HBO’s House of the Dragon and Amazon’s Rings of Power. The former is better written, but while both have excellent scores, House of the Dragon’s feels very recycled from Game of Thrones, while Rings of Power gives us an entirely new creation from Bear McCreary, the man behind the fantastic score for the Battlestar Galactica reboot, which is now twenty years old, a thing I don’t really like to think about too much. McCreary’s Rings score follows the spirit of Howard Shore’s work, and really does sound like Middle-earth, but it’s very much its own thing, and it reaches some truly grand and sublime highs.

Sometimes a random songs finds its way from the algorithm into my rotation, and I don’t fall in love with it, or become familiar with the artist, but I just keep listening to it and enjoying it, and in that way it’s undeniable, while remaining the ordinary song in a list of extraordinary ones. Last year that inclusion was Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. I’ve not got much to say, but this one sounds different from what I usually listen to, but it has the sort of plaintive roughness that I do enjoy, and it swings gently through clouds of melancholy in a way I don’t mind.

If the previous song is maybe the least moving of those on my list, the next is at the other end of the spectrum. Last year I finally discovered The Sundays, and Here’s Where the Story Ends struck some kind of fundamental chord in me, and it hasn’t stopped vibrating since. I listen to it constantly and have done so for months, and it never ceases to make my face crinkle with feeling. As the title promises, it offers the hope of closure, and yet it is in fact open-ended, unresolved. And it’s incredibly nostalgic, burdened with the belief that the best thing to ever happen to you is in fact already in the rearview, and you didn’t realize it in time. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that idea, feeling it out. I don’t recommend it, and I don’t think it’s even really true, but at a certain point its hard to ignore any more. But the thing I like about this song, is that it seems to find a way to move on. Even if the story isn’t resolved, we’re calling a certain point the end, and moving forward. And even if you can’t get the past back, there’s a sense of something more than acceptance in the music – because it’s not a sad song. If you listen to the timbre of the music, it’s clearly smiling.

Suzanne Vega’s Cracking is a song in the same vein as the preceding song, not just because I found it around the same time, but because it also is enormously compelling. If The Sundays are singing about an ending, Vega is ushering in a new beginning. The whole song feels as if you’ve caught the quiet moment where the snowdrop springs above the surface. Something has shifted, very quietly, almost imperceptible, but it’s a fundamental shift, and soon the entire panoply of spring will follow. There’s a point at the end of winter where the ice first begins to crack, and this song somehow captures the quiet significance of first noticing that. Also, the way she sings the word “happens” is magical.

I’ve been increasingly obsessed by the TV series The Young Pope and its follow-up The New Pope, and while I feel like both have elements that don’t quite gel for me, the way in which they are executed and the depth of feeling crafted into them elevates them beyond their scripts and has made them some of my favorite television. One aspect of that is the soundtrack. 4.5 Bourrees, originally a Bach suite, now recomposed by Peter Gregson, somehow combines a satisfied sense of quiet contentment, the fulfillment of a silent smile under kind eyes, with a steady, unswerving forward motion. It feels like a funeral service that looks toward the future and affirms that all is going to be well, after all.

On the other end of the emotional scale is Black Math’s Lapse, used in the trailer for The Green Knight. Similarly propulsive, this song drives not into a sunny upland, but into dark clouds, with lightning flashing on the horizon, over the dead trees. It’s perfect for a film about a journey into the dark self, and when the music starts wailing it feels truly cinematic.

I picked Jerusalem sort of as a representative of all the Sinead O’Connor music I began listening to last year. I knew who she was, vaguely, but I’d never heard any of her work before, but I really got into it in the past few months. It’s exactly in the pocket of the period of music that I love, with that same sort of instrumentation and sound that crops up all over the 80s. I can’t really explain my weird obsession with an imagined memory of that time period, but this song feels like the perfect anthem of the end of history, invoking in its title the ultimate portent of transformation. You can feel the tension and elation of some sort of great Turning in process.

Maybe I like Andromeda because it flows smoothly like a colorless oil, or because it sounds like big old empty space, or because I can hear both organs and the sort of far-out twanging I know from the 70s. Or maybe I just like it because like Weyes Blood, I too have a heart that is lazy.

Arvo Part’s masterwork, Spiegel im Spiegel, has been used in so many films that shows that it’s hard to know exactly how I encountered it, though I suspect it was in About Time. There’s a reason it’s so widely used. There’s something beyond longing – the song is a perfect tincture of a gentle final parting from a very old friend. This is deathbed music.

I’m sure I’d heard it before, but I also became really familiar with The Cure’s Friday I’m in Love through About Time (which is itself a really lovely film). This is just a fantastic jam painted in the musical colors of the period I love most, and at the same time it almost compels a sort of hopeful outlook. 

In perhaps the ultimate example of elegiac music, Dario Marianelli and Jean-Yves Thibaudet created Elegy for Dunkirk for the dreamlike and astonishing Dunkirk beach scene in the film Atonement. The common voices of the soldiers pierce the somber waves of the strings as a sort of irruption of ordinary people into a moment of extraordinary nobility and sorrow. It really does sound like what it accompanies: the wreck of all time on the shore of eternity.

I feel sort of weird listing Kanho Yakushiji’s recording of the Heart Sutra in this list, considering that this is a chanted version of Buddhist scripture, sung by a Buddhist monk, and I’m a Christian who doesn’t really even get the appeal many people feel for the Buddhist worldview. In fact, if Buddhism (in my very limited understanding) is about detachment from desire, I view my Christianity as the opposite – I seek to pursue desire in a religion of attachment to a more real, material, and substantive world than the one we currently inhabit. But regardless of all that, I find this sutra so calming in its steady rhythm that I really love it. And I do think that even where there is disagreement, there are truths apparent in the sutra’s expression of the universal human longing for something beyond what we know now.

Sneaking in at the end of the year, Ludwig Goransson once again pulls off an absolutely fantastic score, this time for Wakanda Forever. While the whole score is excellent, I want to highlight the eponymous track, which made me sit straight up in my seat in the theatre. This is something unlike what we heard in the first film – a synthesis of traditional instruments with icy, jagged synths, running through my body like an electric current. It’s a brilliant way to signal the shift in the franchise into a colder, bluer, even more science fiction dominated direction, while retaining all that made the original so unique. And it sounds so good.

The final song I’d like to mention comes from one of the best shows I’ve ever seen, SEATBELTS’ soundtrack to Cowboy Bebop. I’m specifically referring to the track Space Lion, which begins as a loose jazz saxophone, sonically adrift in space, and then transforms into something amazing. In the context of the show, it’s an enormously powerful, meditative piece, which places you into a trance, and then brings out the stars one by one, each sparking like embers out of the purple dusk.

Well that’s all folks – that’s 2022 in music, at least for me. I wrote this for my own memory, but mostly I wrote it so others might check out some of this music, and hopefully find something you also find moving and meaningful.