Music in 2023

When I began writing about the music I have enjoyed listening to, I started by saying that I did not know how to speak intelligently about music. That is not to say that there aren’t intelligent ways of speaking about music, only that they are strange to me. In the end, I experience music as a beauty glimpsed but not understood. I would like to pretend that this is quite different from how I experience film and literature, two art forms I have studied enough to speak about intelligently – but of course it’s not really any different at all. I can pass myself off as having an intellectual understanding of these things, because I am able to notice and describe patterns and details and employ the correct words to do so, but in the one area that counts – the intersection of truth and beauty, or the uncertainty of the gap between them – then I am as mute as ever. You can only experience a feeling – you can’t really describe it, except by creating something that creates a similar feeling in someone else.

I’m saying all this as a way of recognizing that I shouldn’t say more, that in fact there is no need to. I have already written about all of these songs, in too many other posts, and none of those words really matter much. But the music speaks for itself. So instead of attempting to recap these highlights of my listening in 2023, I will simply do the thing I was trying to do from the beginning: I will share them, and you can listen, if you will.