The Best Music of 2020: #5–1
Ten musicians who helped us pass the time in an interminable year
10–6 | 5–1
5. Moses Sumney
Grae
Whether lying nude on his album cover or standing six-foot three at a video shoot spattered in glitter, Moses Sumney’s physical form exudes a canonical masculinity—charismatic, chiseled, and imposing. It makes his examinations of sexual identity and non-binary gender on double album Grae all the more intriguing. The fluidity of these twenty songs—coalescing somewhere between folk, electro-soul, and avant-garde indie rock—mirrors the 29-year old Ghanian-American’s existence in liminal space. In a world climate of polarization, Sumney remains imperturbably inbetween.
His skyscraping falsetto might have guaranteed pop stardom in some parallel universe where Sumney wasn’t infatuated with eclectic instrumentation and dark lyricism. But in this one, “Neither/Nor” and “Bless Me” slowly peel open like chrysalises into a flutter of harp, lutes, and synthesizer. “Cut Me” pens pain as the great motivator, and “Two Dogs” uncovers mysteries in the visage of departed pets: “I learned in death we are all unified in countenance/ Eyes bulging as if they’d seen the truth.” The songs float like ether encased in liquid amber, as luminous as they are disorienting.
Sumney’s upbringing amidst blended cultures and constant travel inspires modern soul music that is an infinite refraction of American pop, baroque elegance and perpetual motion—true immigrant songs. Grae dwells in multiplicity; it is androgynous yet erotically charged, as malleable as the crests and valleys of his unearthly vocal calligraphy. Sumner proves that the word “toxic,” when used to define traditional masculinity, can be rearranged and transformed into “exotic” with but a single brush stroke.
Moses Sumney — “Neither/Nor”
4. Bob Dylan
Rough and Rowdy Ways
To my ears, Dylan has always sounded more myth than man. His song catalog verges on scripture, inarguable and Almighty, yet vaguely distant and impersonal. That a 39th studio album could somehow change this equation in the calcified mind of a middle-aged music critic feels unlikely, if not miraculous.
But on Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan’s vitality is magnified by mortality. Over the greasy blues of “False Prophet” the 79-year old Nobel Prize winner sneers “I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life.” Is there a songwriter alive more qualified to craft “Murder Most Foul,” a 17-minute piano and string elegy in which JFK’s assassination serves as wellspring for the entire canon of modern pop music and our nation’s inexorable decay? It’s the most fully realized allegory of popular culture disguised as generational malaise since Don MacLean’s “American Pie.”
Here, Dylan embodies a beloved, grizzled survivor more than Godhead. The late-career renaissance that once felt improbable now seems preordained, but Dylan’s ascension to singer-songwriter Emeritus was only made possible by the cratering of his former, down-n-out incarnations—the motorcycle-crashing junkie, the tattered divorcé, the panned Born Again Christian of the 80’s, the irrelevant troubadour of the early 90’s. “I’ve already outlived my life by far” he confides on “Mother of Muses,” but Dylan approaches the prosect of dying as studiously as he does living. His back pages remain eternal prologue.
On Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan no longer feels like an institution. He’s something far more substantial; a mortal man. His manner is sage, his acumen razor sharp, and his perspective measured, but that nasally voice, ever peculiar, finds new purchase in back of this throat. It’s as if he’s singing from the firmament. The revelatory beauty of Dylan’s songs has always been that they say more about us than him. Perhaps he always has been speaking to me — only now am I listening.
Bob Dylan — “Murder Most Foul”
3. Phoebe Bridgers
Punisher
When Bridgers sang about being “quarantined in a bad dream” in 2017, who knew she’d already glimpsed the future? Her shadowy sophomore album would become an unlikely pandemic companion in 2020, as much a sedative for the anxious mind as salve for loneliness. Punisher is a slow release medicine capsule; Bridgers unblinking confessions (“I love a good place to hide in plain sight”) can stop you cold in your tracks long after the music’s nocturnal warmth has delivered much needed comfort. For six months, I never heard the album’s second half because the wobbly womb of “Garden Song” became the narcoleptic trigger my mind needed it to be. I drifted off each night, my curious subconscious left to soak up the rest of Punisher’s lessons.
It knew, long before I did, that Bridgers’ voice is a blazing taper, illuminating the contours of whichever song it inhabits, whether swooning lullaby (“Halloween”), soaring pop (“Kyoto”) or banjo-plucked ballad (“Graceland Too.”) It knew the precious balm of human connection when Bridgers briefly reunites with Boygenius pals Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus to proclaim “I will do anything for you. ” Theirs is an aching, three-part harmony born of heaven’s breath.
And it knew that Punisher is Bridgers’ homemade science project transformed into a full-blown volcano — slaved over, singular, and communally cathartic. Closer “I Know the End” is a slow building epiphany inhabited by churches, slaughterhouses, and slot machines, erupting in a cacaphony of apocalyptic horns and howls, and concluding with Bridgers’ hot gasps fogging up the speakers. Even amidst endings as unsettled as this one, resolution can be found.
Phoebe Bridgers — “Garden Song”
2. Fiona Apple
Fetch the Bolt Cutters
Every work of art has patrons, but no album in this tumultuous year was fucking adored by its fans more intensely than this one. And while it sure helped, you didn’t have to despise the patriarchy to get Fetch The Bolt Cutters. You just needed to appreciate the knowledge that surviving the most egregious of human traumas grants us the deepest forms of expression, those that usually emanate from within.
Apple left no stone unturned in this, her most personal excavation. She dug into teenage diaries for lyrical inspiration (“Relay”), confronted childhood bullies (“Shameika”) and sexual abusers (“For Her”), commiserated with needy ex-lovers’ exes (“Ladies”), and unmasked her own neediness (“Rack of His”). She built drum tracks by thwacking household items (kitchen containers, oil cans filled with dirt, and even the bones of her dead dog) and stitching them together into ramshackle rhythms. It all felt intricate but dazzlingly off the cuff—an extraordinary Rube Goldberg machine of homemade percussion, found sound, jazz-like improv, and hair raising poetry.
Timing is everything. On its own merits, Fetch The Bolt Cutters was a therapeutic totem—a clock tower whose whizzing gears, levers, and pistons were exposed like guts on the outside, enumerating its creator’s passions down to the very minute. But with all of us stuck in our homes, banging on pots and pans, and going tribal, anyone could relate to this seething, hermetic masterpiece on a visceral level. “Fetch the bolt cutters/ I’ve been here way too long” became far more than Apple’s battle cry against glass ceilings and claustrophobic relationships; it was shorthand for feeling trapped in 2020.
Fiona Apple — “I Want You to Love Me”
1. Waxahatchee
St. Cloud
“I have a gift I’m told, for seeing what’s there.” Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield professes on “The Eye,” a nod to the observer’s mind that she holds in high regard: “To possess something arcane, oh it’s a heavy weight.” The 30-year old singer/songwriter bears that burden, and others, gracefully on glowing fifth album St. Cloud — an artistic pivot from boisterous indie rock to rootsy Americana that mirrors Crutchfield’s maturation into newfound sobriety.
St. Cloud’s songs feel ageless, with familiar, indelible harmonies fashioned around plainspoken metaphors. Her struggles against addiction are “War” and “Hell.” Her trusted confidantes are “Witches.” A period of personal growth, “Lilacs.” But Crutchfield packs a scholar’s prose into these fireside folk tunes without ever sounding showy. “You paint my body like a rose/ A depth of beauty in repose” might be the most gorgeous couplet uttered all year.
St. Cloud is a narrative of regret, exuberance, and the discernment found in between. It’s final triumvirate of songs (“Ruby Falls”, “Arkadelphia” and “St. Cloud”) captures the people, places and things that would define Crutchfield — the funeral of a friend, an unlikely homecoming, and a spiritual reckoning. She repurposes them with impressionistic grace over mellotron flourishes and a muted acoustic: “I might just show up in white dress/ Turn reluctance on its ear/ If the dead just go on living/ Then there’s nothing left to fear.” Unfettered by burdens, St. Cloud transforms into simultaneous destination, journey, and reconciliation as articulated by T.S. Eliot: “The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
Next to Fiona Apple’s emotionally walloping Fetch the Bolt Cutters (the year’s other masterwork by a freshly sober songwriter), St. Cloud is a humble underdog. It exudes a quiet competence and sacred honesty — a modern classic that marries the redemptive vigor of Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels On A Gravel Road with the melanchholy undertones of Wilco’s Summerteeth. The serenity is subtle, the joys tempered, but the payoff is sublime and long lasting. Crutchfield courts oblivion and seeks clemency, acknowledging their relentless tug-of-war without romanticizing the struggle. “I’m an angler married to the sea” she opines knowingly. Her suffering is sweet, her lucidity worth the wait.
Waxahatchee — “St.Cloud”
10–6 | 5–1
