When it comes to popular music (and movies), I always enjoy reading people’s year-end, best-of lists.
This is for two reasons: (1) It’s a road map to finding the artists whose work I missed during the Gregorian calendar; and (2) it occasionally gives affirmation of my own personal favorites in the same time period.
Discovering new sounds has been an active pursuit for me over the past five decades. It’s a constant pop-culture treasure hunt that used to be a lot more work before the advent of the internet. So, thanks, Al Gore.
Conversely, there’s sooooooooo much new music out there anymore, it’s really hard to sift through it all. I miss a lot of really good stuff the first time around.
This is where the aforementioned best-of lists come in handy. If the reviewer’s tastes vibrate at a similar frequency to mine, then I seek out their suggestions, quite often with grand success. And if they happen to single out an album or song that I liked myself, well then, the sonic convergence makes it all the groovier.
So in this season of sharing, I offer up this list of my 20 favorite songs, in no particular order, from the orbital period that has been 2017:
“Don’t Be Denied,” Norah Jones
“Time Coast,” Robyn Hitchcock
“December,” Benjamin Gibbard
“Pharoah,” Young Mopes
“Pearly Gate Smoke Machine,” Guided By Voices
“Trick,” Matthew Sweet
“Odyssey,” the Accidentals
“Me and My Man,” Deer Tick
“See What Love Did to Me,” Yusuf/Cat Stevens
“Not Everything That Counts Can Be Counted,” Bill Bragg
“Dead in the Water (Live),” Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds
“Wait for Me,” Tift Merritt
“Bobby Fuller Died For Your Sins,” Chuck Prophet
“Ballad of the Dying Man,” Father John Misty
“Disappeared Planets,” Richard Edwards
“Maybe a Moment,” Justin Townes Earle
“Putin,” Randy Newman
“If Was Your Boyfriend,” The Waterboys
“Make It Clear,” The Feelies
“Broken Anyway,” Ryan Adams
To listen to this on YouTube.com, click this link: https://youtu.be/X2LT_fablic
[divide margin_top="4" margin_bottom="4" color="#000000"]Beesley is a production editor for 360, He can be reached at (208) 848-8209 or beez@lmtribune.com.
