Click to copy
Listen to the 63 Grammy winners for album of the year, and they ll tell the story of the last six decades of popular music. Except, well, not really, at all. Zoom out on all 63 and squint a little and you might be able to see a general progression from jazz and vocal standards to rock to pop and hip-hop, but the timeline traced by the album of the year winners is really more of a Jeremy Bearimy: constantly curving, skipping around and looping back unpredictably.
That s part of the fun of the Grammys canon, though: The tale it tells isn t always the most coherent, but it s rich with moment-in-time pretzel logic that makes sense when viewed in totality not to mention fascinating quirks forgotten in most enduring pop narratives of the past. And every so often, the Recording Academy gets it totally right, rewarding an album so undeniably essential that all voting roads lead back to it as the one and only answer.
With a semester of online classes, many of us have lost the simple joy of strolling through campus with earbuds blaring, and full-blown concerts still feel like an unrealistic daydream.
ONTD Original: Top 10 Fiona Apple Singles.
To celebrate yet another accolade for Fetch The Bolt Cutters as Metacritic chose it as the album of the year, here is a ranking of Fiona Apple s top 10 singles according to the chaos I chose today for myself.
10. Shadowboxer from Tidal (1997) Any Fiona Apple music ranking will be tricky because it is all amazing, but her debut single was not as big as her later releases. The lyrics say everything you wanted to say when you were an angsty teen, but there was so much more to recover. Fiona once said that she used to play this song for herself a lot before releasing and it gave her a rush because she thought it sounded good, however she said that since then she stopped playing the songs for herself. The music video could have been so much better, also. Howard Stern saw this being performed live at his show, which he did not deserve because he is GROSS.
LOMA VISTA
Recording in Hollywood with Sturgill Simpson in the producer’s chair, the Midwest farmer’s daughter tried her hand at a West Coast pop album for her third LP. Rather than country confessionals, then, here were 10 songs taking in Heartbreakers-esque new wave, gospel and prime Fleetwood Mac. Complete with a more oblique, lyrical voice from Price, the result was another step forward for a musician who respects tradition but has never been shackled by it.
49 GWENIFER RAYMOND
TOMPKINS SQUARE
A fearsome live performer, foregoing chat for instrumental acoustic guitar intensity, Gwenifer Raymond in 2020 made the album that gave recorded shape to her uncompromising approach. Grown in ambition, if not noticeably in length from her 2018 debut, Garth Mountain drew both on the rabbit skulls and damp moss of British folk horror, and also a compositional wisdom that broadened the horizon of her American Primitive twang.