My favorite songs of 2022
A month into 2023, read about which were my favorite songs of the year past and why.
This is a list of some of my favorite songs of the year 2022 in which I dive into great detail about why and what it is that I like about each one of them. Here we go…
girlfriends – Can You Hear Me Now?
Maybe my favorite song from maybe my favorite album of the year. I don’t know, that is actually very hard to pinpoint and decide on. Which is why this list is more formulated like a concert setlist or album tracklist rather than any sort of ranking of preferences or actual favorites between one another. Nevertheless, I digress… Perhaps the best thing to come out of the pandemic is the music band “girlfriends”. A duo act, composed of singer-guitarist Travis Mills and drummer Nick Gross, to me they are the real essence behind the modern, latest wave of pop-punk. MGK’s good and all that… girlfriends are a completely different ball game to me. Under their self-titled album launched in October 2020, incredible songs such as Jessica, California, Eyes Wide Shut or Where Were You (the last of which featured the other Travis, Barker) graced this world. Criminally underknown, underrecognized, this is the best current band you still don’t know about. And from their June 2022 “(e)motion sickness” record, Can Your Hear Me Now? has made me feel the most in a very sensorial way. In a very obvious homage to one of their biggest influences, blink-182, after initial background noise of prep and moving stuff around in the recording studio and an acoustic guitar line, the song opens with a gorgeous piano lick that basically mimics the melody in blink-182’s mid-2000’s hit Feeling This. And the parallels, they don’t stop there, they continue rather throughout the song. But with its complete own spin, own twist, own re-imagination. All the contrasts, points of drop into the verses and re-burst into the choruses and all further transitions from one part to the other, all the points of giant and enormous sound, in juxtaposition to acoustics on guitar and Mills’ marvelous, even if still raw and screamy, melodic sensibilities, make this a sensational song. A work of art that has made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Like some but very few other ones have done in 2022.
Machine Gun Kelly – 9 Lives
MGK’s second album in his pop-punk era felt much more scattered, much more troubled, much more aimlessly darker. An act of giving into vices, a mission of self-flagellation that felt in great part a fumbled continuation of the much stronger, lovelier, much livelier publication that was Tickets to my Downfall. Mainstream Sellout on the other hand feels conceptually muddled, MKG in a brattier, more sort of entitled and confused mode. Lessons – it gives a distant feeling – not learned. An immaturity that starts to wear thin on you; him spinning his wheels in ways that you would hope wouldn’t persist into his 30’s. Venturing into new musical styles, after rising into the musical mainstream scene over a decade ago, he’s not exactly that young know-nothing white rapper from Cleveland. There is still a sense of earnesty in him, in the music, of genuine intention of improvement. Sonically, 9 Lives, the opening track of Mainstream Sellout’s deluxe version, despite being riddled in dark angst, in glorification of a toxic lifestyle that remains attached to him, it still feels uplifting, upbeat, hopeful, fightful. Nice harmonies in spots and some beautiful melodies that are, to me, an attractive contrast to his rap rise (a style which probably remains his strongest strong suit). Something that feels part of the struggle he embodies, not only personally, but artistically. Feeling it’s him against the world, a sort of complex of persecution; someone who, actually, has been a legitimate popstar for quite a while. He decided to change, to radically evolve musically from his rapping pillared career, to becoming pop-punk’s biggest defibrillator shock. He became an instant-hit in his pivot to rock, to guitar-driven, fast-paced, punchy, poppy music with Yungblud in their collaboration song “I think I’m Okay”. The gatekeepers detested him, but by no means anyone considered him a “mainstream sellout”. Maybe his most hardcore rap fans, but the album title Mainstream Sellout projects a feeling of misunderstanding, of self-victimization; apart from the recurring themes of self-fueled toxic relationships and their glorification. In 9 Lives, amongst the misdirection, the choppy waters that represent the album as a whole art piece, he gives into a lot of the dark – but the song closes on the hopeful, smile-provoking “but we’re not done yet”. Where he goes from here will be interesting, to see if a page can be turned, if he can, in whatever style of music that it is, truly lyrical grow, positively, emotionally, healthily, effectively. For everyone listening, but especially for himself.
blink-182 – Edging
The long-awaited return of blink-182 with Tom DeLonge. So fucking exciting. This was one of my personal highlights of 2022 in music and beyond. I have done as much as loved blink-182 with Matt Skiba as lead-singer, but to me Tom is something special, something incomparable with anyone else. I am one of those very few who was an Angels & Airwaves fan before a blink-182 fan. But it was titillatingly exciting to witness, for the first time in real time, Tom in blink; the long-awaited, seven-year plus return of him to the iconic pop-punk band along those two guys who he created such deep, sensational magic in song after song in years past: Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker. The combination of these three is unlike any other combination of musical creators. If you’re not a fan of blink, you probably won’t get it. But if you are, you do. You do. And to me, the song that signaled the start of “Act III of Tom in blink” – after what was their second separation of sorts – is a perfect piece of art to be exactly that: the return of the Mark, Tom and Travis Show. Is it my favorite blink-182 song of all time? Not even close. And to many it wasn’t even sufficient, it wasn’t even good enough. But it was to me. The high energy, very in-your-face vocal styling the song brings along through Tom and Mark is something that made me fall in love with it almost immediately. The magic of them two, in their so perfectly contrasting voices, going back and forth, is that thing that AVA doesn’t have that blink does and that they, in this such anticipated comeback, deliver on marvelously. The bite, the voracity, the power behind the music and singing performances grabs you from the get-go; projecting all three of them what feels like the sheer excitement of being “back”, together, to recapture the beauty of everything that they’ve done and to lead the legacy into the future, to grow it, to hopefully enrich it. To still take it to new and exciting places. The songwriting has always felt like their biggest strong suit, the combination of the trio, the secret recipe for what makes blink so special. And what, to me, has made Edging so rad, so cool, so enjoyable and captivating. No part of the song more so than the beautiful melodic transitional passage, stripped back to almost, almost, just vocals and drums that goes…
“I know, there’s a special place in hell
That my friends and I know well
There’s a perfect place to go
When it’s time to lose control”
… Which comes, funny enough from Mark and not from Tom, as my most liked bit of the song. To emphasize just that little bit more how special it is to have not just Angels & Airwaves and Tom-less blink-182. But to finally have the three Californian friends recapture that liveliest of chemistries. What they have is special. And what we do, thanks to the reunion, is that too.
Avril Lavigne – Dare To Love Me
A thrillingly beautiful song in Avril Lavigne’s return to pop-punk. Ironically, it is the one biggest point of contrast in the whole record; the one track that isn’t the glaring rendition of pop-punk that the rest of Love Sux is. A song that wasn’t actually meant to be, as Lavigne put it in an interview with Audacy’s Kevan Kenney prior to the official release of the record, that it was “the boys” –producers, official or otherwise, of the record – such as Travis Barker or Mod Sun that insisted to her that she must include this one ballad-y song amongst the power-punk that constitutes the rest of the album, even if she herself was doubtful about it. In that same interview, even if at that point the song title was still withheld, she would go on to state about what couldn’t be any other song than Dare To Love Me, that: “That’s a song that I just wrote by myself on the piano…It’s just tapping into the vulnerability of…like, going there again and being able to go there again, and ‘open up, fall in love’ and also, ‘Are you really ready? Don’t tell me you love me unless you really mean it.’” It tackles love, the feeling, the human expression in a relationship between two people, in such a brutally sincere way. That vulnerability that she alludes to is as real as it gets, in such a very disarming fashion. It is a gorgeous musical composition, in a sense so spiritually stripped back (within a healthy amount of post-production albeit), so simple, so sentimentally complex. It expresses itself in such a directness, you can’t help but become helplessly enthralled. Through the piano, through the harmonies, through the arrangement of lyrics, through a softly blazing refrain… it is so hard-hitting in the best possible way. Also, through just the pure sounding voice of Lavigne. The way she sings it, she lives it, she delivers and conveys it all – the sadness, the fear, the bite and zest, the yearn and hope, the honesty – is something that I cannot get enough of and why I come back to the song again and again. The way the first few “dares” in the chorus are sung, pronounced, accentuated, so perfectly is something that just gets me, something that I love to hear, over and again. Because of the pure, simple sound – and because of the emotion that drives it. So raw and real. It is a song so whole in itself. You see it through rose-colored glasses until you take them off and see that it still glows on its own, in that same but even more vibrant beautiful rose color.
Bad Omens – Just Pretend
I want to start off by saying that I know very little about Bad Omens. At the point of publishing, I have consciously only listened to two songs from them: Just Pretend and Nowhere To Go. The interesting thing about the former one, apart from it being an absolute banger, bluntly, is how it has single-handedly rocketed the band’s popularity, despite them being already a North American headlining act. “Just Pretend wasn’t a single. It popped off 6 months after the album came out and still doesn’t have a video. We promise it’s still cool to enjoy that song, don’t let the internet tell you it’s not. Think for yourself, friend”. Bad Omens tweeted from the band’s official Twitter account less than three months ago. During those first days of November, “The PRP” music news site reported how Just Pretend sat at one point at 17th on Spotify’s Viral 50 – Global chart list. Number 1 on iTunes’ metal chart and 3rd on iTunes’ rock chart. The interesting thing is what caused this phenomenon. Sure, it is a great, exhilarating, both a hard- and soft-hitting song (its bridge and reverbed outro are absolutely beautiful). But it wasn’t even a single on Bad Omens’ 2022 album The Death of Peace of Mind, as the band itself pointed out on that tweet. It didn’t even catch the fire of viral popularity out of the gate with the full release of the album. In an apparently unintended modern success-story, it became so by chance on TikTok, months after its initial release. In a world where there’s more great music than you will ever hear, it’s precisely that, getting heard, that is so challenging. Breaking through the noise, outshining in the ever-present, overwhelming world of shinny sonic sparkle. Personally, Just Pretend hits just with my personal and limited taste of metalcore. Loud in contrast with being gentle in just about the right amount. And it is a section of that striking chorus that broke through into the current zeitgeist, coloring vast swathes of TikTok and finishing selling out a concert tour that was already upgrading in venue sizes as it progressed. The intensity, the power within the three gone-viral lines of the song’s four-line chorus…
“I can wait for you at the bottom
I can go stay away if you want me to
I can wait for years if I gotta”
…is what has struck gold, what has stuck in people’s heads. Those 10 seconds, their potency, their raw, emotional force of gravity, have done it. Also, because they have somehow lent themselves to the caricature, the parody, the fun in the absurdity of serving as background sound to the most ridiculous life scenes. Such as this.
Falling in Reverse – Zombified
Very likely the most cringe song on this list. As much as some of the singles on MGK’s Mainstream Sellout are too, Zombified by Ronnie Radke’s band Falling in Reverse can easily take the cake. But goddamn does this song absolutely bang. The melody, all the instrumental support, the vocal delivery… There’s so much to like about this song. I discovered it while I was watching All Elite Wrestling last September, when female superstar wrestler Saraya debuted for the company and did so with Zombified as her brand-new entrance theme. The girlfriend of Radke, there’s much of her that can border on the cringe also. But it damn does it fit her look, her aura, her swag and star-feel… It works so incredibly well. But then there’s the lyrics, when you stop and pay attention to what they’re actually saying. It is an anthem of cancel culture! Woo let’s go! The subject is treated throughout the song with a very low-level complexity of thought. Simple, plain, unimaginative grievance politics melted into a song. Look, for as cliched as it is, cancel culture is a real thing. It affects many people in unjust, over-the-top, crazy ways. There are many things wrong behind the fire stokers of cancel culture. It has also been co-opted into a blanket excuse for sorry excuses of people to do ungodly, fucked up things. And when you still have a livelihood, when you’re not tossed on the street, it rubs many people the wrong way to be a crybaby. Even to sympathetic crowds. This is what this song is. A wildly successful singer-songwriter throwing a pity party for himself. It is hard to tell what is real, what accusations are legitimate, which aren’t, but Radke is a bit of a walking smoke machine… that might actually be on fire. No less because he’s served actual time in prison. But beyond all that, and beyond how cringe, silly, ridiculous the lyrics are, god this song just hits so hard. And you end up wanting to scream “THEY’RE CANCELLING, CANCELLING YOU AND THEY WON’T STOP ‘TILL EVERYBODY’S ZOMBIFIED” from the top of your lungs. A guilty pleasure if there ever was one.
Demi Lovato – SUBSTANCE
In the sonically heaviest, “rockiest” album of her entire career Demi Lovato brought to the genre what is probably the best technical and most powerful voice in the entire scene. There are levels to this and Lovato is a talent of enormous proportions. It is hard to pick a song among what is a fantastic record in Holy Fvck. But something about Substance, at least to me, has made it stay as the best – my favorite. The technical brilliance, the awe-inspiring range that Lovato has in her voice is something that can elevate the base-level of any given song. This particular one tackles on broader societal issues, very much in tune with the times and what the world has experienced in the last handful of years, as she herself has described in her track-by-track official breakdown of the record: “The overall meaning behind Substance is that I wanted to make a point that we live in a world where nothing is real anymore. There’s so much that’s lacking substance, from the content that we intake to the activities we do in our normal lives. We’re always on our phones, we’re always on the internet and I wanted to make a song that was saying how I missed the substance that used to be the world we live in”. Yet, as is fairly obvious in some parts of it, the song swirls around in the more personal as well and especially in its chorus. Something that remains a steel-hard theme throughout the entire 16-song-long tracklist. Knowing a little bit about her retched life, her jaw-dropping struggles and her almost mind-numbing resilience through what has been a torturous, hellish, rocky life in many aspects for her, the voracity and the vulnerability, the ferocity and the gentleness, pours through an album that might’ve been too big a departure – in terms of commercial success – from her last decade veering towards a pop sound much more than a rock one. But the album and this song retain a musical sensibility that is truly wondrous. Because it is so real, because it so dark, because it so hopeful, because it feels so intense, so full of purpose and so full of a sense existential wanting to improve, to be better. It touches on so many of same white noise horrors that, that for example Machine Gun Kelly does in Mainstream Sellout also, but from a point of greater maturity, of greater honesty, of much lesser self-flagellation, of being much less content with the bad, not in any way glorifying the horrors. The sincerest reflections of what is lyrically trying to be conveyed, the melodic screaming feels like a fightback. One you want to come long for the ride.
Dayseeker – Crying While You’re Dancing
One of the singles on Dayseeker’s marvelous 2022 record Dark Sun. A beautifully melodic, ambient and deeply emotional album that is captured and angelically transmitted in many if not all its songs but in few more so than in Crying While You’re Dancing. It is very hard to pick just one and I’m going with one that I don’t even think for sure, in certain terms, is my number one from this record. But it is right there with it. Or with them. Although a pretty big stylistic departure from their previous albums, and one condoned by many original fans, it has felt like a complete level-up. Like, not only have they not lost a step, not fumbled having to pivot from one album to the next, but rather they have punched right through onto their next stage. Something about Dayseeker, and about their vocalist and lyric-writer Rory Rodriguez, felt like a gigantic wave coming into shore. A band with all the potential in the world because in Rodriguez they have a generationally talented technical singer. His power, his capacity for vocal projection, of loud, high-note-hitting, is truly fantastical. I love every singer of every song in this list, but after Lovato, he might be the rangiest, most technically able of them all. It is the power in his throat what has fueled their ascension the most. But everything that accompanies, and specially in such a “vibe” of a record, where the songs are these melodic trances, this soulful, atmospheric sense of flight, of weaving in the current, of pure, undistilled musical flow… It’s just so articulately, so craftfully put together. It’s masterful. Because this song is over-the-top good and, again, might not even be the best on the record. But the way you can feel so powerfully, so violently within a soft and gentle vibe, is completely remarkable. The word-writing, to complete it all, is stellar and levitating. Having delt with intense grief in the writing of this album, Rodriguez struggled with the reception from some of the band’s most hardcore fans, claiming that he reached a feeling that he should not do this anymore. But thank god for everyone that told him how wrong he was to feel that and to listen to that subsection of the fanbase. Because this collection of songs is indescribably good. The way this one in particular states, in subtleties, in inuendo, in clearer, more direct words also, how hard it is to power through pain, to dance. Of the struggles and sometimes of the horrors of trying to cope. How, despite the pain, of heartache or otherwise, it is worth it. You dance, you try, you keep going. Even if you’re crying while you’re dancing.
Mary Spender – Smells Like Teen Spirit (cover)
If you’re looking for something to grip you, it is definitely this cover song. Mary Spender is a singer-songwriter/youtuber who has created an enormously significant following on the world’s quintessential video platform. There she published the cover, not only in audio, but of her live rendition, playing Kurt Cobain’s 1953 Martin D-18 “Grandpa” acoustic guitar. It is a song you’ve heard time and again in your life, I’m sure, if you’re into rock music at all. It is an iconic track if there ever was one. Dark, incredibly weird, lyrically perplexing but also so absorbing and magnetic because that’s what great songs do, and this is not one lacking any kind of greatness. Nor is it missing anything in Spender’s version either. With her own distinct tonality, voice and cadence, this cover is barely like any other you might’ve ever heard of Smells Like Teen Spirit. She really makes it her own standout version. You go into it perhaps expecting a good cover of a classic anthem of the Grunge Era of rock and you leave wanting to play it again, wanting to feel that visceral sense of grip that it evokes, that feeling of deep and profound captivation a master crafter like Spender can create and express through a performance such as this one. With such soulfulness, with such raw emotion, it doesn’t let you go. It infects you in the best possible way. After a deep sigh of relief, reaching the completion of the song, Spender says between a nervous laugh “Woo, of my goodness… That felt emotional”. You felt it right along with her. “I’m like shaking, actually – oh my goodness”. It does not feel it overstated on her behalf because it is that kind of performance.
Beauty School Dropout – ALMOST FAMOUS (ft. Mark Hoppus)
It had been a couple of very rough years. At the point of August 2022 it had been two and (almost) a half years since the covid pandemic took the world by storm. Furthermore, it would have been particularly horrific if you were Mark Hoppus, blink-182’s bassist and co-lead singer, who had been diagnosed with leukemia. Everything was already awful enough for on top if it all one of modern rock’s nicest people – not to mention if you held him in hero/idol status – had fallen capture to such a devasting ail. Every day that we live but especially when you get sick from something like that, the possibility of your life being imminently over is as real as it can get. You followed him, you saw him put on a smile, a positive kind of energy out into the world on the Twitch streams he decided to start doing throughout the pandemic. And things, as he chronicled them, started to get better. All the way until making the full recovery that he made from the disease. It was so wonderful when he announced he was cured of the cancer. It was a great day. And given blink-182 finally ended up reforming in their most classic and recognizable form, with the return of Tom in the fall of 2022, there is a funny, analyzed story to tell about blink depending on near-death experiences to get reunited; attracted back together. Which we’ll do a different day. But Almost Famous, from until-the-moment-I-heard-the-song-completely-unknown-to-me band called Beauty School Dropout, was the return of Mark Hoppus to the “music video scene”. Another of first collaborated-with songs was as the feature on the masterful All I Wanted from Avril Lavigne’s previously mentioned Love Sux record. Hoppus had left but with how rapidly, purposefully he returned, it was almost like he had never left at all. Almost. And Almost Famous’ music video felt like the exclamation point to the return of Hoppus – who had not lost a step and decided to prove so in a collaboration with an up-and-coming but very much “unknown” band with less than 7k YouTube subscribers. With his melodic, so whole voice, his gravity of tone, his such soothing delivery of words, his emergence as the song goes along really establishes it; gives an anchoring feel that also feels like a tranquil rocket launch – if such a thing is even possible. He irrupts in Verse 2 with a simple but classic 4-liner of Hoppus, that this time goes…
“All my days, they end the same
I take a hit, relive the pain
Am I the one who needs to change?
What’s the difference anyways”
…before dropping out, not out of beauty school but out of Beauty School’s song. And then subtly remerging back in with backing vocals for two of the flowing refrain’s lines. Then departs for the band to close it off, to complete it, to finish it off and show who it is that they are and why Hoppus had decided to give his difficult to overstate seal of approval. The shenanigans, the very blink-inspired kind of nonsense and silliness off which the video concept seems based on, are a fantastic feel-good way to visually reconnect with the pop-punk legend and his distinct, “spikey” but still flowing, luscious hair. Mark back, I like.
Starset – Waiting On The Sky To Change ft. Breaking Benjamin
The only song published this past year by what is maybe a top-5 favorite band of mine. A song that I have liked, that I have liked a lot, but perhaps didn’t make me fall in love, completely disarmed. That tempered feeling, of really enjoying not quite fainting in sensorial pleasure was most likely to do with it not being exactly a started-from-scratch song but rather a reimagination of a track that existed in an original form, under Starset’s former iteration: “Downplay”. However, this is me nitpicking, trying to figure out to myself why it didn’t absolutely and then some hit the bull’s eye of my musical heart. But damn, even with all, on re-listening in order to write this piece on some of my favorite songs of the 2022 year, it still hit so many notes of the “my love of Starset scale”. Its most thrilling aspect is the bringing in of a band that used to be up there amongst my absolute favorites even if it dwindled over time. My appreciation for Breaking Benjamin is still deep, is still profound. Having done on-stage collaborations throughout the years, the mashup, the mix of Dustin Bates’ and Benjamin Burnley’s voices in an official, studio release is something that comes through on the speakers with all that wholesomeness, that contrast between Burnley’s heavier, grittier, fuller style and Bates’ punchier, more acidic, more accentuated high register but also his soulful gravity… makes it a marvel of a combination. A beautiful symbiotic blend. It is also an interesting revisitation thematically for a band, Starset, lyrically driven by Bates. Someone pointed out in a YouTube comment how Earthrise, off the 2021 album Horizons, says “And I waited for the sky to change but, oh, it never did” in its opening verse; a neat, thrilling little lyrical callback to this obscure Downplay song called Waiting On The Sky To Change. Maybe it is a callback of the callback of the callback. Maybe the sky did indeed, in the end, after he thought it wouldn’t, actually change. I wouldn’t put it pass Dustin wanting to be that meta. But maybe it just… happened. Maybe the opportunity, stylistically, was just too good to not bring this song back into the present to be the long-awaited duet with Breaking Benjamin’s Benjamin Burnley. Whatever the case, the wait for the sky to change… was worth every second.
Movements – Barbed Wire Body
One of the up-and-coming bands of the last half decade plus, they hit with impact with their fast back-to-back releases of Outgrown Things in 2016 and Feel Something in 2017. The first of the two albums was good, very good even; Feel Something felt momentous, like an incredibly work of art. Grueling greatness through its collection of songs. Feel something you absolutely do. And after a three-year process of simmering they came back with a third record in 2020, No Good Left to Give, and its B-Sides-included version in 2021. But rather than going back into the black, into silence, they picked up their instruments and kept the momentum going through the rest of 2021 and 2022 with what have remained as three stand-alone singles. Banquet, Cherry Thrill and my personal favorite Barbed Wire Body, an angsty, punchy but still melodic, harrowing, emotion-twisting anthem. Also, with a persistent sense of pop throughout the grimy bass and cutting guitar sounds. Which serves as a very nice contrast of a wrapping paper to a song lyrically filled with anguish, anger, resentment, of working through complicated feelings in and out of a relationship. Whereas Feel Something was the huge, powerful sound of deep human understanding, the direction Patrick Miranda, Movements’ lead-singer, has taken with these last handful of songs and specially Barbed Wire Body has felt like a significant departure. A conscious effort to juxtapose it all against what those first singles and songs molded the band as. Still very much trapping, but maybe not quite as hypnotic. But maybe that just is because empathy is in itself a much more attractive, sympathy-generating feeling than bitterness is. Especially for their emo or sort of emo-adjacent vibe. But whether their first or most recent songs are best, the evolution hasn’t felt “missteped”. It was probably necessary if nothing else and Barbed Wire Body feels like a great first sort of experimentation and launching pad for whatever comes next.
girlfriends – Missing You
Perhaps the most powerful, heart-wrenching, painful but beautiful songs I’ve heard in all of the last year and one of the most so that I’ve ever put in my ears. I’ve already dived into another one their songs from the endlessly wonderful, endlessly brilliant “(e)motion sickness” record but I would be remised if I didn’t come to Missing You before leaving, departing this unexpectedly (even I didn’t think it would be so) long article about some of my favorite songs of 2022. It captures, it emanates so succinctly out of so much of what Travis Mills does so goddamn well. Even if just a step below their self-titled debut record from 2020, “(e)motion sickness” is consolidating artwork for them, for “girlfriends”, for Travis and Nick, and this song is possibly the most emotive on the whole record. Like hugging a cactus, listening to this song hurts. But it is also too good not to. The (e)motion it evokes grabs you from the start and until the very end, starting with the opening guitar notes and through Mills’ gorgeous melodies, through his channeled bravado, his slight bratty-ness and his heart cried out through cutting delivery of love- and hurt-filled words. His clear signing, front and center in the best kind of way, it gets levelled out with the instrumentation where it needs, stands rather alone when it again needs to and shines through what feels like very well put-together production. But it is all that (e)motion that Mills pours out from his insides… from the very deep of his being, to strike into your own deepest of depths. The level of craft, through a whole lot of simplicity – but by god is simplicity not always that simple to capture – is lovely in so many different senses. It makes you feel, it grabs you, it holds you, it chills you. If you’ve ever experienced loss, a breakup, the sense of missing someone so deeply that you can hardly explain, that you can’t put it to words because it hurts too much, Travis does one hell of a job trying to. Doing so.
Lizzy McAlpine – hate to be lame feat. FINNEAS
The last song on this list, the last song from this list that I listened to in 2022. A beautiful trance that this tune takes you into. It is so absorbing, so “take you by the hand”, so to speak. It is a gentle, softly ecstatic adventure; deeply sentimental, sensationally thoughtful. I only discovered Lizzy McAlpine in the month of December, as a great and fabulous way to close off the musical year. I had not heard of her, except for maybe a very fast, in-passing mention of her name. But I was intrigued when one of her songs came through my feed. And it grabbed me. This wasn’t just anyone. The thumbnail placed her in a living-like room, with an acoustic guitar, sat on a stool and in front of a guitar. Like anybody else, but McAlpine wasn’t like anybody else. Expecting to hear a nice, pleasant but maybe not all that memorable acoustic song, I left captivated – wanting more, knowing that this is someone with that special something. That first song was ceilings but the one that stroked, gently caressed my sense of feel, my dreams and imagination the most, was “hate to be lame”. A song so gorgeously crafted, so awesomely sung, felt, delivered, performed in all-encompassing perfection. It does attract you by force, by intense pull, yet it softly sways and dances with you. Alongside Billie Eilish’s brother and producer extraordinaire Finneas, the song jumps within an ever-constant state of flow, of delicate ability, from verse to chorus and back and to the precious bridge and to Finneas’ solo, practically an a cappella verse 3 before wrapping up in this fading, spine-tingling way, with a duet-ed final chorus. A song that approaches embarrassment and love, and hopes, and dreams, and admission, of revelation to oneself and to the world. Doubt but ultimately certainty. A song that feels introspective and yet extremely comfortable in its own skin, in its own being. In both its acoustic version and in its original form. A piece of beauty, an amazing little listening experience. A feeling of captivation. An easy but complexly wonderful song.
Hope you enjoyed!