For the last several years, it has become my year end tradition to compile a list of some of my favorite songs from the past year and compose a haiku to accompany each one. It’s a rather meditative exercise, and an occasion to sift through the colors, textures, and images that the music evokes for me with a specificity and brevity that doesn’t always come naturally to me.
I’m a bit late with my little ‘Year In Haiku’ this winter because a flu knocked me out for the last two weeks and I’ve been doing nothing but laying on the couch feeling sorry for myself and taking turns with my partner to PostMates soup. And also as it turns out it takes a long time to write 50 haikus.
As a result, I’ve already read a lot of the lists that came out this year, both big and small, and although I find value in the lists that share large chunks of their top albums and songs of the year with those of the other major lists, I especially love reading the ones that are mostly full of surprises, with stuff that managed to fly under the radar of most year-end compiling. In this spirit, you’ll find some indie staples on the list that follows (for instance, both of the year’s Big Thief albums are, naturally, represented), but I hope that more often than not you’ll find something you weren’t expecting.
The illustration for this post was created by Hullabaloo contributor Tommy Ordway. To me, it feels like being at home inside in the quiet of my childhood bedroom, watching a little snow fall outside and pondering the trajectory of the coming year. 2019 was full of uncertainty and growth for me. After years of seeking out stability and, to be honest, a certain degree of stasis, the ground underneath me shifted all at once. But although I’m surrounded by new people in a new city with a new job, this little blog remains a constant and important part of my life. To everyone who is here reading, submitting music, contributing writing, and sharing this community with me, I am profoundly grateful.
Not that I’m especially in a position to be handing out advice, but if you’re looking for something to put on your list of New Years resolutions, may I humbly suggest that you create something. Put a piece of yourself out into the world that probably won’t make any money, just because you love it. Make it a place to foster joy and your wildest, most impractical creative impulses – like a bunch of haiku poems written for indie songs.
Without further ado, here are some of the songs that accompanied me through my days this year, and made an impact on me. It is an incomplete collection, and certainly not designed to be authoritative. If you click through to the artists’ Bandcamp or Soundcloud pages you’ll find links to buy their music, which I encourage you to do.
∇ Rosie Tucker // Habit
fluttering ember still breathless with the heat that flame aches to meet flame
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∇ Sneaks // Suck It Like A Whistle
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a soda pop lake fizzing off in the distance of the toy car race
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∇ BACKXWASH // DON’T COME TO THE WOODS
incantation as hip hop, every verse a spell cast by the chorus
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∇ Julia Jacklin // Don’t Know How To Keep Loving You
soft peach skin belly squeezed starving in shaking hands wounds scrubbed in sugar
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∇ Al Riggs // GODKILLER
the velvet forest blinking through the descent in a half-dreamed darkness
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∇ Big Thief // Not
searching the ceiling of my childhood bedroom for cracks in its resolve
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∇ Baloji // Kaniama
sprawling and tightly woven, a molten marble forest in the sky
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∇ Angie McMahon // Standout
the lilt of the waves is no match for the terror of their endlessness
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∇ Christinna O // Lay It Down
if the sky opened its arms and made off with us on the bluest day
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∇ Laura Stevenson // Perfect
the passage of clouds reimagines the dull blue as a great canvas
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∇ RF Shannon // Wild Rose Pass
full of the kind of magic that turns river stones round and beach glass smooth
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∇ Lucy Dacus // Forever Half Mast
asphalt winding up rolling hills like ribbon and down like slide guitar
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∇ Evil // Mice Or Men
a song that does not progress so much as ripens heavy on the vine
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∇ Runnner // Eggshell
the lonely trail a let-go-of balloon makes as it drifts out of reach
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∇ Great Grandpa // Bloom
the first time we roll the windows down in the spring everything changes
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∇ Vagabon // In A Bind
a tiny bird who’s also a feeling decides against flying south
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∇ False Priest // Turn
a lone stone skitters down the cheek of a great mountain ahead of the crush
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∇ Big Thief // Orange
ancient tragedy told in flipbook flashes to a room of doves
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∇ Pip Blom // Daddy Issues
boxing match bruises form unnoticed under fists which might be dancing
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∇ Szymon // Yakuza
seasonless but not unenchanted with both blush and sting of sunlight
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∇ Caroline Polachek // So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings
summertime romance in which the tears at the end are a warm night’s rain
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∇ 0171 // 1000 Words
glitching toothily holes poked in and out of an ungrasped memory
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∇ Better Oblivion Community Center // Chesapeake
the mournful song that every kettle tries to sing when it starts to cry
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∇ Hiss Golden Messenger // Cat’s Eye Blue
as comforting as the merest suggestion of chamomile tea
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∇ Love You Later // Harder On Myself
disco ball casting sparkles to an empty room on the first spring night
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∇ The National // Light Years
bobbing in the waves a bird too far out to sea to fly back to land
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∇ River Gods // Stressed Out
aftertaste of the last ray of sunlight over the beach parking lot
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∇ Shormey // LA
synchronized swimmers perfectly languid even in vhs buzz
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∇ Friendship // Millionfish
a very long walk through sagebrush hills without picking up your feet
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∇ Esther Rose // Handyman
sparkling sounds coming to sit down on the porch and braid each other’s hair
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∇ Mdou Moctar // Kamane Tarhanin
rich acrid darkness split through with an openness that swallowed the air
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∇ Bess Atwell // Cherry Baby
a world behind glass where everything is rendered in swimming pool blue
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∇ Park Hotel // Make It Happen
engines revving up but when the flag goes down they burst into flowers
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∇ Du Blonde // Angel
summer nights’ scraped knees and the fireflies followed us all the way home
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∇ Diva Sweetly // Detox Island
candy coated sludge sugar crashing neuroses tied up in a bow
