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The most quarantine-sounding album of the year was actually written and recorded pre-pandemic, but you could be forgiven for imagining it as the sound of an artist in lockdown, bouncing off the walls in wild fits of pent-up creative energy, because it kind of is just that. Early rehearsals were in Apple's Venice Beach home studio, using home-made percussive objects and chanting as she and her collaborators paraded around the house. This experimental approach to pop music and rhythms gives the album an unconventional and yet oddly comforting sound, as if assuring us that someone else is going through this craziness with us and is feeling just as disconnected. After all, haven’t we all at one point this year wanted to throw open the window, stick our heads out, and, in true Howard Beale fashion, yell out “Fetch the Bolt Cutters!”?
9) folklore
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If, in January, someone had said that eleven months later Taylor Swift would be the indie darling of the year, disbelief would have no doubt been the mildest reaction. But here we are. And, no matter what else you may think, the fact is that she earned it. 34 songs in eight months, two number one albums, and critical accolades (I’m counting this as one release overall because evermore is really just a continuation of folklore’s deep dive into introspection and storytelling). With strong influences from collaborators Jack Antonoff and the National’s Aaron Dessner, Swift dug in deep and came out with deeply personal yet much more honest self-revelation, but also fictional imaginings about what it must be like to be so depressed that your good days are everybody else’s worst, the revenge of Este Haim’s murder, and a biographical sketch about the eccentric socialite former owner of her house. This is not how she made her reputation, and it felt like the perfect pandemic music precisely because it was so unexpected, and yet so relatable. Tell me the line from “This is Me Trying” doesn’t resonate: “They told me all of my cages were mental, So I got wasted like all my potential”. Taylor who?
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One thing about music in 2020 seemed completely normal, that being the fact that Bob Dylan released a sixteen minute single about John F. Kennedy’s assassination. I mean, that’s just the kind of thing he’s been doing for 60 years, right? It had been 8 years since his last album of original material, 2012’s Tempest, and it felt like three months into lockdown was just about the right time for this release. Dylan is in probably the longest stretch of consistency in his career, as he hasn’t put out any questionable original albums since his 1990’s resurgence, and this album is perhaps one of the strongest of that period. Murder ballads, mysteries, and myths abound, and when, on the track “False Prophet” he declares “I ain’t no false prophet, I just know what I know”, you might be saying to yourself “Did he somehow know…? Nah, couldn’t have.”