My Decade in Music So Far: Mark Richardson

This week, Pitchfork shared lists featuring the best albums and tracks of the decade so far. We asked Pitchfork writers and editors to share a favorite song and album that didn't make the list, along with a music highlight and their personal Top 10s or 20s. Check back for more installments of My Decade in Music So Far.

Waxahatchee: American Weekend [Don Giovanni]

I have records like this sometimes, where I don't listen to them all that often but when I do it's very intense. The week I discovered this record, in December 2012, I listened to it constantly and knew immediately it'd be a huge favorite for a long time. The album is about a period in life that is distant for me now (early 20s) but I can remember how it all felt and remember the relationship between feeling things very deeply—having the present moment seem seem super-charged—and wanting to channel that into creative expression. That's partly why so many people make great records in their early 20s. I wrote this on my Tumblr in December 2012:

On December 15, 2012, which was a Saturday, I spent the day at the Pitchfork office to work on our year-end lists and also write my own blurbs. By late afternoon I was looking at the day’s work and listening to Waxahatchee’s American Weekend while having a beer before heading home. I was feeling pretty good about what we had accomplished that year, feeling good about music and life in general. Holidays were coming, which is always a strange time for me, and then there was this song, which mentioned a sharp hangover on Christmas Eve and hiding from the world for a minute. Pretty sure for the rest of my life when I hear this song I’ll think of that one afternoon. 

And I can report that almost two years later I do in fact think of that one afternoon whenever I hear "Rose, 1956". 

Lana Del Rey: "Radio" [Interscope]

I was thinking recently about how many people analyze and discuss radio-directed pop music by noting a song's individual parts, and evaluating them in turn: "Great chorus, but not too sure about the bridge, the verses are OK." I hear the word "pre-chorus" come up in regular conversations. I know I'm a music critic and that's the way we talk, but it can feel like we're engineers discussing how machines are put together. We've all read too many Dr. Luke profiles, maybe. And it seems commonly understood that this is a normal way to talk about pop music. This feels like a more recent phenomena to me. I really don't remember, say, Prince and Madonna songs being broken into constituent parts like that, but maybe they were.  

I mention all this to say that my appreciation for Lana Del Rey's "Radio", a song I love, seems very much along the lines of admiring how well a super high-end toaster is put together, or something. Don't get me wrong, I feel stuff when I hear this song, big time, but it seems like it's because the form of it is just so perfectly rendered, and when the verses explode into the choruses it's like watching a 747 take off and you can't believe that something so heavy can fly. And then if I step back a little more, I can see that it's a song about being on the radio, and how the fact of being on the radio makes life for the character in this song less painful. It all swirls together and becomes a very interesting mix of ice-cold aesthetics and warm emotion. 

Musical Highlight of the Last Five Years

I've always said that I'm not a show person, and that almost all of my greatest experiences with music involve recordings. Here's one from a couple of years back that also illustrates why I still love record shopping.

Early in this decade my wife went to graduate school in another state, which meant I spent a lot of time alone. I'd been a Neil Young fan for a long time at this point, but I was far from an expert on his catalog. But as anyone who spends a lot of time alone can tell you, Tonight's the Night makes a very good companion. Maybe because the album is so off-the-cuff and loose and sloppy you kind of feel like the band is in there in the room with you. They have a definite presence. But it's also because it's an album about feeling many contradictory things at once. It's both blown-out and dark and also a lot of fun. So all that together really fills up a room.

During this time I lived about 300 yards from Laurie's Planet of Sound, a great record store on the north side of Chicago. And since I wasn't going out much and was often alone, I stopped into Laurie's a few times a week to look at the new arrivals bin for used records. And somewhere during this period I started collecting Neil Young records in earnest. First I got all the good ones, and then I decided, hey, I want all of them, even the mid-80s shit. Felt like something I would like to have on my shelf. 

But one thing about my life as a record collector is I'm also driven by good deals, not just by buying great records. I think I enjoy them more if I know I didn't overpay. And that's a little tricky when it comes to Neil Young. Because he charges absolutely outrageous prices for his new records on vinyl records now, and I'm missing a lot of them. I'm not going to spend $60 on a double album. 

But of course it's quite easy to find most of Neil's records on vinyl pretty cheap. A few sold millions of copies. So I was quickly amassing a sizable Neil collection. I found Time Fades Away at Laurie's for like $12, that made me happy. Got Journey Through the Past cheap. I already had On the Beach from back when it was out of print, and I think it cost me $5. I got the CSNY records he was on, I got the Stills-Young record. Sometimes I'd luck out and find a new record for not a lot of money. I got all the '80s records for very little, and also found Freedom for not much, which is rare.

But somehow, I could not find Zuma. Now it's easy to find new, but I wasn't seeing it around during those couple of years for some reason. Could have been just chance. And after a while I mentioned Zuma to one of the clerks at Laurie's, whom I saw in the store but didn't know otherwise, and she said that she didn't remember coming across any in a while. A few weeks after that, while I was out of town, I got an email from her, out of the blue, and she said someone had recently sold a nice clean copy of Zuma and she'd hold it for me until the next time I came in. I hadn't asked her to do this, she just did it to be nice, which I found very touching.

So now I'm up to 33 Neil Young records on vinyl. Maybe someday a kind clerk will hold for me Mirror Ball or Ragged Glory or Le Noise or...

Favorite Albums of 2010-2014:

1. EMA: Past Life Martyred Saints
2. Sun Kil Moon: Benji
3. Destroyer: Kaputt
4. Vampire Weekend: Contra
5. Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!
6. Kanye West: Yeezus
7. LCD Soundsystem: This Is Happening
8. Fiona Apple: The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do
9. Oneohtrix Point Never: Replica
10. Bill Callahan: Apocalypse
11. Kendrick Lamar: good kid, m.A.A.d city
12. Grimes: Visions
13. Bon Iver: Bon Iver
14. Waxahatchee: American Weekend
15. Daft Punk: Random Access Memories
16. The Caretaker: An Empty Bliss Beyond This World
17. Girls: Father, Son, Holy Ghost
18. Burial: Rival Dealer EP
19. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
20. Frank Ocean: Channel Orange

Favorite Tracks of 2010-2014:

1. Destroyer: "Bay of Pigs"
2. Robyn: "Dancing on My Own"
3. Grimes: "Oblivion"
4. EMA: "Marked"
5. Japandroids: "Younger Us"
6. Kendrick Lamar: "Bitch Don't Kill My Vibe"
7. Sleigh Bells: "Rill Rill"
8. Kanye West: "New Slaves"
9. Lana Del Rey: "Radio"
10. Crystal Castles: "Celestica"
11. The-Dream: "Love King"
12. Disclosure: "Latch" [ft. Sam Smith]
13. LCD Soundsystem: "All I Want"
14. Kanye West: "Monster" [ft. Justin Vernon, Rick Ross, Jay-Z, and Nicki Minaj]
15. Girls: "Vomit"
16. Vampire Weekend: "Hannah Hunt"
17. Young Galaxy: "Pretty Boy (Peaking Lights Remix)"
18. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti: "Round and Round"
19. Miguel: "Do You"
20. Todd Terje: "Snooze 4 Love"