We asked Pitchfork writers and editors to share their personal highs and lows of 2013. Check back for more installments of My Year in Music throughout the next two weeks.
Favorite Tracks of 2013:
01 Daft Punk: "Get Lucky"
02 Chvrches: "The Mother We Share"
03 Phosphorescent: "Song For Zula"
04 Jason Isbell: "Elephant"
05 Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: "Higgs Boson Blues"
06 Guy Clark: "My Favorite Picture of You"
07 Robin Thicke: "Blurred Lines" [ft. Pharrell & T.I.]
08 Eleanor Friedberger: "When I Knew"
09 The National: "Pink Rabbits"
10 Brandy Clark: "Stripes"
Favorite Albums of 2013:
01 Hiss Golden Messenger: Haw
02 Phosphorescent: Muchacho
03 The National: Trouble Will Find Me
04 Brandy Clark: 12 Stories
05 Daft Punk: Random Access Memories
06 Eleanor Friedberger: Personal Record
07 Janelle Monáe: The Electric Lady
08 Kacey Musgraves: Same Trailer Different Park
09 Kanye West: Yeezus
10 Chvrches: The Bones of What You Believe
Most Played Song of 2013: iTunes claims my most-played song of 2013 is Hiss Golden Messenger’s "Sufferer (Love My Conqueror)", which I remember playing over and over just to hear the part at 4:14 when the string section splits into two parts and traces tributaries through North Carolina. But I suspect that if you consider all of my music-listening devices (computer, phone, turntable, brain), my most-played song would be Daft Punk’s "Get Lucky". At one point in April I put it on repeat and didn’t sleep for three days.
An Old Album I Discovered/Rediscovered This Year: Last Christmas, my father-in-law, a seventh-generation Texan and the biggest Elvis fan I know, gave me his old copies of Jerry Jeff Walker’s Viva Terlingua and A Man Must Carry On. Both are live albums, and both are just glorious examples of gregarious Lone Star rock whose exuberance is matched only by its weirdness: Opening the set with two-and-a-half minutes of chicken imitations, pausing for not one but two poetry recitals. I also discovered that Walker wrote an ode to Astros ace and former Rangers honcho Nolan Ryan, which in my head plays over an endless loop of this.
Musical Highlights: At the beginning of the year I discovered an old 10" record in a box of my grandparents’ belongings. Scrawled across the label was my grandfather’s name—Dr. E. E. Deusner—along with the title of a hymn ("Pearly White City") and a date (October 1948). At first I thought it was a sermon; my grandfather had been a Southern Baptist preacher in Lexington, Tennessee, for more than fifty years. He retired in the early 1980s, shortly before his death in 1983. It was an amazing find, but it was also bittersweet: I didn’t have a turntable capable of playing a 10" record, nor did I want to risk damaging the vinyl coating with a modern needle.
Fortunately, nearby Indiana University has an incredible Archives of Traditional Music, and they agreed to take a look at this find. I met with a technician named John Dawson, who took the time to walk me through the process of cleaning, playing, and finally making a digital copy of the record. It turned out to be not a sermon but a solo performance of a hymn called "Pearly White City". Under the heavy blanket of 65 years of surface noise, a pipe organ can be heard, faint but billowy, which makes me think the recording would have been made in the sanctuary at his church, the vinyl etched in real time. Thanks to Dawson, I was able to hear my grandfather’s voice for the first time in thirty years. You can listen here.
Musical Lowlights: The deaths of Ray Price, Lou Reed, Karen Black, Ray Harryhausen, Cowboy Jack Clement, J.J. Cale, and Bobby "Blue" Bland weren’t shocking, but that didn’t make them any less devastating.