Pop songs and thoughts about them from the second half of 2019. Combined with #18, this makes a pretty good surrogate for my year-end list, though not all the songs are from 2019.
Listen on Spotify if you must, but be warned that one of the best songs of the year is not on there.
Jonas Brothers — “Sucker” (2019)
It’s become a tradition that each year during our family beach vacation, I ask my sister and her husband for their opinions on “the song of the summer.” Nancy and Joe are two of the few adults I know who have great taste and are still actively engaged with hit music. And because they are close in age to me, they share the sensibilities of our generation. The happy result is that they’re able to recommend music that is currently popular, while remaining recognizable to me as music. One of this year’s candidates was “Sucker,” along the entire Jonas Brothers’ album Happiness Begins. I was pleasantly surprised by the overall quality of this record, and “Sucker” in particular has a lot going for it: hooks galore, whistling, ridiculous lyrics about dancing on top of cars. It’s an obvious rip-off of Portugal. The Man’s “Feel It Still,” but as far as rip-offs go, you could do a lot worse.
illuminati hotties — “Paying Off the Happiness” (2018)
Everything about this is adorable. The name of the band, the name of the album (Kiss Yr Frenemies), the slightly naive vocals, the rhyming of “hoodie” with “rookie mistakes.” It’s almost enough to make you overlook the Millennial darkness about fourth jobs and emotional blackmail.
Pernice Brothers — “The Devil and the Jinn” (2019)
The Pernice Brothers are one of the few bands about whom I can honestly say I like everything they’ve ever done. Their new album Spread the Feeling is their first in nine years, and hands down my favorite record of 2019. Joe Pernice is an absolute pro, and “The Devil and the Jinn” is everything that mature pop music should be. Pernice and Neko Case are vocal soulmates, the guitar playing is warm and jangly, the production is polished to a high sheen, and how about those lyrics? “Burning cauliflower,” “slithers back to you” “it’s not enough to leave, it’s not enough to be left.” Joe, please continue to piss away your life writing these stupid songs that try to say what love is.
Better Oblivious Community Center — “Dylan Thomas” (2019)
Another excellent duet. I take the lyrics to be about life under the current presidential administration, a topic I’m not generally that keen to engage with in my pop music listening. But Bridgers and Oberst tackle in a way that’s oblique enough that you don’t have to think about it too much unless you want to. Excellent use of metaphors throughout: “a game of four-dimensional chess,” “that ghost is just a kid in a sheet,” “I’m taking a shower at the Bates Motel.”
Bodega — “Shiny New Model” (2019)
Bodega are proof that you can do anything you want as long as you can pull it off. On paper, I should hate them. They’re deliberately arty, they have weird affectations like shouting single words and omitting articles from their phrasing, and their songs tend toward social commentary. Yet I can’t help but really like them. The band’s intrinsic catchiness serves as a counterbalance against pretension, and it doesn’t hurt that they have something real to say. “Shiny New Model” is very clever in its use of dust-gathering ATMs as a metaphor for the way technologies now go from transformative to ubiquitous to antiquated a very short span of time. I was going to say something like, “If people in their 20s are feeling this way, what hope is there for the rest of us?” But then I thought, maybe the very fact that people in their 20s are feeling this way — and making those feelings known — is the hope for the rest of us.
Arctic Monkeys — “Cornerstone” (2009)
I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that Alex Turner is a poet on par with Shakespeare. “Cornerstone” has got to be one of the most exquisitely written songs I’ve ever heard. I particularly love the way that Turner plays with repetition and variation within the structure of the song. Let’s break it down by looking at my favorite verse:
I thought I saw you in the Parrot’s Beak
Each verse starts out roughly the same, but with a different cheesily nautical bar name. It’s a good example of the way repetition is countered by small variations.There’s also some very economical storytelling here. In just a few words, we learn the key facts, which are these: there are some girls in some bars, but these girls are not the girl.
Messing with the smoke alarmIt was too loud for me to hear her speakAnd she had a broken arm
The characters in this song do some pretty strange things. There’s no explanation given, which makes the song intriguing and singular. See also the “I smelt your scent on the seatbelt” line from the middle eight.
It was close, so close that the walls were wet
Brilliant change-up of the “She was close” lines, playing with an alternate meaning.
And she wrote it out in Letraset
It wouldn’t be an Arctic Monkeys song if you didn’t have to Google at least one word.
No you can’t call me her name
Again, it’s so satisfying the way that Turner changes up these last lines very slightly: “If I could call her your name,” “Can I call you her name?,” “No, you can’t call me her name.” It’s like that little bit of variation gives your mind something to latch onto — and of course it sets up the twist on the last line beautifully.
And let’s not forget that “Cornerstone” is a song, not a poem. It’s got a yearning melody, that sad wah-wah guitar almost like a muted trumpet, and the way that Turner’s voice soars to a new height of emotion on the last verse. All of this makes you want to listen to it many, many times, and without that urge, it would be impossible to truly appreciate the way that Turner can take one of the most common tropes in pop songwriting — “boy loses girl” — and turn out something that is vivid, freewheeling, surprising, finely crafted, and unusual. There’s literally not one phrase or image in this whole song that you’ve ever heard anywhere else. That’s as good a definition of genius as I can come up with.
Alex Cameron — “True Lies” (2017)
I remember watching an episode of Oprah in the late ‘90s where people who were, like, lawyers talked about how they fell for fax scams from alleged Nigerian princes. And lately The New York Times has been covering a lot of scams and the way that people actively miss their scammers, or how the whole thing unravels dramatically and still the victim gets sucked back in a few months later. It’s a fascinating pattern, and “True Lies” really gets the way that scams work because people want to believe in them. It’s also funny and creepy and I’ve listened to it way more times that would be warranted by something that’s just a novelty. There are just so many good pop elements going on: the saxophone, the backing vocals, the play with “beautiful eyes” and “beautiful lies” (not to mention “Nigerian guy”).
Black Pumas — “Black Moon Rising” (2019)
Nothing more or less than a perfectly executed throwback to the rock-soul hybrids of the early 1970s.
Don Henley — “The Heart of the Matter” (1989)
“Heart of the Matter” was kicking around the edges of my brain for a while as “that one Don Henley song that’s pretty cheesy, but maybe kind of good.” Once I listened to it intentionally, it was off to the races, and I’ve determined that it is in fact quite good. The melody is exceptional — not surprising given that the music was composed by Mike Campbell, a member of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers who co-wrote hits like “Refugee,” as well as Henley’s “Boys of Summer,” (which is not at all cheesy and clearly great). The obvious target for derision is the song’s production, as exemplified by moment where it is punctuated by Henley crying out “Forgiveness! Forgiveness!” along with some heavy-handed female backing singers. I’ll forgive it, because I think there’s some real sincerity here — I’d guess someone living the life of Don Henley probably knows a thing or two about fractured relationships.
Look Park — “You Can Come Round If You Want To” (2016)
I know I liked Chris Collingswood’s solo project when it came out in 2016, but I didn’t appreciate how much I loved it until I revisited it this year. I see it as part of a trend in which ‘70s soft rock is finally getting its due, with the likes of Collingswood, Aimiee Mann, and Joe Pernice touting its virtues and emulating its strengths. It’s also nice that these artists can embrace the best of the genre — excellent melodies, gentle acoustic guitars, naturalistic production — while writing lyrics that rely much less heavily on stories about no-strings-attached romantic encounters. “You Can Come Round If You Want To” is absolutely lovely. It’s still got FoW’s snarkiness (“the bird in the tree/won’t shut the hell up”), and the lyrics are actually pretty negative throughout. And yet, it reads to me as a positive song, as if the fact that you can come round — the fact of friendship — makes up for all these little nagging problems of life.
Tacocat — The Joke of Life (2019)
A bit like Bodega, Tacocat manage to combine their catchy pop with a remarkable degree of thoughtfulness. Sometimes they tackle defined issues like privilege or the pressures of the social media era. But the ones I like best are songs like “Joke of Life,” which have a more oblique philosophy. To me, lines like “When the pros and the cons are the same thing/Can’t tell the nightmare from the dream” get at the ambiguity of life, the way that humor and pain are often two sides of the same coin. It’s a difficult thing it explain and an even more impressive thing to get across as a feeling.
Pete and the Pirates — Half Moon Street (2011)
Sometimes I feel an immediate and natural affinity with a particular songwriter, almost like the way that you would hit it off with a person you meet in real life. Whoever is the primary writer for Pete and the Pirates (and their successors, Teleman) is one such writer. (One downside of the decline in physical media is that I cannot find detailed songwriting credits for any of these two bands’ albums anywhere on the internet. I suspect the primary songwriter is lead singer Thomas Sanders.) “Half Moon Street” is just really good power pop, nailing that wistful feeling on both the soft and loud parts.
Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds — “A Dream is All I Need to Get By” (2019)
It must be pretty great to be Noel Gallagher in 2019. All the drama of Oasis is behind you, money’s no worry, and you can just make the kind of pop records that appeal to you and your fans. “A Dream is All I Need to Get By” strikes a perfect mid-point between the usual Gallagher touchstones of wistfulness and exuberance, but with a looser, hip-swaying quality that’s a nice addition to his repertoire. He even gets a little sassy on the “I hope you can walk it like you talk it, son” part. It’s really been a gift for fans to get to enjoy this smaller-scale, more relaxed version of Noel in 2019.