2014 in Music, Part 2

It's funny how much I agonize over a list of top albums.  Ask me in a month and the sequence would be different -- I'd be wondering what I thought was so wonderful about a couple of them and why I put three of them as low as I did.  Meanwhile, a couple of albums I don't know about at the moment would be clawing their way onto the list (despite my having reading gobs of end-of-year lists in a futile attempt to head off such an eventuality).  Ask me in two years and it would go well beyond such minor tweaks -- I'll be bored with an entire sub-genre represented here and one I reject right now would demand its presence in my 2016 look back at the albums of 2014.  And so, even though I know that this list is just a snapsnot of my brain, one that's unable to stand the test of time, I nevertheless spent weeks weighing every ranking, every inclusion and rejection, as though there's a right answer.

With that caveat, here are my Top 25 Albums of 2014:

1. Strand of Oaks -- HEAL

2. St. Vincent -- St. Vincent

3. Ben Howard -- I Forget Where We Were

4. The War on Drugs -- Lost in the Dream

5. Conor Oberst -- Upside Down Mountain

6. *Woods -- With Light and with Love

7. *St. Paul & The Broken Bones -- Half the City

8. Lydia Loveless -- Somewhere Else

9. Hozier -- Hozier

10. Margot & The Nuclear So and So’s -- Slingshot to Heaven

11. Hurray for the Riff Raff -- Small Town Heroes

12. *Drive-By Truckers -- English Oceans

13. Beck -- Morning Phase

14. Field Report -- Marigolden

15. First Aid Kit -- Stay Gold

16. Hard Working Americans -- Hard Working Americans

17. Jeremy Messersmith -- Heart Murmurs

18. Real Estate -- Atlas

19. Ty Segall -- Manipulator

20. The Donkeys -- Ride the Black Wave

21. La Sera -- Hour of the Dawn

22. Sean Rowe -- Madman

23. Ex Hex -- Rips

24. Jenny Lewis -- The Voyager

25. The Bones of J.R. Jones -- Dark Was the Yearling

* -- Artist I saw in 2014

I finish my year-end summary by sharing a playlist with over 11 hours of my favorite songs of the year (as I self-imposed a limit of one song per album, the list leaves out plenty of tunes I loved).  You'd think that a 172-song playlist would pretty much cover things, but I wish it were a bit longer, as Spotify doesn't have the rights to a couple of tunes that otherwise would have been included -- "It's Over" by Ty Segall and "Compassion" by Lucinda Williams.



May 2015 be as wonderful musically as 2014 has been!