Unbest

Happy end-of-the-yearing!

Unbest 2k12 has come to an end. Huge thank-yous to everyone who contributed and everyone who followed along at home. We're going into hiding for a little while, but we'll be back for the end of 2013 and better than ever (hopefully). <3!

Lindsay Zoladz on Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” (1984) (Rdio, Spotify, iTunes) In my 2012, there wasn't an Independence Day. You lose a day when you fly over the Atlantic, and early on the morning of July 4, at an hour when nobody barbecues and the sky is too bright for fireworks, I got on a plane to Denmark. On long international flights, at a distance of 30,000 feet, the concepts that usually order our lives—clocks, mealtimes, holidays—have a way of first becoming abstract, and then seeming downright absurd. So I cannot even pinpoint exactly where I was (above Iceland seems as good a guess as any) the precise moment that the most quintessentially American holiday turned to a metaphysical speck and then quietly disappeared. I almost did not get on a plane to Denmark, because up until two days before my flight, I didn't have a passport. Only about three weeks before, I had been assigned to cover the Roskilde Festival, which is in a town about 20 miles outside of Copenhagen. The fact that I didn't have a passport when I got this assignment was something I conveniently kept from my editor and that he probably still did not know until now (hi Mark!). But when you are a freelance writer and it’s the dead of summer so you're kind of bored and the worst month in the swampland city you live in is fast approaching and you've never been to Europe and someone asks you if you'd like to go to a festival where Bjork and Bruce Springsteen are headlining, you say yes. Knowing full well how difficult it will be to get a passport in three weeks because you have lived in our nation's capital of red tape and long lines and bureaucracy for seven years now, you say yes, you will find a way to make it work. The people at the passport agency did not believe I was who I said I was. Not at first. They flagged my paperwork and made me come back on three different, excruciating, nails-bitten-to-the-nubs occasions. Later I found out why: although I’d been living in DC for seven years, I’d only very recently gotten rid of my New Jersey drivers license. This is suspicious, in the eyes of the National Passport Agency. It was actually just lazy, I tried to explain to the man behind the fogged up plastic window. But what I couldn't quite explain to him was it also might have also been something else. I think that part of me felt like hanging onto my New Jersey license kept me grounded, connected to the place I'd spent the first 18 years of my life, proof that I was not entirely what I feared people from my hometown thought I’d turned out to be: that girl who flees to the big city first chance she gets (and to be a writer, of all things), globs a coating of faux sophistication over her past and forgets all about where she came from. But I wasn’t that girl, you see. Because last year I’d also changed my phone number, and my provider asked if I'd like a 202 area code. "Actually," I asked, "Is it possible for me to keep the 856?" I had been out of the country once before: Canada, when I was 18, on a trip that whose main cultural objective was to go to travel to a mystical land where 18 year-olds can drink and gamble publicly. I won about 30 American dollars on a slot machine, and I spent 100% of my winnings on strawberry daiquiris. When we were driving back through customs, we played that "America, Fuck Yeah!" song from Team America: World Police and giggled conspiratorially. That was my idea. You can take the girl out of Jersey, etc. All my life when I’ve done something that a kind person would call gauche or provincial (see: never having “seen the world,” making it to 25 without a passport, etc.) or an asshole would call trashy, the easy thing has always been to chalk it up to being from New Jersey. And then I spent the early part of my adulthood trying, and maybe failing, to get away from all of that. An asshole did actually call me trashy to my face once, at a party when I was 19 or 20, a little while after I’d moved. My best friend from New Jersey and I were there together, feeling very cool, at this party full of older people. A drunk guy who’d been talking to her found out where we were from, and then he and his friend lead a rousing chant of “Jersey trash, Jersey trash.” (Assholes, naturally, will recognize this concept as “negging.”) We had a plan, though. We played nice enough to get his number (more specifically, his business card; older people!) and then stayed up half the night leaving vulgar, mean and—thanks to details we’d astutely picked up while playing nice—pointedly personal messages on his voicemail. That’s what happens when you mess with Jersey. * My senior year of high school, I got into two colleges. One was in New Jersey and the other wasn’t, so I picked the one that wasn’t in New Jersey. I met some people who liked music as much as I did and they lovingly teased me for saying wuter instead of water. Some of them asked if I liked Bruce Springsteen, and I said that honestly I didn’t very much, no. That was my parents’ music—Born to Run, Born in the U.S.A. That was New Jersey in the flesh, or by this time, so widely revered that it was more like New Jersey in statue form. Too hallowed, too close to home. “You would at least like Nebraska, I know you would,” somebody told me many different times, and somehow that put me off even more: The One Bruce Springsteen Album It’s Acceptable To Like In College. OK sure, I told them maybe I’d try it sometime, but I never did. I was thinking of all this in June—your entire life tends to flash before your eyes somewhere around the fifth time a passport agent puts you on hold—after having just read David Brooks’ column about Bruce. The gist was, “You’ve never seen Bruce until you’ve seen him in Europe.” OK, sure. By the grace of some obviously very high up saint (Clarence?), I got a passport and made it to Roskilde. And as soon as I got there, it was easy to gauge whose set was the most anticipated. American flags dotted the crowds all weekend. People in handmade Bruce t-shirts and hats. Fervent drunks in the bathroom line singing “Born in the USA” like it was last call at a karaoke bar the night before the apocalypse. David Brooks is not right about everything, but he is right about Bruce. People in Europe go batshit for him. And alone for the first time in a country where I didn’t speak the language, Max Weinberg’s most iconic beat rattling my bones, I went a little crazy too. I stood beneath one of the monitors and handed my camera to a Danish woman who I thought I’d overheard speaking English. “Take my picture!” I beamed, “I’m from New Jersey, like Bruce!” She snapped it, handed it back to me and said warmly, “Happy birthday!” It occurred to me overseas that America is just America. From 30,000 feet, without the regional texture. Everyone knows that Bruce represents something American, but not everyone knows what it means to be from New Jersey as opposed to California or Maine. They didn’t know that Bruce represents something specific and hard-won and triumphant. And that if any asshole even tried to call it “trashy,” I’d be regionally obligated to seek a very personal sort of revenge upon their soul, and possibly their extended family. “Born in the U.S.A" was the moment I was struck with this urge to tell everybody everything. I never thought I would have taken such strange, giddy pride in a sentence I’d spent my teens and half my twenties trying to stealthily inch away from: “I’m from New Jersey, like Bruce.” But I was. Born down in a dead man’s town / The first kick I took was when I hit the ground. How many times had I heard this song before and tuned it out? I listened now, I felt the communicative texture of every word like Braille. End up like a dog that’s been beat too much / Til you spend half your life tryin’ to cover it up. Bruce is a writer so he had to learn this too, that you’ll spend half your life trying to pass as generic, the written equivalent of the newscaster’s non-regional dialect, and then quite suddenly you’ll spend the other half peeling off the varnish and getting down to the business of telling your story in your own cracked accent. You can’t mark this down on a calendar ahead of time: you cannot predict when this change will happen or where you’ll be when it does. But trust me when I say it will come. Independence Day. Lindsay Zoladz is a writer now living in Brooklyn.

Andrew William Smith on Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes’ “I Don’t Wanna Pray” (from Here, 2012) (Rdio, Spotify, iTunes) Pop music has always fancied the sublime and fascinated itself with the divine. Songs want to return us to Eden or rapture us to heaven or reduce us to a sloppy but womb-like wonder with the help of whisky and weed. Ever since Joni Mitchell lured us “back to the garden” in her timeless trippy folk hymn “Woodstock,” artists imbue sonic experiments with religious images to recreate revivals in sound. I’ve always had a soft spot for music that invokes either Jesus or the Age of Aquarius, but the latest one-among-many band-as-caravan to lure me into some limitless and liminal region of the spirit with a gospel-tainted album of mystic crystal revelations is Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros. “I Don’t Wanna Pray,” from the band’s most recent record, Here, is a strange kind of folk-gospel song. Refrains of the chanted mantra “I love my God” are coupled with not just love but hate, not just good but bad. When the lyric suggests we might “become not the prayer but the prayer,” it’s no longer the person that prays that’s important. It’s no longer the act of asking. It’s the prayer itself, embodied and empowered. It’s not the asker, but the question itself. It’s vision quest and visionary action collapsed into pop epiphany. It’s getting behind the symbol and into the beautiful bowels and glorious guts of reality.   If prayer and meditation require mediation, this song says let’s get past that, through that, beyond that, over that, by becoming one with all. People who pray set prayers, recite regular devotions:  they are the disciplined neo-monastics. But some people are undisciplined and seek shortcuts; rock songcraft when it achieves its purpose can bypass the therapeutic and the theological for a revolutionary awakening into the now and the wow. Rock’s shamans have always shown us the reckless chemically-enhanced-and-tranced versions of the vision quest: Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin messed up magical on booze, many more with harder habits and a sense of nothing-left-to-lose. Despite the negative consequences and pharmacological boundaries of that lifestyle, songs still come along that could make the magical mystery tour more magical but also sober and sanctified. “I Don’t Wanna Pray” is one track among many in the tribal revival that informs mystical consciousness and transforms into the collective called Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros. The kind of direct contact with or immersion into God suggested by the song: these are not usually possible or easily available in modes of mundane, everyday living. So prayer and meditation or yoga and exercise remain fruitful for many. But this song reminds that there’s still something more, more vast, more loving, more amazing. I don’t wanna pray, but I don’t want to try the psychedelic shortcut either, so I am going to pray anyway, hopefully without ceasing, even while singing “I Don’t Wanna Pray.” Andrew William Smith is a professor by day, DJ by night; poet, preacher, insatiable creature.

Brady Hall on Smog’s A River Ain’t Too Much to Love (2005) (iTunes) I used to be obsessed with new music. Every year I listened to dozens upon dozens of freshly printed albums as soon as I could get my hands on them. I would discuss and debate the merits of these albums with my friends and coworkers until they banished me to the world of online discussion boards. A pen and pad of paper was always kept next to the radio when I worked to record the names of new songs played by my local radio station and my weekly All Songs Considered podcasts. Attending live shows of touring bands was almost always where any spare cash I happened to have went towards. Then when December rolled around I would spend an unseemly amount of time reading every best-music-of-the-year list I could find and compare it to my own. There were very few albums on those lists that I hadn’t listened to. The last two years I haven’t made my own best-music-of-the-year lists. I’ve skimmed over some of the lists from a few trusted sources, but I’ve listened to almost none of the albums that they thought I should. In 2012 I picked up exactly two new releases, my radio stayed complacently tuned to NPR, and I only attended live shows when my favorite artists came to town. I don’t know to where my passion for music had fled or precisely when it had deserted me, but it was undoubtedly gone. Was the quality of recent music declining? Probably not. Were musicians starting to lose their innovation causing most new music to sound too similar? Probably not. Was the reason for my dissatisfaction internal? Probably. Whatever the reason, it was gone.  However, after smoldering for the last two years my fire for music has been rekindled by the one and only Bill Callahan.      I had first discovered him when his 2009 album Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle came out. Despite loving the album I didn’t delve into his back catalog (much of it released under the name Smog) until last year, and when I finally did it was with 2005’s A River Ain’t Too Much to Love. At first I thought it very similar to his 2009 album, which means I loved it, but despite the beauty of the songwriting and complimentary minimalist musical arrangement on the later album River revealed itself to be a far superior beast.  Callahan’s songwriting is pure poetry. “Palimpsest,” the 2005 album’s opening song, is an excellent example. Callahan half speaks and half sings his poem in a deep but smooth voice of a gruff angel: Winter weather is not my soul But the biding for spring… Why’s everybody looking at me Like there’s something fundamentally wrong Like I’m a southern bird That stayed north too long Winter exposes the nests And I’m gone Every song on A River Ain’t Too Much to Love is a gold mine of achingly beautiful verse. The production on this album is its own kind of poetry that compliments Callahan’s personal songwriting perfectly. Mostly the thoughtful picking of an acoustic guitar sparsely supplemented with a piercing violin here, an echoing whistle there, it’s by turns mesmerizing and haunting. Near the end of “Say Valley Maker,” a heart-wrenching song about lost love, Callahan mutters the line “Oh, I cantered out here / now I’m galloping back,” and with that the music picks up its pace and gallops to the end of the song.  This album moved me in a way that others haven’t done for a very long time. With every additional listen the once dormant fire inside me blazed stronger. I have high hopes for the this year’s coming musical releases, but even if they fails to move me like the last two years of music have failed to move me, I know that personally 2013 will be a great year for music because there are still plenty of Smog/Bill Callahan albums for me to experience. Brady Hall is a student in Portland, Ore.

Katherine St. Asaph is a writer living in New York City.

Doug Schrashun on Annie’s “Heartbeat” (from Anniemal, 2005) (Rdio, Spotify, iTunes) It could be said that I met my wife at a Yo La Tengo concert, after which we talked extensively on a bus about Radiohead. It could also be said that she was the director of our college radio station, where I did a radio show called "Frontier Psychiatry" where a friend and I would, in an attempt at humor, play mix CDs solicited from listeners while providing running psychoanalytic commentary based on their song selections. As is the case for any two musically inclined people who fall in love, it could be said that we learned about each other through music, like some Nick and Nora's bullshit—"the music brought us together." Relationships are all too easily broken down into a series of simple anecdotes, and while I can't entirely discount the part that music—even specific songs, specific musicians—played in the courtship of my wife and our subsequent life together, it makes me cringe to have something that has become so complex, domestic, and all-encompassing reduced to what song I may have drunkenly attempted to serenade her with at an afterparty in a friend's dorm room (Magnetic Fields), or what she put on the tape she sent me for a Christmas present during our first year together (Butthole Surfers). If it's cute, it's also cliche, and if it's not cute, then it's too close to home. The problem with stories like this is that the music in question becomes nothing more than an inanimate prop. Saying that Sigur Ros was playing during a first kiss is not too different, in the mind of someone whose experience of Sigur Ros doesn't go far beyond what was overheard during a hazy night or two of bad psuedo-philosophical conversation, than saying than that it happened on a Wednesday, or while standing on a carpeted floor. Too often, calling music a soundtrack to experience reduces it to a level beneath the experience itself, failing to acknowledge the central importance of the music to the action, to the emotion, to whatever else makes up the impression of a moment. But of course I'm going to say something like that, because at the time my wife and I were getting to know each other, we were very, very serious about dance parties. These were the sorts of parties where the combination of songs, personalities and alcohols turned strangers into friends, friends into lovers, clueless kids into slightly less clueless kids. It was education through play, socially, sexually and musically. We found out when it was a fantastic idea to drop N*Sync into a set and when all it did was make you look desperate, when it was OKto mess with gender roles and when all it did was make you feel confused, and where the limits were in regards to the ratio of southern hip hop to non-southern hip hop, the intensity of grinding with a friend's ex, and the volume of shouted mid-90’s rock lyrics. So many of my memories of these nights are tied to specific songs: "Let Me Clear My Throat" bringing together a basement full of strangers who I'd later come to love; Usher's "Yeah" breaking the boombox, forcing us to keep the chant going until someone decided to fix it; "The Middle" violently breaking down the flimsy walls we had put up to protect us from anything that we could possibly associate with Good Charlotte, exploding with the realization that true goodness can be found even in a period where A&R guys were straining their ears trying to find the next Lit. As indelible as they may seem now, these songs, of course, came and went: we got burned out on "Hey Ya" just like everyone else, we forgot why we'd liked Nelly as much as we had, the luster of Annie's "Heartbeat" faded as we all realized we were soon going to probably have to get jobs and join proper society, which, for the most part, we did. My wife and I got married this past August. The wedding was something of a production, but all the preparations seemed to proceed so naturally that there was no need for any sort of emotional meltdown, no undue stress. It was still a wedding, though, with events occurring at multiple locations, over 100 family members and friends to manage, and many details left to be decided at the last possible minute. I had enlisted friends to serve as our wedding band, but expected them to only prepare a little over an hour of music, so it was on me to fill the gaps in an evening of music that I hoped would approach some of the same highs the parties of our college years had reached. In the whirlwind of preparations, I left this task until a few hours before the wedding, and found myself sifting through old playlists, picking out songs that were meaningful to my wife and me, to our friends and our families: "Lovefool," "Crazy in Love," "Heartbeat." "Heartbeat" is not a perfect song. It's perhaps too short, not fully realized, with the opening simultaneously too long and too short, out of proportion to the meat of the song, which develops only slightly once the drums kick in, failing to reach either a hypnotic stasis or an emotional build and release. Like most Royksopp songs, though, it rubs shoulders with perfection, such that when it's playing you give in entirely to the perfectly attuned but slightly cheeseball sounds, and the goofily skewed English by way of Norwegian lyrics. Simultaneously evoking the humdrum and transcendent ("we all went down to a party Friday night and had a drink there or two," alongside "what a heat of love and heartbeat, it's electricity") "Heartbeat" somewhat accidentally encapsulated so much of how I felt that life worked at age 21. I was in love, I was ready for the world without having any idea how to find my place in it or what sort of skills my liberal arts education might leave me with, and I had found truth in the beauty and of the mundane day to day life. In its exhilarating but too-brief three minutes, "Heartbeat" made me feel like I was right about things, that it was OK to be burying myself as much in the present as I was, fucking the future, while at the same time speaking directly to the way my future wife and I had codified our relationship—communion on the dance floor. The story of "Heartbeat" is told, confusingly enough, both in the present tense and as a flashback, with the chorus insisting on an ongoing urge to feel the blending of musical and biological rhythms, while the verses recall a certain past instance of this kind of sensation. There's an Annie in the moment, dancing, losing herself in a brief, profound connection to a dance partner and a song, and there's an Annie in the future, looking back on this moment, reminiscing with some regret on an experience that was too intense to last, but also drawing the memory into present, perpetuating it. Sitting at my desk in an empty apartment, the morning of my wedding, I queued up "Heartbeat," and before the drums even came in I had, my defenses already weakened by weeks of emotionally meaningful events, little food, little sleep, and too much kindness, completely broken down. Full, hot tears, and desperately unromantic, clumsy weepy noises, expressing resplendent feelings of relief and joyful resignation. I didn't have the mental capacity or the time to figure out what exactly was going on in my brain at the time, but it was clear that this wasn't a reaction that any other song could have had on me at that moment. In the old days "Heartbeat" was an unabashed celebration of the present, but on this morning it spoke to me of an abstract past which seemed so distant, so idealized and distorted through an imperfect and impartial memory, and viscerally recalled the specific nights when I had heard and moved to it in concert with my friends and the woman I was going to, later that day, get married to. "Heartbeat" had called up and flushed out my gratitude for a life with a wonderful woman, for the fond memories I had collected, for the privilege of celebrations to come. At the risk of overstating the profundity of that morning, it was as if the past, present and future came together for a minute there, and I was ready to get married, ready for whatever. Doug Schrashun plays in the rock band MiniBoone, writes things on the internet sometimes and lives in New York City.me

Brian Collins on Hüsker Dü’s “Eight Miles High” (1990) (Rdio, YouTube) You can’t help whatever music initially grabs you just after you get your driver’s license. When you’re in that time, at that age, high school is EVERYTHING. That time in your life pours the foundation of the little house of your musical awareness. And then you build upon that foundation throughout your early adulthood, and maybe that foundation turns out less than ideal for the weird postmodern tar-paper shanty you go on to build on top of it, but still, there’s no place like home, and this one’s yours. Until you are 35, that is, when Hüsker Dü enters your life and tells you to burn down that shanty (and every shitty metaphor attached to it) for the insurance money. “Eight Miles High” is a song first released by The Byrds in 1966 that is allegedly about an “airplane trip to England.” It is probably also a shitty metaphor about being really high, but Hüsker Dü burn all that business to the ground here, too. I like to divide Hüsker Dü’s version of “Eight Miles High” into three parts: “Intro,” “It’s On,” and “Whoa.” In the first part, Bob Mould’s vocals are frantic as hell, but still somewhat sincere to the original—recognizable but gruff and with really loud guitars. In the second part, you start to feel like there’s something else going on here and things are... building. He has a giddy “hup-hup-hup” part that mimics a “two-three-four” countdown, and you kind of stop what you are doing and wonder if now is a good time to stage dive from your couch. If you know the song’s lyrics by heart (or are reading along) you can still make them out in his singing here, barely. The tempo seems to quicken and we’re more frantic now, and if he just left it right here and finished out the song at this intensity it would be a helluva well-executed cover with a proper Hüsker Dü stamp on it. But no. The third part—ie, “Whoa”—is where you quit your job and buy a guitar, where your forearm hairs stand up, where you put on your running shoes and take a jog that involves leaping rooftops in single bounds and climbing trees (no-hands) and setting off car alarms and tossing improperly parked vehicles out of the way with your left hand, the right being busy fist-pumping. It’s where Mel Gibson is yelling “FREEEDOOMMMMM” at the end of Braveheart, except it’s Bob Mould yelling and it’s better and with power chords and a backbeat. Whoa. I still haven’t figured the best time or context for listening to these guys. Some albums/songs work well as nighttime music. Some make fantastic driving music and some songs are really good to run to. With the exception of overly-motivated yard work, I think Hüsker Dü is music I just want to live to. I want to be 40 years old and enter a work meeting with a guttural Bob Mould yell, just so the attendees know where I’m coming from. I want to call the cable company and tell them the internet is down (again) the way 1984 Bob Mould would. I’m not sure what the 1984 Hüsker Dü version of walking my dog is, but I want to do that every morning before work. Gonna start tomorrow. In 2012 I discovered Hüsker Dü, pavers of the paths of so many bands that have been dear to me since I got a driver’s license. I am way late to this Hüsker Dü party, and I’m still really excited about what other party’s I might also be late to, but this is a good one and I’m going to linger here awkwardly for a bit. Brian Collins tries to make nice things on the internet by day, and mows sidewalk grass in Atlanta’s Reynoldstown neighborhood by night.

Kasia Galazka on Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die: The Paradise Edition (Rdio, Spotify, iTunes) I fell in maddening love with Lana Del Rey for the sorcery of her beauty. Everything about her is conjured, but in such a hyperbolically feminine way that I can't help but exhale with my own lip-biting fantasizing. Crowns of flowers? Sexy surrealist alligator straddling? Nether regions that taste like high-fructose corn syrup? Where did I go wrong? Some of Lana's songs are over-the-top fantasies, like Danielle Steele novels sifted through a sieve, leaving all the glittery bits of life's Big Themes. Within five minutes of Born to Die, drugs are shared, bikinis tossed and loins left a-burning. "Blue Jeans," my favorite, is Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game" if the girl getting sand up her cooter had anything to say about it. I love Lana's conscious dips into idiotic Betty Boopisms and non-existent vocabulary, extracting what little soul can be found in vapidity. It's vampy camp, and as someone who will eternally be perceived as modest, those few hours reliving my off-the-record moments are bliss. Every impurity, though, is equally balanced with pastoral sentiments of loss and summer driving and plaintive vulnerabilities. When her voice softens to tell you “honey, put on that party dress,” all I want is for everything to get dark so I can re-emerge to watch moonlight turn to sunlight with a pair of Louboutins swinging from my hand. Something about her music skirts a quiet discontent that emerges as quickly as it disappears. Many women can relate to the initial head rush and subsequent fumbling through eddies of whether she should express what she's actually thinking, meanwhile streamlining back to air in as composed a fashion as possible to say it's cool, she's fine. Anything to avoid the always-feared label of "crazy." "I'm tired of feeling like I'm fucking crazy" is one of my favorite Lana lines. When I hear her, I feel anything but. And during the moments that she occupies the space in my head, I, too, am a sorceress. Kasia Galazka is a writer in New York City. Her closet is too small for skeletons.

Sarah McCarty on Fun’s Some Nights (2012) (Rdio, Spotify, iTunes) One line. That’s all it takes sometimes. You put on an album just to sample it per a friend’s recommendation or to hear what the buzz is about, and then one simple lyric colors your entire relationship with the album. That’s how it happened for me with Fun’s Some Nights. Three minutes into the second track, the auto-tune pitches and military-style drum cadence drop out. Over a faint, slow piano melody, Nate Ruess sings, “My heart is breaking for my sister and the con that she called love / And then I look into my nephew’s eyes / Man you wouldn’t believe the most amazing things that can come from some terrible nights.” I felt like Roberta Flack (or Lauryn Hill), like Ruess had just read my imaginary diary out loud. When an artist puts personal feelings into a piece of work that precisely mirror your own, and then that art intersects with your life, an unbreakable sense of connection forms. And through that one line, that simple connection specifically relevant to my life, I tailored each song to my own experience, and the album morphed into my musical diary for 2012. This past year was the worst of my life. I dealt with my sister’s ex-husband’s custody lawsuit for my 6-year-old nephew, who I helped raise and love more than anyone in this world. By the time Some Nights hit the charts, I had lost myself in a pit of despair—the sort of despair you hit after 14 months of unemployment. The months, weeks, days and hours put into researching, networking and tailoring resumes and cover letters seemed useless. I felt stuck, powerless over my circumstances. Hopeless—almost hopeless. Some Nights was the one album that let me feel my entire spectrum of emotions, whether I wanted to indulge in my depression or wanted to motivate myself with positivity or just wanted to escape. In addition to Ruess’s expressions of love for his family, I also related to his more prominent and broad themes of loneliness, self-worth and introspection. This year I dwelled on everything, questioning all past decisions, current plans, future hopes. For me, it wasn’t just about finding a job; it was about reclaiming my life. Back in 2009, a minor quarter-life crisis spurred me to climb out of a rut, take action and apply for graduate school so that I could make the life I wanted. But nearly one year after graduating and approaching 30 years old, I felt trapped again. I started to doubt it all—everything I had worked for, everything I had always wanted, everything I stood for, everything I thought was important to me. I questioned who I was, who I wanted to be and who I thought I could be. In the song “Some Nights,” Ruess asks “What do I stand for?” and concludes that, “Most nights, I don’t know anymore.” On “One Foot” he’s stuck in limbo, “waiting for something to happen.”  In “Carry On” he sings about suicide and facing adversity. Even on the bonus track, “Out on the Town,” he doubts himself, repeating, “And I know I could be more clever / And I know I could be more strong.” Some nights, I wanted to let in all the hurt, all the uncertainty, all the suffering. It was those times I would focus on these words. It was those times I locked myself in the car. I cried to the pounding percussion beats and yelled, “Oh Lord, I’m still not sure what I stand for / What do I stand for? What do I stand for? / Most nights, I don’t know anymore.” I skip forward to “One Foot.” A vulnerable voice sings, “I am over 25 and I can’t make a name for myself / Some nights I break down and cry.”  Is that Ruess, or is that me? Other times, “One Foot” was my battle cry. The track starts and ends with an assault of horns championing me forward, and Ruess even reminds himself that maybe success is the fact that his father will “live on forever in my song.” The same album and the same songs that allowed me to serve my egocentric depression also allowed me to tap into inspiration. Listening to “Carry On” and its wailing guitar solo made me feel less lonely. Singing aloud lyrics such as “We are shining stars / We are invincible / We are who we are” and “If you're lost and alone / Or you're sinking like a stone / Carry on” motivated me to keep fighting for what I want. And when I was tired of fighting and too weak to be melodramatic and wallow in my depression, Some Nights was an escape. When you hear certain music, it changes your entire body chemistry. When I needed to forget it all, I played the album and let the pop saturate my veins with positivity. Nothing made me feel better than sitting outside under the warm sun blasting the buoyant music, tapping my feet to the fast tempos and bass beats, and humming along to the catchy melodies and hooks. The earnest, powerful delivery of the words and the theatrical, bombastic sounds worked as a thousand hands reaching to help me crawl out of the pit. Putting on the album gave me a reason to get out of bed, a reason to open the blinds. A car ride alone gave me something to look forward to, even if it just lasted 15 minutes. It was 15 minutes to not think about anything and to just enjoy the music. Some Nights effortlessly moves across a range of emotions and speaks to the complexities of my life in 2012. From the outside, I spent all my time either sleeping or on the computer. But inside my mind it was a bedlam of activity—constantly fighting for space to be sad, to be angry, to be motivated, to be excited about the future, to be nostalgic for the past. My mood was in constant chaos, changing from one minute to the next. The opener on Some Nights illustrates some of this mayhem. It’s a mini-pop-opera that sounds like an eerie Jack-in-the-Box slowly winding up in the first few notes. Ruess sings of someone hanging on to the past, worried about what he’s changing into, expecting catastrophe in the future and expressing bitterness in the present. As the music and the dissonant sounds of screams, gunshots and broadcasts grow louder in the background, he confesses he’s going crazy. He just wants some sleep, a little peace. Hopefully he found that peace in his music. I did. Sarah A. McCarty is an arts and culture journalist.

I know the girls have a big year ahead of them. They’re recording their debut full-length album, and I can’t wait to watch it all unfold. Although it was important for me to find my footing in San Francisco and navigate much of this crazy year on my own, I like knowing that the girls are just a train ride away. Because there’s always something going down at the T’s house.  Julia Askenase is a freelance writer based in a not-so-foggy neighborhood of San Francisco.

First came the elevator and Iman riding it. Iman rides your elevator?! Yes, she owns a cosmetics company and their offices are a floor below us. SO ONE DAY BOWIE MIGHT BE IN YOUR ELEVATOR? No. YES. Bowie wouldn’t visit Iman. HE MIGHT. No. YES. Why would he leave the house? TO HAVE LUNCH. No. BOWIE IN THE ELEVATOR was my internet status for a while, anywhere I could have a status, not as a joke but as a visualization, like The Secret or Scientology. If I can picture Bowie in the elevator, down to the smallest detail, he will be there, wearing shades and an expertly tailored jacket. He might make a joke, smile that crooked Bowie smile. I would laugh like my abuelita, covering my mouth with one hand to hide the teeth. Then I’d remember, I’m talking to Bowie! He doesn’t care about my crooked bicuspids, I mean, his teeth! Seriously! I never really extended my daydream past this moment. It’s Bowie in the elevator and that’s enough. The company was bought, the office got closed, J works from home now. Bowie rides the elevator unseen. Second was the car. We were test driving a clunker, the lady was offering it at a super low price. It had an off smell and a perfectly boring exterior—perfect, I thought, no one will want to steal it, they won’t even see it, it’s not even there. It had a tape player with a tape already inside—Low by David Bowie. She told us that if we bought it, we could keep the tape. She was kidding of course, not about giving up the tape, that bit was legit, but about the tape being any kind of incentive. She didn’t know us at all, didn’t see when we locked eyes briefly in excitement. We drove around, listing the pros and cons of car ownership, and I kept hitting rewind on “Breaking Glass.” How is it that he’s so good with guitarists? Even Stevie Ray Vaughn. Right? Even him, “Let’s Dance” is the best thing he ever did. Do you think it was a cut and paste solo, much longer but shaped by Bowie to be amazing? It was analog, sure, but there are ways. We didn’t know. What we did know was that when Bowie says that he’s breaking glass in our room again, when he tells us to listen, the z-shaped keyboard line that comes in doesn’t sound like breaking glass at all. It sounds like a car hitting the horn while zig-zagging through traffic, captured on Polaroid with faux neon speed lines, Picasso painting with light. Carlos Alomar’s guitar sounds like avoidance AND confrontation; deliberately facing off against the drum/bass united front with deep, swaggering bend, then falling off the funky dance floor with greased up slide during the verses. The flow mirrors the singer who is in no way straight. In fact, our narrator is so bent, he may not even be breaking anything, just imagining he is. Drawing runes on the carpet with cigarette ash, getting up suddenly, dancing around, pointing fingers at all the surfaces bearing his reflection, sitting back down. It’s an imaginary fight and like most imaginary fights, it’s symmetrical and orderly, beautiful even. It makes sense in a way the real thing could not because our emotions don’t let it. Boy, this song. It is so, so good and so, so short. You just want to put it on a loop and play it and play it as you drive around aimlessly on a sweltering suburban summer street; never, ever fade. But I skipped ahead a bit. In 2011, we only had one child; in 2012, children. I was and am hormonal. Commercials about Google chat make me cry. The jar of peanuts my husband keeps stashed on the top shelf out of my 5’2” reach turns me into a ragemonster. Jason Segel is in every movie I’ve seen this year and I laughed at all of them, even the unfunny ones and I don’t care who knows it. You would think that all this sour house-bound domestic lunacy would lead me to simpler, cliched fare but no. Low, Station to Station, Heroes. That’s been the soundtrack of this past year. The lines, the clear up and downs, the space. It all makes sense now. So meeting Bowie, even by chance, didn’t seem so strange. No stranger than my sudden love of albums that I’d always admired more than cared for. We didn’t buy the car. Even for pennies it was too much for our budget. I did buy Bowie in Berlin for him, for Christmas. So that he could tell me about it as he reads. So that we could keep the Bowie year going and going and going. Maybe he’ll return and sing us a new song. Maybe not. But for now—listen. Daniella Joseph wasn't expecting Bowie to come out with another album in 2013.

La Sera’s Sees The Light starts off with a slow song. It feels calm and familiar. Then the second song throws you into the deep end of the pool. “Please Be My Third Eye” is loud and fast, urgent but controlled. Since I first heard it, this song has been a constant in my life. It was a really busy year: Shortly after Sees The Light was released I lost my job, then this summer I packed up my car and drove from California to New York to make a new life for myself. All this year I have been traveling a lot, making new friends, going on adventures. All while listening to this song. The components hit all the pleasure centers in my brain. Fuzzy guitars? Check. Way too much reverb? Check. Super catchy vocal melody? Check. To me it feels like the solution to the question posed by Best Coast, Vivian Girls, Cults and all these other throwback surf-rock girl group bands. In less than three minutes it finally does everything I want in one perfect song. In October I finally got to see La Sera live when they opened for Father John Misty. I got there early and got a spot up front. I could barely hear the vocals and I was surrounded all around with people who could care less about La Sera. But as soon as that drum intro started I was jumping up and down and singing along because this was my song. Alice Lee writes a weekly email called Probably Never and uses Twitter too much.

Robert Ker on Cat Power’s Sun (2012) and The Shins’ Port of Morrow (2012) (Rdio, Spotify, iTunes / Rdio, Spotify, iTunes) The way they presented themselves on stage revealed much about them. Chan Marshall took up a guitar as Cat Power and hid her eyes behind her bangs, sometimes performing with her back to the audience as if slightly ashamed. When James Mercer played early concerts with The Shins, he hid off to the side, deferring the audience’s attention to the extroverted keyboardist Martin Crandall. Marshall was prone to abruptly stopping her performances and breaking down. Mercer looked as if he were eyeing the exits and making preparations for a quick escape. If you never got to see them perform, there was always the music. In “Colors and the Kids,” one of Cat Power’s most arresting early songs, Marshall tries to figure out why she even bothers living. In “Chutes Too Narrow,” one of The Shins’ best early songs, Mercer fantasizes about grabbing the yoke from the pilot and flying “the whole mess into the sea.” This deep depression, and their skill at conveying it in a powerfully relatable way, was a big part of their image and eventual success. When Hollywood licensed their music, the filmmakers took The Shins’ “New Slang,” a song that sounded like a sigh and a shrug on the long, slow march to death, for Garden State. In V for Vendetta, filmmakers opted for Cat Power’s cover of the Velvet Underground’s “I Found a Reason”—a song that makes the final stop on this march seem like a relief. This background made Marshall’s cry of “you want to live” on 2012’s “Nothing But Time”—a message so important she borrowed Iggy Pop’s dive-bar baritone to invoke it with proper gravity—mean something. Much ink has been spilled about Marshall’s personal turnaround and her hopeful and deeply humanistic album Sun, but Mercer’s less-talked-about Port of Morrow strikes a similar nerve. Neither one was my “favorite” album of the year but neither one was ever far from my thoughts. If Mercer seemed slightly obsessed with death on The Shins’ first two albums, Port of Morrow sounds like he was visited by the third ghost in A Christmas Carol, actually saw his lonely funeral, imagined how his life could have been happier, and wrote the album as a message to himself (according to Time Out London and other sources, this is not far from what happened to him at Heath Ledger’s memorial service). And so the man who sung about flying the whole mess into the sea now says, in a “Simple Song” line that never fails to move me, that once you confront your fears of accepting love and companionship you “feel like an ocean, being warmed by the sun.” An especially meaningful aspect of Marshall’s and Mercer’s creative evolutions is how they’ve gotten out of their own heads to embrace a level of empathy that they hadn’t often shown before. Their early music was frequently first-person and self-involved. But Sun and Port of Morrow find them exploring the second person and reaching out to others. “Nothin But Time” opens with “I see you kid, alone in your room, you got the weight on your mind and you’re just trying to get by”—lines of understanding that beautifully summarize so much of what makes music important. On “It’s Only Life,” Mercer—a man who once sung of having his head to the wall and feeling lonely—sings, “I’ve been down the very road you’re walking now, it doesn’t have to be so dark and lonesome.” You learn from the hardships of your past, and share with others. I’ve never been the biggest fan of either artist, but I’ve had a certain affection for them, mostly thanks to my wife. Before we started dating in the 1990s, she made me a Cat Power mixtape, a gesture I’ll never forget. She was also an early adopter of The Shins (meaning pre-Garden State) and played them a lot through our time together. So both of these artists have been in my life for a long time, even though I never quite warmed to either one—Marshall was always a little too directly painful for me, and Mercer was a little too obtuse in covering up his pain. For now, it seems, that pain has subsided. It’s a little odd how much reassurance I’ve drawn from this development. Maybe it’s on account of my age: Marshall is three years older than me and Mercer five years older, so it’s comforting to know that age 40 doesn’t hold the horrors I’m sometimes moved to mentally prepare for—quite the opposite, in fact. One of the major things I like about the internet is knowing that people my age are doing OK, whether they’re old friends that I’ll probably never see again, new friends from around the world that I might never meet, or complete strangers. This is my generation; these are people that came into the world at roughly the same time I did, and will leave the world at roughly the same time I will, and the people that I’ll share this whole, general life experience with. It helps me to know they’re doing well, Marshall and Mercer included. When it comes to those two, you can still tell a lot by how they present themselves in concert. Marshall’s performances are still hit-and-miss, if reviews are to be believed, but she now occupies a large stage, walking back and forth with a microphone in hand, her long bangs now replaced by a short locks that shows off her deeply expressive face. Mercer now has an entirely different band behind him and he now stands front and center, full of smiles, full of thanks. Robert Ker is a writer living in Portland, Maine.

And January 31st is the very last day you have to submit something for Unbest 2012. Yipes! No pressure, but you might wanna get on it.

Meghan O'Dea lives and writes (and tweets) in Chattanooga, Tenn.

Christina Lee once watched Gucci Mane read a press release. She writes and tweets.