Last week, we announced our top 10 albums of the year with Zach Bryan’s American Heartrbreak taking the top spot, just ahead of The Ghost of Paul Revere’s swan song, Goodbye. Now, it’s time to narrow it down further with our top 10 songs of the year.
As mentioned in last week’s post, I’m not trying to convince you that the songs I like are better than yours, but I love seeing other peoples’ lists because they give me new songs or artists to listen to, and that’s what I hope my list will be for others too.
Naturally, many of the songs on my list are also on my top albums. The song Spotify named my most listened to song of the year, The Otter from Caamp, didn’t actually make my Top 10 (not that I don’t like it).
5 songs that just missed the cut
Brady Street – Dead Horses
Brightside – The Lumineers
Lavender Girl – Caamp
Something in the Orange – Zach Bryan
Ballad of a Retired Man – Ian Noe
The Top 10 Songs of the Year
10. California – Bonny Light Horseman
from the album Rolling Golden Honey
While Bonny Light Horseman’s sophomore album just missed my top 10 albums list, I could listen to Annais Mitchell’s voice all day long. That said, it’s a song that features bandmate Eric D. Johnson that makes my top 10 song list. California is the type of song that makes you long for a Sunday drive up the coast.
Johnson described the song by saying it’s, “a sad one, a story about pulling up roots, new beginnings, goodbyes, early morning long drives, riding into the sunrise instead of the sunset. They usually don’t end movies riding into the sunrise but this movie has that scene.”
9. San Francisco – Bonny Doon
single from unreleased album
Apparently, we have a theme this year with bands named Bonny and songs about the largest state on the West Coast. This one, from Detroit-based Bonny Doon, has Katie Crutchfield (a.k.a. Waxahatchee) singing background vocals.
The band describes the song as a nod to their time on the West Coast and an “observation about how places like San Francisco and Detroit are being transformed by capital, and how people are figuring out how to keep existing within that change.”
8. The Single Fatherhood Feels of Corey Dean – Jeremy Todd
from the album Jeremy Todd
Any artist who can mix some humor with solid songwriting and a great baseline is good with me. This song has all of that. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been there three times (fatherhood, not as a single father, though) but the opening lyrics just hit home.
“The Goddamn baby was crying all the time
and I felt I might lose my mind
well, it wouldn’t be the first time.
A wise man told me take it one day at a time
but I just watched life pass me by
and I guess it’s my right.
And all the long I was trying to do what was right
and all the while just getting a little bit further behind.”
7. Stealing Dark from the Night Sky – Arlo McKinley
from the album This Mess We’re In
From my 5th-best album of the year, Arlo McKinley knocks it out of the park with Stealing Dark from the Night Sky. A classic slow country song featuring McKinley’s raspy voice, beautiful strings, and a great contrast between the dark tone of the song and the uplifting lyrics. It’s the kind of song that, the first time you hear it, immediately becomes one of your new favorites.
McKinley described This Mess We’re In as a “growth record”, and Stealing Dark from the Night Sky reflects that.
6. Letters from the War of Love and Loss – The Ghost of Paul Revere
from the album Goodbye
I’m still sad that The Ghost of Paul Revere hung it up, but the gift they gave us with Goodbye will live on. Lead singer Griffin Sherry, who I’m excited to see embark on his own solo career, said of the record, “I hope listeners love the songs and want to keep listening to them for as long as they’ve got ears,” and that’s what we’ll do.
Letters from the War of Love and Loss is the first single from the album and the band describes it as a party tune. It may reflect the band’s feeling of searching for something more but finding out the grass isn’t always greener, and it could also reflect the listener’s realization that this is it.
5. It’s So Hard to Hold On – Trampled by Turtles
from the album Alpenglow
The lead track from Trampled by Turtles’ latest album, Alpenglow, captures the dichotomy of time in a way that few bands can. The Avett Brothers do it with songs like Backwards With Time, and Trampled by Turtles do it nicely with It’s So Hard to Hold On. The juxtaposition of the rollicking strings and the melancholy voice of Dave Simonett lamenting time both flying by and moving too slowly, is classic TBT.
4. Miles and Miles – The Heavy Heavy
from the album Life and Life Only
The first single from UK-band The Heavy Heavy’s debut EP, Life and Life Only, Miles and Miles is the type of catchy tune that you can’t get out of your head. That was true for me all summer with a song that makes you want to roll down the windows on a summer road trip. As soon as I heard it played on 93XRT for the first time, I wanted to know more about the band. Needless to say, they made my top 10 albums list and the song ranks even higher on my top songs list.
3. Jamie – Zach Bryan & Charles Wesley Godwin
from the album Summertime Blues EP
While his 34-song American Heartbreak topped my albums list, it’s Zach Bryan’s duet with Charles Wesley Godwin off of his 9-song Summertime Blues EP that lands on my top songs list. Jamie finds Bryan and Godwin trading verses and harmonizing on the chorus. telling the story of a man trying to cope with the loss of his lover. It’s beautiful, sad, raw, and such a perfect collaboration.
2. Abilene – Plains
from the album I Walked With You a Ways
Katie Crutchfield and Jess Williamson joined forces for one of the best collabs of the year. Their album I Walked With You a Ways — and the tour that supported it — is full of 1990s Dixie Chicks style country tunes. Abilene, a country waltz style song that was written by Williamson, narrates the ending of a relationship, lamenting what could have been.
“I think we all have our own personal ‘Abilene,’” Williamson said. “Maybe it’s a place where you used to live and things didn’t turn out as planned, like in the song. It could also be a relationship that ended in disappointment, or a dream that turned into a hard reality, or even an old version of yourself that’s better left in the past. ‘Abilene’ is a song about knowing your worth, having courage in the face of an uncertain future, and trusting your gut.”
1. Ships in the Harbor – Tommy Prine
single from unreleased album
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that a song connected to the late great John Prince takes the No. 1 spot on my list. Arlo McKinley made both my top albums and top songs list and he’s signed to Prine’s Oh Boy Records label, as is Tre Burt who made my list last year. This song, however, has the closest connection as Tommy Prine is John’s 26-year-old son.
The lead-up to his debut album, which will be released this year, Ships in the Harbor sounds nothing like the elder Prine — but that’s just fine because if it’s any indication of what’s to come, he’ll have plenty of his own success.
“I wrote this song around my birthday last year and I always get super existential around my birthday and I had a thought that we as humans can only feel as deeply as we do and love people and fear things and all the other intense emotions is because everything we experience is finite, including our own lives,” Prine said. “So I wrote a song about these little powerful moments and reflections in the human experience to try and capture the beauty in mortality.”
We would love to hear what songs topped your list this year. Share in the comments below.
