FINALLY we're back again for an Albums of the Year countdown. Sorry I missed 2021, but that was a heck of a jacked up year. As usual, this is the list of my favorite albums that I heard in their complete form for the first time in the calendar year 2022. They did not all come out this year, and I may have heard a song or two a while ago. For example, I heard "The Body Electric" from Small Town Heroes for the first time back in 2014, and finally got around to hearing the entire album 8 years later. Music. Wow.
Rank - Artist - Album Name (Year)
Bonus: Live Album - La Santa Cecilia - Amar Y Vivir (En Vivo Desde La Ciudad De México, 2017)
This live recording from a show in Mexico City is pretty much exactly what all performing musicians should aspire to: variety, fun, excitement, and, most important of all, damn good music. In the Uber I took from Harlem to JFK after my performance in Brooklyn last April, I had a conversation in Spanish with my driver and asked her what kind of music she liked. She told me to look up these guys and, I admit, I didn't listen to the full album until December. But when I did, I loved every minute. Every song is fantastic, the performance aspect of it is wonderful, and the surprise Beatles cover was a bonus.
10 - Galt McDermott, Gerome Ragni, James Rado - Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical (1967)
The first of two musicals to make my list this year. I did my listening pretty much exclusively to the film soundtrack special anniversary edition (which has incredible drumset and bass guitar playing). Everyone has heard "The Flesh Failures (Let the Sunshine In)" at some point in their lives but it took until I saw a trio including Hugh Panaro (whom I also got to see on Broadway as Erik (The Phantom) back in 2012) do it as the encore to a Best of Broadway show with The Phoenix Symphony this past Spring before I realized it came from Hair. This musical is funky and the lyrics are evocative. The questions raised by the Hippie movement remain unanswered and the full depth of its cultural impact is yet to be determined, and the way Hair captures the zeitgeist of that era makes it still incredibly relevant today. Especially now that astrology is making a comeback.
9 - Willis Alan Ramsey - Willis Alan Ramsey (1972)
When you realize that one of the final lyrics of this album is "those Dallas women standing up beat the others lying down" it suddenly becomes awkward that my parents told me about it. Apparently some article about "the songwriter's songwriter" legendary for only ever recording one album. Well, having listened to the music, it does make for a pretty good legend. Hits like Muskrat Love/Muskrat Candlelight and The Ballad of Spider John have been covered by numerous other artists, like Captain & Tennille and Jimmy Buffet. It's all great music, but honestly, for me, it really is all about the last track. Often what makes or breaks an album is the final word - the last song - and the final word (thus far) of Willis Alan Ramsey's entire recording career is a love letter to the women of Texas, and in particular, Dallas, TX (there aren't enough good songs about my hometown). God bless the Trinity River and any man who's unaware of Northeast Texas women and their cotton candy hair.
8 - Mohammed El-Bakkar and his Oriental Ensemble - Port Said: Music of the Middle East (1957)
Sex Sells. I always cringe when I'm at the record store and I see an album of music from Southwest Asia and the cover is a belly dancer. It just seems weird for me. But my parents got me this album on vinyl as a graduation/birthday gift and I gave it a shot and, lo and behold, beneath the seductive image of Nejla Ates (a Turkish belly dancer who starred in the musical Fanny along with El-Bakkar and had a very dramatic life story) are some real bangers. And these aren't just cliche Arabic-sounding tunes - I found three of the songs in the Southwest Asian version of the Realbook - The Real Arab Book (buy it here). One of those is the classic Ah Ya Zayne (Ah Ya Zain - Beautiful One) which I performed dozens of times with Jamal Mohamed and the Meadows World Music Ensemble. You can play this album at a party, or a wedding, or while you're having your morning coffee, really anywhere. It's worth looking past the cover. And then once you appreciate the music, maybe learning how to appreciate the cover art, too (you really can't pick and choose which correlated traditions you appreciate and act like the others don't exist).
7 - Melody Gardot - The Absence (2012)
I usually don't like jazz. In the same year as El-Bakkar released Port Said, Chuck Berry hit the nail on the head decrying jazz for too often "[losing] the beauty of the melody." Melody Gardot has a really crazy life story that I will leave you to look up on Wikipedia (brain trauma leads to being superhuman, the usual). My psychotherapist told me to listen to some of her music and one quiet night I popped her on the bluetooth, and I heard the sultry harmonic and rhythmic ethereality that I associate with later jazz, but with real solid Melody, too. I found another album of Gardot's - I think The Absence was that second one. WOW. It's songs, but with complex accompaniment that goes so far beyond the poppy trash we hear all too often blaring in gas stations and shopping malls that you're almost tempted to say these aren't songs at all - rather they're "pieces" of music. But then mixed into the album are a few straight up bops, like Amalia and Iemanja. This is great music.
6 - Natalia Lafourcade - De todas las flores (2022)
Ok now I'm seeing a trend. Just like how Gardot's music is songs, but deconstructed to where the structure of verse-chorus-verse-(bridge?)-chorus is unrecognizable and the music accompanying the singing is really just that - straight up music, happening, evolving throughout the piece, Lafourcade is moving in that direction. Should it be called "Post-Pop?" I don't know. It's really cool to observe how Lafourcade's style grew, though. She started as normal pop as a youngster, then crafted an album nearly entirely made up of pop-style covers of the great Mexican composer Agustin Lara (you've heard his Granada), then another more advanced pop album, then a two-volume masterpiece with the guitar duo Los Macorinos featuring some new tunes and some more covers of Latin American classics (like Simon Diaz' Tonada de Luna Llena), then her two-volume Canto por México where she did what many thought unthinkable - she covered HERSELF. By the Canto albums, the music accompanying Lafroucade's vocals had become incredibly complex - the first volume reminds me a lot of lush "Golden Age of Cinema" sounds. Well now she's just gone full Post-Pop with her latest album. All the beauty of her lyrics and her voice combined with utterly transcendent performances by her backing musicians, and the way it all comes together I couldn't help but think of the Gardot albums I had just heard earlier this year. Natalia Lafourcade has always been great, and its really cool to see her continue to develop and evolve her style and continue to nail it siempre.
5 - IBERI - Supra (2022)
Not many of you know this about me, but as an ethnomusicologist, I love medieval choral church music. Actually though - I love going back and listening to recordings of music by Thomas Tallis (England, contemporary of Henry VIII) and Hildegard von Bingen (Germany (Holy Roman Empire) 11th Century). Well I have no idea how I found this album, Supra, by the Georgian (🇬🇪) male choir IBERI, but it's got a very similar vibe (for obvious reasons - the Georgian traditional music they are singing can trace its origins back to the same traditions from whence came the music of Tallis and Hildegard out in Western Europe). This feels more fresh, though, more energetic, perhaps even more human. While many of the more historical recordings wash the sound of the voices with acoustical reverb, natural or otherwise, to mimic the sound of a towering cathedral (for the record I'm sure some of those recording are actually made in cathedrals), IBERI is just brash and in-your-face. I like to play this album driving through downtown Phoenix with my windows down, hoping someone will ask me who it is and I can shout "IBERI. They're from Georgia!"
4 - Cheikh Lô - Bambay Gueej (1999)
This is another one that I cannot recall why I added it to my library, but I'm glad I did. Most of the album is a really solid Afro-Cuban-Mbalax (Senegalese Cuban-inspired music) type of sound. Music you can dance to or that you can throw on at a party, and is absolutely complex and thoughtful enough for you to just sit down and listen to it with a nice cold bottle of root beer. But what shoots this album all the way to the #4 spot is the reward you get for listening through to the end. Holy Cats. When you talk about the final track making or breaking the album, THIS IS WHAT I MEAN. Zkir is one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard in my entire life. It's a complete changeup from the sound and style of the rest of the album, dropping the energy down a few notches so that the heart of the musician emerges above the fray, pulsing violently, but with a sense of absolute peace. It's a true encore - the kind that is deeply personal and makes you want to immediately listen to the entire album over again so that you can remember what it felt like for the curtains to open one last time and you hear . . . THAT.
3 - Dale Wasserman, Mitch Leigh, & Joe Darion - Man of La Mancha (1965)
2022 was the Year of Don Quixote for me. I had started re-reading the epic in fall of 2021 and completed it in the Spring of '22 as I was finishing my masters degree. That same Spring, I filmed a Don Quixote-inspired music video for my single, Here & Everywhere, that I presented in Brooklyn as the last hurrah of my time at ASU. Shortly after I graduated, one of my professors held a moving-away stuff-giveaway party where I found myself the proud second-hand owner of a number of vinyl records. One of them was the film soundtrack to Man of La Mancha, starring Peter O'Toole and Sofia Loren. I listened to the record, then decided I needed to see the movie. Having just finished reading the book, I loved both for their charming references to the original text, their sincere humor, and what I found to be great music. There's one scene in the movie (and I can only assume it's similar in most productions of the musical) where Sofia Loren's character is treated quite rudely and it makes me wonder how people ever survived in olden times when things were even worse than they are now (oh wait - isn't there a song about that called Two Thousand & One?) The plot of the musical is a creative twist on Don Q, and there are several real worthy earworms throughout. The best by far is The Impossible Dream, which was the butt of most criticisms when the musical first came out for being a glorious ode to a madman. But to me it's really about trying to be better, to live in a way that's about more than just surviving for oneself (clawing for money) and instead trying to truly live a life of goodness, and to share that desire and motivation for a better life and better world with others. I'll never forget when I drove back to Phoenix from Mexico in August '22 and I listened straight through the entire musical on the desert highway through Sonora. Keep dreaming, Alonso Quijana - I'm right there with you.
2 - Jimmy Cliff - Follow My Mind (1976)
I love Jimmy Cliff and I have for many years. First, many years ago, I found a compilation of his top hits including Many Rivers to Cross, Hard Road to Travel, Hello Sunshine, and Use What I Got. I found his album Music Maker when I was nearing the end of my time in Dallas (the song Been Dead 400 Years made my one and only top 10 songs list in 2019, before I decided to stick to full albums). Then I saw his movie in the Spring of my first year at ASU - The Harder They Come, which was responsible for introducing many outside of Jamaica to Reggae music for the first time - and listened to its soundtrack, which featured Cliff and a number of other early Reggae and Rocksteady groups. It's all incredible. I found Follow My Mind on vinyl at the Ghost of Eastside record store across the parking lot from where I was stationed when I first moved to the Valley of the Sun - the same pad where I first saw Cliff's movie. It opens with a bang and never stops being perfect. Beautiful ballads, rocking dance tunes, and lyrics that bite. Cliff's cover of No Woman, No Cry is worthy, but my favorites are Look at the Mountains (especially poignant living in Phoenix) and Who Feels It, Knows It. If you know, you know.
1 - Hurray for the Riff Raff - Small Town Heroes (2014)
Every time I go home, my accent gets a little more Texan. I've been carrying on a tradition for a while where every time I drive back to Dallas, I take more rural highways instead of the big interstates and I stop in as many small towns as I can, take a quick wander around and try to absorb what life might smell, taste, and feel like from the perspective of each place. It's made me an expert in patterns of urban growth and decay, but it's also given me a glimpse into what the history of larger cities like Dallas and of my hometown, McKinney, TX, might have looked like. Small Town Heroes is the music of the rural highway. It's the music of the sun setting beyond the grain elevator. It's the music of a quiet, slow, patient, and difficult life. It's music that feels like home to me and I spent the week or so after I came back from the holidays pretty thoroughly obsessed with it. I first heard The Body Electric on an NPR top indie free downloads playlist in the same year this album was released but didn't come back to listen to the entire thing until late Fall 2022. In the intervening years, I saw the very Blue Ridge Mountains that she sings about in the opening track. In those years I got stuck in the backup on the two-lane highway in the mountains between Holbrook and Payson because of a crash multiple times. I met someone named Levon. I found and lost every love that I've had so far and grown to become a person who can listen to this music and reflect - in 2014 I was only able to imagine. As I grow older, I find myself longing more and more for a quieter lifestyle. I drive through the small towns and wish that I could simply pick one, stop, and never leave. Duncan, Arizona - Idalou, Texas - Payson, Arizona - Mesilla, New Mexico. In these places, forever seems like just a day. Especially if you don't like country music, this album is worth hearing.
Listen to all these albums in my Good Ovidius: 2022 Top 10 Albums playlist on Apple Music:
https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/good-ovidius-2022-top-10-albums/pl.u-GgA52JVHdpMoqp
Love music, love each other, keep dreaming, find your pace and find your place, and here's to a kick ass 2023.
Lawson Malnory
Phoenix, AZ
7 January 2023
Rank - Artist - Album Name (Year)
Bonus: Live Album - La Santa Cecilia - Amar Y Vivir (En Vivo Desde La Ciudad De México, 2017)
This live recording from a show in Mexico City is pretty much exactly what all performing musicians should aspire to: variety, fun, excitement, and, most important of all, damn good music. In the Uber I took from Harlem to JFK after my performance in Brooklyn last April, I had a conversation in Spanish with my driver and asked her what kind of music she liked. She told me to look up these guys and, I admit, I didn't listen to the full album until December. But when I did, I loved every minute. Every song is fantastic, the performance aspect of it is wonderful, and the surprise Beatles cover was a bonus.
10 - Galt McDermott, Gerome Ragni, James Rado - Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical (1967)
The first of two musicals to make my list this year. I did my listening pretty much exclusively to the film soundtrack special anniversary edition (which has incredible drumset and bass guitar playing). Everyone has heard "The Flesh Failures (Let the Sunshine In)" at some point in their lives but it took until I saw a trio including Hugh Panaro (whom I also got to see on Broadway as Erik (The Phantom) back in 2012) do it as the encore to a Best of Broadway show with The Phoenix Symphony this past Spring before I realized it came from Hair. This musical is funky and the lyrics are evocative. The questions raised by the Hippie movement remain unanswered and the full depth of its cultural impact is yet to be determined, and the way Hair captures the zeitgeist of that era makes it still incredibly relevant today. Especially now that astrology is making a comeback.
9 - Willis Alan Ramsey - Willis Alan Ramsey (1972)
When you realize that one of the final lyrics of this album is "those Dallas women standing up beat the others lying down" it suddenly becomes awkward that my parents told me about it. Apparently some article about "the songwriter's songwriter" legendary for only ever recording one album. Well, having listened to the music, it does make for a pretty good legend. Hits like Muskrat Love/Muskrat Candlelight and The Ballad of Spider John have been covered by numerous other artists, like Captain & Tennille and Jimmy Buffet. It's all great music, but honestly, for me, it really is all about the last track. Often what makes or breaks an album is the final word - the last song - and the final word (thus far) of Willis Alan Ramsey's entire recording career is a love letter to the women of Texas, and in particular, Dallas, TX (there aren't enough good songs about my hometown). God bless the Trinity River and any man who's unaware of Northeast Texas women and their cotton candy hair.
8 - Mohammed El-Bakkar and his Oriental Ensemble - Port Said: Music of the Middle East (1957)
Sex Sells. I always cringe when I'm at the record store and I see an album of music from Southwest Asia and the cover is a belly dancer. It just seems weird for me. But my parents got me this album on vinyl as a graduation/birthday gift and I gave it a shot and, lo and behold, beneath the seductive image of Nejla Ates (a Turkish belly dancer who starred in the musical Fanny along with El-Bakkar and had a very dramatic life story) are some real bangers. And these aren't just cliche Arabic-sounding tunes - I found three of the songs in the Southwest Asian version of the Realbook - The Real Arab Book (buy it here). One of those is the classic Ah Ya Zayne (Ah Ya Zain - Beautiful One) which I performed dozens of times with Jamal Mohamed and the Meadows World Music Ensemble. You can play this album at a party, or a wedding, or while you're having your morning coffee, really anywhere. It's worth looking past the cover. And then once you appreciate the music, maybe learning how to appreciate the cover art, too (you really can't pick and choose which correlated traditions you appreciate and act like the others don't exist).
7 - Melody Gardot - The Absence (2012)
I usually don't like jazz. In the same year as El-Bakkar released Port Said, Chuck Berry hit the nail on the head decrying jazz for too often "[losing] the beauty of the melody." Melody Gardot has a really crazy life story that I will leave you to look up on Wikipedia (brain trauma leads to being superhuman, the usual). My psychotherapist told me to listen to some of her music and one quiet night I popped her on the bluetooth, and I heard the sultry harmonic and rhythmic ethereality that I associate with later jazz, but with real solid Melody, too. I found another album of Gardot's - I think The Absence was that second one. WOW. It's songs, but with complex accompaniment that goes so far beyond the poppy trash we hear all too often blaring in gas stations and shopping malls that you're almost tempted to say these aren't songs at all - rather they're "pieces" of music. But then mixed into the album are a few straight up bops, like Amalia and Iemanja. This is great music.
6 - Natalia Lafourcade - De todas las flores (2022)
Ok now I'm seeing a trend. Just like how Gardot's music is songs, but deconstructed to where the structure of verse-chorus-verse-(bridge?)-chorus is unrecognizable and the music accompanying the singing is really just that - straight up music, happening, evolving throughout the piece, Lafourcade is moving in that direction. Should it be called "Post-Pop?" I don't know. It's really cool to observe how Lafourcade's style grew, though. She started as normal pop as a youngster, then crafted an album nearly entirely made up of pop-style covers of the great Mexican composer Agustin Lara (you've heard his Granada), then another more advanced pop album, then a two-volume masterpiece with the guitar duo Los Macorinos featuring some new tunes and some more covers of Latin American classics (like Simon Diaz' Tonada de Luna Llena), then her two-volume Canto por México where she did what many thought unthinkable - she covered HERSELF. By the Canto albums, the music accompanying Lafroucade's vocals had become incredibly complex - the first volume reminds me a lot of lush "Golden Age of Cinema" sounds. Well now she's just gone full Post-Pop with her latest album. All the beauty of her lyrics and her voice combined with utterly transcendent performances by her backing musicians, and the way it all comes together I couldn't help but think of the Gardot albums I had just heard earlier this year. Natalia Lafourcade has always been great, and its really cool to see her continue to develop and evolve her style and continue to nail it siempre.
5 - IBERI - Supra (2022)
Not many of you know this about me, but as an ethnomusicologist, I love medieval choral church music. Actually though - I love going back and listening to recordings of music by Thomas Tallis (England, contemporary of Henry VIII) and Hildegard von Bingen (Germany (Holy Roman Empire) 11th Century). Well I have no idea how I found this album, Supra, by the Georgian (🇬🇪) male choir IBERI, but it's got a very similar vibe (for obvious reasons - the Georgian traditional music they are singing can trace its origins back to the same traditions from whence came the music of Tallis and Hildegard out in Western Europe). This feels more fresh, though, more energetic, perhaps even more human. While many of the more historical recordings wash the sound of the voices with acoustical reverb, natural or otherwise, to mimic the sound of a towering cathedral (for the record I'm sure some of those recording are actually made in cathedrals), IBERI is just brash and in-your-face. I like to play this album driving through downtown Phoenix with my windows down, hoping someone will ask me who it is and I can shout "IBERI. They're from Georgia!"
4 - Cheikh Lô - Bambay Gueej (1999)
This is another one that I cannot recall why I added it to my library, but I'm glad I did. Most of the album is a really solid Afro-Cuban-Mbalax (Senegalese Cuban-inspired music) type of sound. Music you can dance to or that you can throw on at a party, and is absolutely complex and thoughtful enough for you to just sit down and listen to it with a nice cold bottle of root beer. But what shoots this album all the way to the #4 spot is the reward you get for listening through to the end. Holy Cats. When you talk about the final track making or breaking the album, THIS IS WHAT I MEAN. Zkir is one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard in my entire life. It's a complete changeup from the sound and style of the rest of the album, dropping the energy down a few notches so that the heart of the musician emerges above the fray, pulsing violently, but with a sense of absolute peace. It's a true encore - the kind that is deeply personal and makes you want to immediately listen to the entire album over again so that you can remember what it felt like for the curtains to open one last time and you hear . . . THAT.
3 - Dale Wasserman, Mitch Leigh, & Joe Darion - Man of La Mancha (1965)
2022 was the Year of Don Quixote for me. I had started re-reading the epic in fall of 2021 and completed it in the Spring of '22 as I was finishing my masters degree. That same Spring, I filmed a Don Quixote-inspired music video for my single, Here & Everywhere, that I presented in Brooklyn as the last hurrah of my time at ASU. Shortly after I graduated, one of my professors held a moving-away stuff-giveaway party where I found myself the proud second-hand owner of a number of vinyl records. One of them was the film soundtrack to Man of La Mancha, starring Peter O'Toole and Sofia Loren. I listened to the record, then decided I needed to see the movie. Having just finished reading the book, I loved both for their charming references to the original text, their sincere humor, and what I found to be great music. There's one scene in the movie (and I can only assume it's similar in most productions of the musical) where Sofia Loren's character is treated quite rudely and it makes me wonder how people ever survived in olden times when things were even worse than they are now (oh wait - isn't there a song about that called Two Thousand & One?) The plot of the musical is a creative twist on Don Q, and there are several real worthy earworms throughout. The best by far is The Impossible Dream, which was the butt of most criticisms when the musical first came out for being a glorious ode to a madman. But to me it's really about trying to be better, to live in a way that's about more than just surviving for oneself (clawing for money) and instead trying to truly live a life of goodness, and to share that desire and motivation for a better life and better world with others. I'll never forget when I drove back to Phoenix from Mexico in August '22 and I listened straight through the entire musical on the desert highway through Sonora. Keep dreaming, Alonso Quijana - I'm right there with you.
2 - Jimmy Cliff - Follow My Mind (1976)
I love Jimmy Cliff and I have for many years. First, many years ago, I found a compilation of his top hits including Many Rivers to Cross, Hard Road to Travel, Hello Sunshine, and Use What I Got. I found his album Music Maker when I was nearing the end of my time in Dallas (the song Been Dead 400 Years made my one and only top 10 songs list in 2019, before I decided to stick to full albums). Then I saw his movie in the Spring of my first year at ASU - The Harder They Come, which was responsible for introducing many outside of Jamaica to Reggae music for the first time - and listened to its soundtrack, which featured Cliff and a number of other early Reggae and Rocksteady groups. It's all incredible. I found Follow My Mind on vinyl at the Ghost of Eastside record store across the parking lot from where I was stationed when I first moved to the Valley of the Sun - the same pad where I first saw Cliff's movie. It opens with a bang and never stops being perfect. Beautiful ballads, rocking dance tunes, and lyrics that bite. Cliff's cover of No Woman, No Cry is worthy, but my favorites are Look at the Mountains (especially poignant living in Phoenix) and Who Feels It, Knows It. If you know, you know.
1 - Hurray for the Riff Raff - Small Town Heroes (2014)
Every time I go home, my accent gets a little more Texan. I've been carrying on a tradition for a while where every time I drive back to Dallas, I take more rural highways instead of the big interstates and I stop in as many small towns as I can, take a quick wander around and try to absorb what life might smell, taste, and feel like from the perspective of each place. It's made me an expert in patterns of urban growth and decay, but it's also given me a glimpse into what the history of larger cities like Dallas and of my hometown, McKinney, TX, might have looked like. Small Town Heroes is the music of the rural highway. It's the music of the sun setting beyond the grain elevator. It's the music of a quiet, slow, patient, and difficult life. It's music that feels like home to me and I spent the week or so after I came back from the holidays pretty thoroughly obsessed with it. I first heard The Body Electric on an NPR top indie free downloads playlist in the same year this album was released but didn't come back to listen to the entire thing until late Fall 2022. In the intervening years, I saw the very Blue Ridge Mountains that she sings about in the opening track. In those years I got stuck in the backup on the two-lane highway in the mountains between Holbrook and Payson because of a crash multiple times. I met someone named Levon. I found and lost every love that I've had so far and grown to become a person who can listen to this music and reflect - in 2014 I was only able to imagine. As I grow older, I find myself longing more and more for a quieter lifestyle. I drive through the small towns and wish that I could simply pick one, stop, and never leave. Duncan, Arizona - Idalou, Texas - Payson, Arizona - Mesilla, New Mexico. In these places, forever seems like just a day. Especially if you don't like country music, this album is worth hearing.
Listen to all these albums in my Good Ovidius: 2022 Top 10 Albums playlist on Apple Music:
https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/good-ovidius-2022-top-10-albums/pl.u-GgA52JVHdpMoqp
Love music, love each other, keep dreaming, find your pace and find your place, and here's to a kick ass 2023.
Lawson Malnory
Phoenix, AZ
7 January 2023