Before we begin, here's an annual reminder that different streaming platforms pay different amounts to the artists who create the music you love. The numbers are the same as last year, but Spotify made a change so that you only get paid for songs that reach at least 1,000 streams. An artist who has several songs that each get 999 streams per year doesn't get paid ANYTHING. Small-time artists are being robbed of their IP thanks to this policy.
Tidal: $0.01284 / stream (a little more than 1 cent)
Apple Music: $0.008 / stream (eight tenths of a cent)
Amazon Music: $0.00402 / stream (less than half a cent)
Spotify: $0.00318 / stream (or nothing if your song receives fewer than 1,000 streams)
(YouTube, Pandora, and Deezer all pay even less)
Those of you who are familiar will already know how this works. Considering all albums that I heard in their entirety for the first time in 2024, these are my Top 10.
2024 was a challenging year for me. I decided to quit my job, got accepted into the Peace Corps but had to keep it quiet, ended up not actually being able to join the Peace Corps, fell in love, finally got away from my job and transitioned into a new role, and tried to keep ahold of my sense of purpose all the while. I did a lot of work on my own musical projects but as the year went on, I felt more and more disconnected from on the outside, and since inspiration fuels so much of my creativity that was really difficult. Even so, I got to listen to some real gems:
Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic | Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherezade, Op. 35 (2014)
David Bowie | The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)
Ay Lazzat | Oh Pleasure – Songs and Melodies from Dagestan (1995)
Dresdner Philharmonie | Kálmán: Die Csárdásfürstin (1966)
blink-182 | Blink-182 (2003)
Musekiwa Chingodza | Live in Santa Cruz (2012)
Hank Williams | Hank 100: Greatest Radio Hits (2005)
Vjaceslav Grochovskij | Songs of Chechnya: Traditional Folk (2017)
4 Non Blondes | Bigger, Better, Faster, More! (1992)
The Front Bottoms | You Are Who You Hang Out With (2023)
10: The Front Bottoms
You Are Who You Hang Out With (2023)
Best Song: “Finding Your Way Home”
I was first introduced to The Front Bottoms through their song "Twin Size Mattress" almost 10 years ago (around the time Jedi Master Sifo-Dyas was killed). I used to listen to their albums while I ran and I can still recite the lyrics to most of the songs from Talon of the Hawk, Rose, and their self-titled album perfectly in time with Brian Sella's immortalized vocal takes. I was talking about the front bottoms when I was quoted as saying "I may wear a suit to conform in the workplace, but I also listen to punk rock."
You Are Who You Hang Out With sounds more like The Front Bottoms of the old days than their more autotuned, pop-inflected material (like Back on Top) that came out in the intervening years. I never stopped being a fan, but I didn't continue to seek out their new material.
Of course, the opening track of YAWYHOW ("Emotional") leans heavily into autotune for effect, but the rest of the album conveys the acoustic/live sensation that made me fall in love with The Front Bottoms to begin with. It's good old punk rock, it's contemporary and relevant, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to give their ears a break from the ultra-mainstream heavily produced pop/rap melange that the popular music world has been circling around in for the past several years.
9: 4 Non Blondes
Bigger, Better, Faster, More! (1992)
Best Song: “What’s Up?”
One day I showed up to work at The Phoenix Symphony and I was whistling the chorus from "What's Up." A stagehand asked me "Is that 4 Non Blondes" and I said "Hell yeah it is." He told me that he had worked one of their shows when they were on tour in Paris. They were not only amazing performers, but they were good people too and treated all the production crew with gratitude and respect. I'll always hype up anyone like that, because too often talent comes with ego, and ego turns talent into torture for the people who orbit the star.
I'm the furthest thing from an expert on classic rock, but this album exudes the vibe that I associate with that genre. It's high energy, it's thoughtful, it mixes ballads with bangers, and the musicianship is top notch. Linda Perry could growl and scream her vocals as good as anybody else from that era, and the lyrics are painfully relevant still today ("It's such a wonderful country, but the man - he's burning it down" | "I cry sometimes when I'm lying in bed just to get it all out, what's in my head . . . and I scream from the top of my lungs 'What's going on?'").
The sad part of the story is that this was 4 Non Blondes' one and only album. What would they be sreaming from the top of their lungs if they were still making music together today?
8: Vjaceslav Grochovskij
Songs of Chechnya: Traditional Folk (2017)
Best Song: “The Land of Our Fathers”
If you're not a fan or free aerophones, this album is NOT for you. And no, free aerophone is not a movement to release somebody from prison - free aerophones are instruments that create sound by vibrating unenclosed (free) air. Flutes and trumpets, for example, contain the air that they vibrate within themselves and are NOT free aerophones. There's a sub category called free reed aerophones, which push air past a vibrating reed held within a frame. This includes harmonicas, accordions, reed organs, pitch pipes - instruments that create that sound that's like a singing car crash. Personally, I find that sound romantic, but a lot of people can't adjust to it so I wanted to give the disclaimer. The instrument you hear in this music is probably a garmon, a Russian button accordion (button accordions don't have keys laid out like a piano - just buttons).
Why Chechnya, you ask? Because of Dune. I never read the Dune books and I'm not a huge fan of Timothée Chalamet, but I felt like the new movies were something I wanted to be aware of for the purposes of small talk. In doing a little background digging, I learned that Frank Herbert was heavily influenced by Lesley Blanch's Sabres of Paradise, a non-fiction account of the life of the Imam Shamil, an Avar man who led the peoples of the Caucasus in resistance against Russian imperial colonialism in the middle of the 19th Century. He led the Murid warriors in obfuscating Russian attempts to establish control over Chechnya and Dagestan - a Caucasian corridor which would give them direct access to the Middle East and India. The conflict lasted from 1817-1859, spanning over the terms of 11 US presidents, making international headlines (especially in Britain where anti-Russian sentiment was strong). The intense training of the warriors, the harsh landscape of Dagestan, and the intense faith of the Caucasian peoples (both in their leader, Shamil, and in their traditions and their God) directly inspired Herbert's Fremen.
I highly recommend reading Blanch's book, and if you listen to this album while you're reading you will be utterly transported to the auls (fortified mountain villages) where many Murids made their last stands. Like the sound of a free reed aerophone - it was harsh, but it was home.
7: Hank Williams
Hank 100: Greatest Radio Hits (2005)
Best Song: “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”
Hank Williams was born in Alabama in 1923, one hundred six years after the start of the Caucasian War. He lived a short life, troubled by alcoholism and celebrity, and died before he had reached the age of 30. But in that brief time he wrote iconic songs like "Hey, Good Lookin'", "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)," "I Saw the Light," and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." This is undeniable, authentic country music at it's roots. Hop-bopping guitars, noodling fiddles, nasal harmonies, and yodeling vocals. For an expat Texan like me who has more affection for what was than what is, this music takes me home to the plains and the old brick bank buildings surrounding the town squares, dotted every half-hour or so along the endless county roads. "The silence of a falling star lights up a purple sky and as I wonder where you are, I'm so lonesome I could cry." Nothing more really need be said.
6: Musekiwa Chingodza
Live in Santa Cruz (2012)
Best Song: “Chemutengure”
Check out my blog post titled "Mbira and Me" for more background on mbira music from the traditions of the Shona people from Zimbabwe and southern Africa. I've been listening to music from these traditions for more than a decade and I still can't get enough.
Musekiwa Chingodza was born in Mwangara village, Murewa, Zimbabwe, in 1970 and has recorded several albums. This live record from 2012 was recorded in Santa Cruz, which gives it a little sentimental boost for me because this summer I visited Santa Cruz for an adventurous weekend with my lovebird KG. On his trip to the wealthy beach town, Chingodza laid down solid renditions of some of the major members of the Shona mbira canon (you can find dozens of other recordings of "Nhemamusasa," "Taireva," "Nyamamusango," "Dande," and "Chemutengure" on Apple Music). There are also a handful of songs I am not so familiar with, and they're great, too. For me, an mbira album is defined by three things - two are binary: tempo (fast/slow), vocals (yes/no) - but the third is more complicated: timbre.
Mbiras have a range of natural sound but when you record it and manipulate it, that range is augmented a thousandfold. There are mbira albums that sound like dubstep (but better) and others that sound like a church chorus. Live in Santa Cruz sounds exactly as you'd expect - dry enough to evoke images of the open air (and perhaps a little scent of saltwater), with the fast pace of a fluent player and sincere, unaltered vocals. If you've never listened to mbira music before, you could start here and get a good idea of - if this can be said - what it's supposed to sound like.
5: blink-182
Blink-182 (2003)
Best Song: “I Miss You”
My journey in 2024 passed through Vienna, Austria. After my mother and I both got drenched in the Danube, we stopped by an upscale food shack on the banks of the river. The place was called "Moby Dick" and they served Havana Club rum, one of the world's most delicious spirits which I hadn't seen in real life since I visited Cuba five years earlier. As we sat enjoying our rum with fish & chips, staring at the giant ducks (they call them "swans" there), I heard someone say "Hello there." It wasn't Master Kenobi, though - it was blink-182.
Moby Dick was putting out a sick playlist of 2000s American punk rock, and "I Miss You" came on and pulled me in. That period in my life was a turning point. I had just decided not to join the Peace Corps barely two months earlier, and was struggling to prepare myself for the inevitable return of the symphony season and the endless frustrations of a job that I had emotionally moved on from long ago. I was falling in love with someone who I was starting to realize is the woman of my dreams but I was too consumed in my own trauma to see beyond my own turmoil. "Don't waste your time on me, you're already the voice inside my head."
But Vienna was a breath of fresh air. Hearing this song on my last day on the banks of the river, as I tried to prepare myself to say goodbye to a place that had forced me to feel optimism and excitement, I felt like music was calling out to me and saying "I've got your back." The defiant fuck-you attitude of blink-182's self-titled album was exactly what I needed to help me transition into the mindset you need to make it in the confused and chaotic version of the USA that we've all been getting to know so well over the past decade. This is classic punk rock from the land of the depressed-but-hopeful.
Dresdner Philharmonie, Dresden State Opera Chorus & Heinz Rögner
Kálmán: Die Csárdásfürstin (1966)
Best Song: Act I: Sich verlieben kann man öfter – Mädchen gibt es wunderfeine”
In a town called Baden bei Wien you can find a place called the Sommerarena. It's a small opera house, built in 1906, with a retractable roof that reveals a forested hillside and allows the songs of birds to mingle with the arias of the divas on stage. I'll always remember it as one of the most beautiful places in the world.
We knew it would be blasphemous to go to Vienna and NOT see any kind of classical music performance, but the big acts (the Philharmonic and the Opera) were in Salzburg for the Summer. So we called an audible and got tickets to see an obscure operetta by Emmerich Kálmán called Die Csárdásfürstin (The Gypsy Princess) in Baden, a resort town in the hills where many Wieners go to escape the summer heat.
There were no subtitles, and we knew that going in, but we figured "Was sum Teufel?" - Opera is supposed to be about the music, the spectacle, the acting, more than the words. Hopefully a good performance could keep us engaged if we couldn't quite latch onto the plot. Well fick mich seitwärts if that wasn't one of the most impressive artistic performances I've ever seen in my life. This was opera by the people who invented opera (Europeans), like getting beefy barbecue in Texas or getting French kissed in Paris. The choreography, the costumes, the singing, the humor. I alternated laughing and crying for almost three hours, and it wasn't really a sad opera - I was crying because I knew that I was living in a moment I would never forget and I was grateful. I looked up at the trees and listened to the birds, looked at the crowd with their hand-fans flapping (the opera house gave out branded cardstock hand-fans), and then back down to the stage where Sylva and Edwin's dramatic love story unfolded on the stage of the fictitious "Orpheum" theater which acts as the setting for most of the opera.
The opera itself has fantastic music and a fun story, and the actors and the pit orchestra performed the hell out of it. I had to find a recording I could stream when I wanted to reminisce and this one by the Dresden Phil is the best on Apple Music - and to be clear, while it is a good recording, it's the best to me because it is the most comprehensive. You can't stream a complete recording of the opera anywhere that I found.
BUT - there is a live recording of the full show performed in Tokyo in 1985 by the Wiener Volksoper orchestra and it's beautiful. If you're inspired by the selections included in the Dresden recording and want to experience the entire operetta, I highly recommend tracking down the Weiner Volkoper recording (available at Discogs on CD or vinyl).
Ay Lazzat
Oh Pleasure – Songs and Melodies from Dagestan (1995)
Best Song: “Shamil Imam”
On the train to Baden I read from my two-pound copy of War & Peace, purchased in Santa Cruz and carried across the Atlantic at the expense of at least a day's worth of clothes because I believe that objects can be imbued with spiritual power by the places they've been. Really it's just semiotics - a book I bought in Santa Cruz, flew with to Vienna, read on the train to Baden, that I look at again 20 years later will bring all the memories flooding back. But I believe in magic, too. I wanted to read War & Peace because I'd recently finished a collection of Tolstoy novellas - The Cossacks, Sevastopol Stories, and . . . Hadji Murat. Of course you've been researching as you go along with this article so you know by now that Hadji Murat was a Avar warrior who opposed Muridism and supported the Russians until they betrayed him, so he joined Imam Shamil and he was again betrayed, so he went back to the Russians, but then he was betrayed again and ultimately killed while trying to escape the Russians and return to the mountains.
Hadji Murat was Tolstoy's last novel, completed around 1904 and not published until after his death. It tells the story of a person trying to find their place in a changing world, unable to hold on to what they love as it is ripped away from them by the ominous and all-consuming progression of time.
Ay Lazzat is a compilation of folk music from Dagestan, home of Imam Shamil, land of jagged peaks, dotted with auls, a place where before people lived full lives surrounded by the light and dark of natural beauty, but for half a century was overrun with violence and bloodshed. Still today, the impact of Russian imperialism is evident in this land. And it's not what they brought with them but what they left behind - nothing. Russia claimed the land and then left it in desolation as what resources they found there were funneled back to the metropolitan areas of Moscow and St. Petersburg. The people of the Caucasus were stuck under the yoke of empire - not being taken care of by the great power that claimed their homeland, and yet no longer free.
Music is funny in that the same emotion can be communicated sometimes in a thousand different ways. I hear the same fuck-you defiance, the same depressed-optimism of Blink-182 in this music from the Caucasus, in songs that have been sung for a hundred years and more, echoing through the canyons of Dagestan.
David Bowie
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)
Best Song: “Five Years”
Yes I am one of the people who first heard the song "Starman" in that 2018 Bleu de Chanel ad. I thought it was nice, but didn't dig deeper. Then, around the end of 2021/start of 2022, I found it again and heard the whole song for the first time. It's juxtaposed instrumental chorus inspired me to turn my song "Here & Everywhere" from a simple acoustic guitar track into an epic odyssey. I waited a couple more years still to hear the rest of the album, and once I did - I loved it.
David Bowie didn't pronounce his name correctly but he could write some hella good songs. This was actually the first new album I listened to in 2024, right after I got back from my holiday trip home and had an emotional breakdown because I finally got away from my job long enough to realize that it was consuming me and turning me bitter and hopeless. I heard "Five Years," where Bowie imagines how the world might react to learning that the world was going to end in five years. Again - depressed optimism. We know it's gonna end, but we have time to make the most of it. We've got five years - what are you gonna do with it? I listened to that song on repeat as I went to bed at night. I belted "Starman" in the car. I couldn't stop humming the melody of "Soul Love" that creeps up over your mind like a vine. The guitar riff of "Ziggy Stardust." This album really is a masterpiece - one of the greatest of all time. But I found one even better last year:
Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic - Sascha Goetzel, conductor; Pelin Halkacı Akın, violin
Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherezade, Op. 35 (2014)
Best Song: “Scheherezade II. (Alternative Version)”
I used to listen to Scheherezade while I played the free version of minecraft for hours at a time back in my mid-high school years. This was before I realized that there were women in the real world, too - not just on screen - but it was a time I remember fondly. I had a lot of time to let my imagination run wild and the possibilities were endless. (As an aside, that's one of the reasons a lot of people never get out into the world: because once you start living, your real life comes into conflict with your imagination and the limitless possibilities begin to rapidly fade. But I can assure you, a week in Vienna is better than a lifetime of imagining it from afar, even if I never get to go back to that Sommerarena or fuck around with those giant ducks.)
I spent a lot of 2024 imagining the Caucasus through Blanch, Tolstoy, Ay Lazzat, and Songs of Chechnya. In the middle of all that I was revisited by Rimsky-Korsakov's masterpiece of programmatic music, recounting the tales of the Thousand & One Arabian Nights told by the beautiful Scheherezade, who used her yarn-spinning prowess to keep the Sultan interested in her and avoid execution.
This recording by the Borusan Instanbul Phil left me stunned when, smack dab in between movements I and II, I heard an improvised oud solo. Then they did it again between III and IV - a brief statement by a kanon prepares you for the epic final movement. They were breaking all the rules! But I loved it. They realized that the only way to elevate European Classical Music is to put the folk music that inspired it front and center. They had taken a Russian's imagined version of Arabian music and put authentic instruments into it.
The performance of Scheherezade (and though it's a recording, the way it's laid out on the album wit the interludes gives you a truly unique performance-like experience) is followed by More Rimsky-Korsakov: Islamey, Caucasian Sketches, and Köçekçe. And then they slap you in the face with a repeat of the opening of Scheherezade's second movement, but this time it was different. They had replaced harp with oud, and a nay played the english horn solo. I'm not exaggerating - when I heard that, it was one of the most shocking moments in my musical life. I'd never heard anyone do that before, and it was perfect. It was better than the original. It felt real.
Wrap-Up
And if there's one thing that defined my journey in 2024, it was a search for something real. I was done with my job but still showing up to work, constantly imagining where else I could be, what else I could be doing that would bring more fulfillment. When I turned away from the Peace Corps I felt, for a time, like I had split my life into two paths that were running simultaneously: a life where I had left and the life where I stayed. The one was obviously not real, but the other didn't feel real even though I was living it. I saw skeletons in Vienna, entered a cave where people had lived 5,000 years ago, and tasted some of the world's finest coffee in an imperial summer palace. Back in Phoenix I hiked a trail and found petroglyphs a thousand years old, in Payson I talked with cows by Verde Creek and read Mungo Park's last words before he and his companions perished on the Niger.
A voracious appetite for life is a good thing, but I got greedy - I kept looking outside of myself, outside of the life I had been gifted here in Phoenix, and ran away from embracing my actual real life to my own detriment. I have to say thank you to KG for filling my real life with joy, to my Mom who enabled my adventurous spirit in Vienna, to my Dad who put up with my judgemental ego, to my brother for taking to me straight, and to everyone else who was there for me when I needed them the most.
In 2025, as I listen to new music, I'm going to be working on getting to understand that line from the Tao Te Ching that the Beatles borrowed: "Without going out of my door I can know all things on Earth." If we all run away from the disappointing things that surround us, we don't get to appreciate the brilliant and beautiful things, the lovely and kind people, the hope that is right there next to us but sometimes gets lost in the weeds. It's up to each of us to make our own gardens grow. I'll check back in next year and let you know how it's going.
Make the best of it until then,
Lawson
7 February 2025
Downtown Phoenix
Tidal: $0.01284 / stream (a little more than 1 cent)
Apple Music: $0.008 / stream (eight tenths of a cent)
Amazon Music: $0.00402 / stream (less than half a cent)
Spotify: $0.00318 / stream (or nothing if your song receives fewer than 1,000 streams)
(YouTube, Pandora, and Deezer all pay even less)
Those of you who are familiar will already know how this works. Considering all albums that I heard in their entirety for the first time in 2024, these are my Top 10.
2024 was a challenging year for me. I decided to quit my job, got accepted into the Peace Corps but had to keep it quiet, ended up not actually being able to join the Peace Corps, fell in love, finally got away from my job and transitioned into a new role, and tried to keep ahold of my sense of purpose all the while. I did a lot of work on my own musical projects but as the year went on, I felt more and more disconnected from on the outside, and since inspiration fuels so much of my creativity that was really difficult. Even so, I got to listen to some real gems:
Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic | Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherezade, Op. 35 (2014)
David Bowie | The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)
Ay Lazzat | Oh Pleasure – Songs and Melodies from Dagestan (1995)
Dresdner Philharmonie | Kálmán: Die Csárdásfürstin (1966)
blink-182 | Blink-182 (2003)
Musekiwa Chingodza | Live in Santa Cruz (2012)
Hank Williams | Hank 100: Greatest Radio Hits (2005)
Vjaceslav Grochovskij | Songs of Chechnya: Traditional Folk (2017)
4 Non Blondes | Bigger, Better, Faster, More! (1992)
The Front Bottoms | You Are Who You Hang Out With (2023)
10: The Front Bottoms
You Are Who You Hang Out With (2023)
Best Song: “Finding Your Way Home”
I was first introduced to The Front Bottoms through their song "Twin Size Mattress" almost 10 years ago (around the time Jedi Master Sifo-Dyas was killed). I used to listen to their albums while I ran and I can still recite the lyrics to most of the songs from Talon of the Hawk, Rose, and their self-titled album perfectly in time with Brian Sella's immortalized vocal takes. I was talking about the front bottoms when I was quoted as saying "I may wear a suit to conform in the workplace, but I also listen to punk rock."
You Are Who You Hang Out With sounds more like The Front Bottoms of the old days than their more autotuned, pop-inflected material (like Back on Top) that came out in the intervening years. I never stopped being a fan, but I didn't continue to seek out their new material.
Of course, the opening track of YAWYHOW ("Emotional") leans heavily into autotune for effect, but the rest of the album conveys the acoustic/live sensation that made me fall in love with The Front Bottoms to begin with. It's good old punk rock, it's contemporary and relevant, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to give their ears a break from the ultra-mainstream heavily produced pop/rap melange that the popular music world has been circling around in for the past several years.
9: 4 Non Blondes
Bigger, Better, Faster, More! (1992)
Best Song: “What’s Up?”
One day I showed up to work at The Phoenix Symphony and I was whistling the chorus from "What's Up." A stagehand asked me "Is that 4 Non Blondes" and I said "Hell yeah it is." He told me that he had worked one of their shows when they were on tour in Paris. They were not only amazing performers, but they were good people too and treated all the production crew with gratitude and respect. I'll always hype up anyone like that, because too often talent comes with ego, and ego turns talent into torture for the people who orbit the star.
I'm the furthest thing from an expert on classic rock, but this album exudes the vibe that I associate with that genre. It's high energy, it's thoughtful, it mixes ballads with bangers, and the musicianship is top notch. Linda Perry could growl and scream her vocals as good as anybody else from that era, and the lyrics are painfully relevant still today ("It's such a wonderful country, but the man - he's burning it down" | "I cry sometimes when I'm lying in bed just to get it all out, what's in my head . . . and I scream from the top of my lungs 'What's going on?'").
The sad part of the story is that this was 4 Non Blondes' one and only album. What would they be sreaming from the top of their lungs if they were still making music together today?
8: Vjaceslav Grochovskij
Songs of Chechnya: Traditional Folk (2017)
Best Song: “The Land of Our Fathers”
If you're not a fan or free aerophones, this album is NOT for you. And no, free aerophone is not a movement to release somebody from prison - free aerophones are instruments that create sound by vibrating unenclosed (free) air. Flutes and trumpets, for example, contain the air that they vibrate within themselves and are NOT free aerophones. There's a sub category called free reed aerophones, which push air past a vibrating reed held within a frame. This includes harmonicas, accordions, reed organs, pitch pipes - instruments that create that sound that's like a singing car crash. Personally, I find that sound romantic, but a lot of people can't adjust to it so I wanted to give the disclaimer. The instrument you hear in this music is probably a garmon, a Russian button accordion (button accordions don't have keys laid out like a piano - just buttons).
Why Chechnya, you ask? Because of Dune. I never read the Dune books and I'm not a huge fan of Timothée Chalamet, but I felt like the new movies were something I wanted to be aware of for the purposes of small talk. In doing a little background digging, I learned that Frank Herbert was heavily influenced by Lesley Blanch's Sabres of Paradise, a non-fiction account of the life of the Imam Shamil, an Avar man who led the peoples of the Caucasus in resistance against Russian imperial colonialism in the middle of the 19th Century. He led the Murid warriors in obfuscating Russian attempts to establish control over Chechnya and Dagestan - a Caucasian corridor which would give them direct access to the Middle East and India. The conflict lasted from 1817-1859, spanning over the terms of 11 US presidents, making international headlines (especially in Britain where anti-Russian sentiment was strong). The intense training of the warriors, the harsh landscape of Dagestan, and the intense faith of the Caucasian peoples (both in their leader, Shamil, and in their traditions and their God) directly inspired Herbert's Fremen.
I highly recommend reading Blanch's book, and if you listen to this album while you're reading you will be utterly transported to the auls (fortified mountain villages) where many Murids made their last stands. Like the sound of a free reed aerophone - it was harsh, but it was home.
7: Hank Williams
Hank 100: Greatest Radio Hits (2005)
Best Song: “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”
Hank Williams was born in Alabama in 1923, one hundred six years after the start of the Caucasian War. He lived a short life, troubled by alcoholism and celebrity, and died before he had reached the age of 30. But in that brief time he wrote iconic songs like "Hey, Good Lookin'", "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)," "I Saw the Light," and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." This is undeniable, authentic country music at it's roots. Hop-bopping guitars, noodling fiddles, nasal harmonies, and yodeling vocals. For an expat Texan like me who has more affection for what was than what is, this music takes me home to the plains and the old brick bank buildings surrounding the town squares, dotted every half-hour or so along the endless county roads. "The silence of a falling star lights up a purple sky and as I wonder where you are, I'm so lonesome I could cry." Nothing more really need be said.
6: Musekiwa Chingodza
Live in Santa Cruz (2012)
Best Song: “Chemutengure”
Check out my blog post titled "Mbira and Me" for more background on mbira music from the traditions of the Shona people from Zimbabwe and southern Africa. I've been listening to music from these traditions for more than a decade and I still can't get enough.
Musekiwa Chingodza was born in Mwangara village, Murewa, Zimbabwe, in 1970 and has recorded several albums. This live record from 2012 was recorded in Santa Cruz, which gives it a little sentimental boost for me because this summer I visited Santa Cruz for an adventurous weekend with my lovebird KG. On his trip to the wealthy beach town, Chingodza laid down solid renditions of some of the major members of the Shona mbira canon (you can find dozens of other recordings of "Nhemamusasa," "Taireva," "Nyamamusango," "Dande," and "Chemutengure" on Apple Music). There are also a handful of songs I am not so familiar with, and they're great, too. For me, an mbira album is defined by three things - two are binary: tempo (fast/slow), vocals (yes/no) - but the third is more complicated: timbre.
Mbiras have a range of natural sound but when you record it and manipulate it, that range is augmented a thousandfold. There are mbira albums that sound like dubstep (but better) and others that sound like a church chorus. Live in Santa Cruz sounds exactly as you'd expect - dry enough to evoke images of the open air (and perhaps a little scent of saltwater), with the fast pace of a fluent player and sincere, unaltered vocals. If you've never listened to mbira music before, you could start here and get a good idea of - if this can be said - what it's supposed to sound like.
5: blink-182
Blink-182 (2003)
Best Song: “I Miss You”
My journey in 2024 passed through Vienna, Austria. After my mother and I both got drenched in the Danube, we stopped by an upscale food shack on the banks of the river. The place was called "Moby Dick" and they served Havana Club rum, one of the world's most delicious spirits which I hadn't seen in real life since I visited Cuba five years earlier. As we sat enjoying our rum with fish & chips, staring at the giant ducks (they call them "swans" there), I heard someone say "Hello there." It wasn't Master Kenobi, though - it was blink-182.
Moby Dick was putting out a sick playlist of 2000s American punk rock, and "I Miss You" came on and pulled me in. That period in my life was a turning point. I had just decided not to join the Peace Corps barely two months earlier, and was struggling to prepare myself for the inevitable return of the symphony season and the endless frustrations of a job that I had emotionally moved on from long ago. I was falling in love with someone who I was starting to realize is the woman of my dreams but I was too consumed in my own trauma to see beyond my own turmoil. "Don't waste your time on me, you're already the voice inside my head."
But Vienna was a breath of fresh air. Hearing this song on my last day on the banks of the river, as I tried to prepare myself to say goodbye to a place that had forced me to feel optimism and excitement, I felt like music was calling out to me and saying "I've got your back." The defiant fuck-you attitude of blink-182's self-titled album was exactly what I needed to help me transition into the mindset you need to make it in the confused and chaotic version of the USA that we've all been getting to know so well over the past decade. This is classic punk rock from the land of the depressed-but-hopeful.
Dresdner Philharmonie, Dresden State Opera Chorus & Heinz Rögner
Kálmán: Die Csárdásfürstin (1966)
Best Song: Act I: Sich verlieben kann man öfter – Mädchen gibt es wunderfeine”
In a town called Baden bei Wien you can find a place called the Sommerarena. It's a small opera house, built in 1906, with a retractable roof that reveals a forested hillside and allows the songs of birds to mingle with the arias of the divas on stage. I'll always remember it as one of the most beautiful places in the world.
We knew it would be blasphemous to go to Vienna and NOT see any kind of classical music performance, but the big acts (the Philharmonic and the Opera) were in Salzburg for the Summer. So we called an audible and got tickets to see an obscure operetta by Emmerich Kálmán called Die Csárdásfürstin (The Gypsy Princess) in Baden, a resort town in the hills where many Wieners go to escape the summer heat.
There were no subtitles, and we knew that going in, but we figured "Was sum Teufel?" - Opera is supposed to be about the music, the spectacle, the acting, more than the words. Hopefully a good performance could keep us engaged if we couldn't quite latch onto the plot. Well fick mich seitwärts if that wasn't one of the most impressive artistic performances I've ever seen in my life. This was opera by the people who invented opera (Europeans), like getting beefy barbecue in Texas or getting French kissed in Paris. The choreography, the costumes, the singing, the humor. I alternated laughing and crying for almost three hours, and it wasn't really a sad opera - I was crying because I knew that I was living in a moment I would never forget and I was grateful. I looked up at the trees and listened to the birds, looked at the crowd with their hand-fans flapping (the opera house gave out branded cardstock hand-fans), and then back down to the stage where Sylva and Edwin's dramatic love story unfolded on the stage of the fictitious "Orpheum" theater which acts as the setting for most of the opera.
The opera itself has fantastic music and a fun story, and the actors and the pit orchestra performed the hell out of it. I had to find a recording I could stream when I wanted to reminisce and this one by the Dresden Phil is the best on Apple Music - and to be clear, while it is a good recording, it's the best to me because it is the most comprehensive. You can't stream a complete recording of the opera anywhere that I found.
BUT - there is a live recording of the full show performed in Tokyo in 1985 by the Wiener Volksoper orchestra and it's beautiful. If you're inspired by the selections included in the Dresden recording and want to experience the entire operetta, I highly recommend tracking down the Weiner Volkoper recording (available at Discogs on CD or vinyl).
Ay Lazzat
Oh Pleasure – Songs and Melodies from Dagestan (1995)
Best Song: “Shamil Imam”
On the train to Baden I read from my two-pound copy of War & Peace, purchased in Santa Cruz and carried across the Atlantic at the expense of at least a day's worth of clothes because I believe that objects can be imbued with spiritual power by the places they've been. Really it's just semiotics - a book I bought in Santa Cruz, flew with to Vienna, read on the train to Baden, that I look at again 20 years later will bring all the memories flooding back. But I believe in magic, too. I wanted to read War & Peace because I'd recently finished a collection of Tolstoy novellas - The Cossacks, Sevastopol Stories, and . . . Hadji Murat. Of course you've been researching as you go along with this article so you know by now that Hadji Murat was a Avar warrior who opposed Muridism and supported the Russians until they betrayed him, so he joined Imam Shamil and he was again betrayed, so he went back to the Russians, but then he was betrayed again and ultimately killed while trying to escape the Russians and return to the mountains.
Hadji Murat was Tolstoy's last novel, completed around 1904 and not published until after his death. It tells the story of a person trying to find their place in a changing world, unable to hold on to what they love as it is ripped away from them by the ominous and all-consuming progression of time.
Ay Lazzat is a compilation of folk music from Dagestan, home of Imam Shamil, land of jagged peaks, dotted with auls, a place where before people lived full lives surrounded by the light and dark of natural beauty, but for half a century was overrun with violence and bloodshed. Still today, the impact of Russian imperialism is evident in this land. And it's not what they brought with them but what they left behind - nothing. Russia claimed the land and then left it in desolation as what resources they found there were funneled back to the metropolitan areas of Moscow and St. Petersburg. The people of the Caucasus were stuck under the yoke of empire - not being taken care of by the great power that claimed their homeland, and yet no longer free.
Music is funny in that the same emotion can be communicated sometimes in a thousand different ways. I hear the same fuck-you defiance, the same depressed-optimism of Blink-182 in this music from the Caucasus, in songs that have been sung for a hundred years and more, echoing through the canyons of Dagestan.
David Bowie
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)
Best Song: “Five Years”
Yes I am one of the people who first heard the song "Starman" in that 2018 Bleu de Chanel ad. I thought it was nice, but didn't dig deeper. Then, around the end of 2021/start of 2022, I found it again and heard the whole song for the first time. It's juxtaposed instrumental chorus inspired me to turn my song "Here & Everywhere" from a simple acoustic guitar track into an epic odyssey. I waited a couple more years still to hear the rest of the album, and once I did - I loved it.
David Bowie didn't pronounce his name correctly but he could write some hella good songs. This was actually the first new album I listened to in 2024, right after I got back from my holiday trip home and had an emotional breakdown because I finally got away from my job long enough to realize that it was consuming me and turning me bitter and hopeless. I heard "Five Years," where Bowie imagines how the world might react to learning that the world was going to end in five years. Again - depressed optimism. We know it's gonna end, but we have time to make the most of it. We've got five years - what are you gonna do with it? I listened to that song on repeat as I went to bed at night. I belted "Starman" in the car. I couldn't stop humming the melody of "Soul Love" that creeps up over your mind like a vine. The guitar riff of "Ziggy Stardust." This album really is a masterpiece - one of the greatest of all time. But I found one even better last year:
Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic - Sascha Goetzel, conductor; Pelin Halkacı Akın, violin
Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherezade, Op. 35 (2014)
Best Song: “Scheherezade II. (Alternative Version)”
I used to listen to Scheherezade while I played the free version of minecraft for hours at a time back in my mid-high school years. This was before I realized that there were women in the real world, too - not just on screen - but it was a time I remember fondly. I had a lot of time to let my imagination run wild and the possibilities were endless. (As an aside, that's one of the reasons a lot of people never get out into the world: because once you start living, your real life comes into conflict with your imagination and the limitless possibilities begin to rapidly fade. But I can assure you, a week in Vienna is better than a lifetime of imagining it from afar, even if I never get to go back to that Sommerarena or fuck around with those giant ducks.)
I spent a lot of 2024 imagining the Caucasus through Blanch, Tolstoy, Ay Lazzat, and Songs of Chechnya. In the middle of all that I was revisited by Rimsky-Korsakov's masterpiece of programmatic music, recounting the tales of the Thousand & One Arabian Nights told by the beautiful Scheherezade, who used her yarn-spinning prowess to keep the Sultan interested in her and avoid execution.
This recording by the Borusan Instanbul Phil left me stunned when, smack dab in between movements I and II, I heard an improvised oud solo. Then they did it again between III and IV - a brief statement by a kanon prepares you for the epic final movement. They were breaking all the rules! But I loved it. They realized that the only way to elevate European Classical Music is to put the folk music that inspired it front and center. They had taken a Russian's imagined version of Arabian music and put authentic instruments into it.
The performance of Scheherezade (and though it's a recording, the way it's laid out on the album wit the interludes gives you a truly unique performance-like experience) is followed by More Rimsky-Korsakov: Islamey, Caucasian Sketches, and Köçekçe. And then they slap you in the face with a repeat of the opening of Scheherezade's second movement, but this time it was different. They had replaced harp with oud, and a nay played the english horn solo. I'm not exaggerating - when I heard that, it was one of the most shocking moments in my musical life. I'd never heard anyone do that before, and it was perfect. It was better than the original. It felt real.
Wrap-Up
And if there's one thing that defined my journey in 2024, it was a search for something real. I was done with my job but still showing up to work, constantly imagining where else I could be, what else I could be doing that would bring more fulfillment. When I turned away from the Peace Corps I felt, for a time, like I had split my life into two paths that were running simultaneously: a life where I had left and the life where I stayed. The one was obviously not real, but the other didn't feel real even though I was living it. I saw skeletons in Vienna, entered a cave where people had lived 5,000 years ago, and tasted some of the world's finest coffee in an imperial summer palace. Back in Phoenix I hiked a trail and found petroglyphs a thousand years old, in Payson I talked with cows by Verde Creek and read Mungo Park's last words before he and his companions perished on the Niger.
A voracious appetite for life is a good thing, but I got greedy - I kept looking outside of myself, outside of the life I had been gifted here in Phoenix, and ran away from embracing my actual real life to my own detriment. I have to say thank you to KG for filling my real life with joy, to my Mom who enabled my adventurous spirit in Vienna, to my Dad who put up with my judgemental ego, to my brother for taking to me straight, and to everyone else who was there for me when I needed them the most.
In 2025, as I listen to new music, I'm going to be working on getting to understand that line from the Tao Te Ching that the Beatles borrowed: "Without going out of my door I can know all things on Earth." If we all run away from the disappointing things that surround us, we don't get to appreciate the brilliant and beautiful things, the lovely and kind people, the hope that is right there next to us but sometimes gets lost in the weeds. It's up to each of us to make our own gardens grow. I'll check back in next year and let you know how it's going.
Make the best of it until then,
Lawson
7 February 2025
Downtown Phoenix
