2023 Musical Highlights, Pt. 3: "Faithful friends who are dear to us..."
Veteran artists — Henry, Harvey, Gabriel, Williams, and more — whose albums I've been collecting for between 20 and 40 years, came back with outstanding new work in 2023. Listen to highlights here!
Here’s a third batch of albums I’m revisiting as I prepare my “Favorite Recordings of 2023,” the annual ranked list I post at LookingCloser.org.
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For me, one of the most encouraging and inspiring trends in music this year was a parade of new work from venerable veteran artists — wise songwriters and innovative artists whose artistry has meaningfully influenced my life for decades. In a year that made me wonder if I’ll ever find the freedom to return to fiction writing, I needed these grand examples that great work is still possible over 50… or over 60… or over 70?!
Joe Henry — All the Eye Can See
Several of the albums that impressed me most in 2023 seem to have been forgotten on critics’ end-of-the-year list. What is wrong with the world when the great music journalists overlook an album by the great Joe Henry — one that also features Bill Frisell, Marc Ribot, Daniel Lanois, the Milk Carton Kids, Allison Russell, and Madison Cunningham… to name just a few of the features? (Did you catch that? Daniel Lanois! There’s a collaboration I’ve been dreaming of for a long time.)
I feel like I’ve been listening to this record for years. (In fact, I have — thanks to an early preview in 2022!)
Joe Henry’s All the Eye Can See was recorded in lockdown as he was driven to settle for working in solitude. But then he started sending out the new songs to a global community of artists — he’s beloved by so many of the best we have in the world — and they started contributing layers of their own. These included some of his most reliable collaborators: his son Levon (sax, clarinet), Patrick Warren (keyboard), David Piltch (bass), and my favorite percussionist in all of music: Jay Bellerose.
The results? He’s given us his richest and most atmospheric orchestration since 2009’s Blood from Stars.
Josh Hurst, one of the biggest Joe Henry fans I know, has his finger on the pulse of the album’s focus: “His songs, written in the wake of his mother’s passing and our shared COVID trauma, carefully tread the boundary between knowing and unknowing; between dreading catastrophe and welcoming the opportunity for change.”
Henry has been writing for many, many years about the strange paradox of human nature: how we long for change and invest in change, even as change is what we tend to fear the most, and as we counterintuitively invest in trying to make sure things stay the same. It’s easy to imagine that this concept of Change is closely related to a concept of God: a sublime power we long to know and yet strive to escape. He picks up that thread again here in “O Beloved,” singing, “O Beloved, I hide from and I’m running from you.”
As always, his lyrics would be powerful on the pages of a poetry collection. (And good news! You can buy that book!) They’re evocative, mysterious, specific enough to kindle vivid imagery, slippery enough to offer a variety of readings. When he talks about them, he makes clear that they’re mysterious to him too — like the song “Karen Dalton.” At Folk Alley, Henry Carrigan provides Henry’s enlightening reflections:
The spare, spectral “Karen Dalton” conveys a dreamscape that evokes some of the late folksinger’s sonic style. “It was the last song I wrote for the record,” [Joe Henry] says, adding that he wrote it while driving through Nebraska late one night.
“I kept reciting it in my head and letting it unspool. I wasn’t writing the story of Karen Dalton, but what I perceived as her spirit. I felt a relationship to her as I was writing, and I saw her face before me as I wrote it. Somehow her spirit was responsible for the song coming to the surface.”
In the lyrics, we can sense the idea that the Capital-T Truth of poetry will not be suppressed. It will always rise to the surface, regardless of who might compose or perform it:
The names of the living have been changed,
every face obscured—
but no secret whispered low
ever goes unheard.
The radio coughs and turns to grain
as we slip the reach
of those singing out aloud
we’ve so long lived beneath.
And in that space of “knowing and unknowing,” between loss and renewal, we might hear voices of the spirits. Sometimes, that spirit manifests like the voice of the Old Man in McCarthy’s The Road, or the ancient storyteller Homer who haunts a Berlin library in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire: a wandering holy ghost of memory and creative inspiration who keeps the light of hope burning through poetry.
In “Song That I Know,” he sings as like the weary but resilient Muse who keeps the fires of poetry burning from age to age, even though humankind continues to disrespect the artist:
Oh, I’ve worn this cape since the dawning of time
Since long before Easter put blood in our wine
And still, at the station, they keep me in line
As the song I know sings without me.
Many of the lyrics point us toward a sense of holiness transcendent, the eternal things that we can tap into for hope and meaning whenever we engage in humility and love. But all of that is set in as dark and troubling a context as he may ever have described, with frequent references to ways in which the world is burning.
In “Mission,” he sings of looking back to see traces of evidence that have led to what we know now — threads of trouble, threads of love — that should humble us with the knowledge that this present darkness has been gathering for some time (although there’s a brighter reading possible: maybe the threads are actually the quiet melodies of love and hope sung by prophets and poets throughout the hard times).
The moving refrain makes reference to the Angel of Death at Passover, lines I doubt that Henry can sing without a prayer of gratitude for the cancer he recently suffered that, last I heard, was very much in remission:
Are we alone believing
in a time to rival this one
where even now they’re building
From the ruins of the missionThere were threads to follow
There were many strung together
They tangle now defining every
Change in all the weatherAnd here we stand with nothing
Growing up to stand between us
The shadow passing over without
Ever having seen us
For a time…
With that reminder that here, now, the shadow has passed over us, he urges us to open our eyes and see, to drop our masks and weapons, to live as though we know the Truth: that we are one, that we are equal, that we will return to the Source of our being and sing in harmony again, and that there is much to apprehend and love right now, before the curtain of this particular life falls. Because the shadow will come around again to make winter of this burning autumn. And then, all things will be new.
For what Nick Cristiano calls “casual listeners,” this album might be more frustrating than rewarding. But for those with hearts tuned to poetry, it offers blessed assurances of grace beyond the excruciating disappointments and griefs of this world. In the title track, he testifies, “Trouble begins at waking / the weight of the world near-breaking / its wave on the heart’s undertaking / of all the eye can see.”
I am grateful to be alive in these years when Joe Henry is writing songs. These songs will live long lives in the minds and hearts of listeners who pay close attention, who meditate on meaningful lyrics, and who revisit these lines again and again. But it is a joy to observe how he takes each new wave of hardship and transforms it into such beauty.
Bruce Cockburn — O Sun O Moon
Bruce Cockburn has released quite a few albums — including the excellent instrumental album Speechless — since what I consider to be his artistic peak: 1997’s The Charity of Night. (And he was already many, many albums into his career at that point.) All of those records of the 2000s and 2010s have had memorable tracks, but O Sun O Moon impresses me more than anything he’s done since 2003’s You’ve Never Seen Everything.
One of the most moving tracks is also one of the simplest: “Colin Went Down to the Water,” composed in memory of Cockburn’s friend Colin who died in a scuba diving accident in Maui. You can read Cockburn’s own account of that tragedy — and much, much more about this late stage of his career and the experiences that went into this album — at San Diego Troubadour.
My favorite track — one of the songs I played most often this year — is “Orders,” which includes these powerful lyrics (posted at The Cockburn Project):
The just, the merciful, the cruel
The stumbling well-intentioned foolThe deft, the oaf, the witless pawn
The golden one life smiles uponThe squalling infant in mid-squall
The neighbors fighting down the hall
The list is long as I recall
Our orders said to love them allThe cynic and the crooked priest
The woman wise, the sullen beastThe enemy outside the gate
The friend who leaves it all to fateThe drunk who tags the bathroom stall
The proud boy headed for his fall
The list is long as I recall
Our orders said to love them allThe pastor preaching shades of hate
The self-inflating head of stateThe black and blue, the starved for bread
The dread, the red, the better deadThe sweet, the vile, the tall, the small
The one who rises to the call
The list is long as I recall
Our orders said to love them allThe one who lets his demons win
The one we think we're better than
A challenge great as I recall
Our orders said to love them all
Peter Gabriel — i/o
Cockburn has been prolific for so many decades, a new album from him is not a surprise. By contrast, we haven’t had an album full of new songs from Peter Gabriel in 21 years!
And the best news is that this twelve-song epic sounds like it could have been released 21 years ago and fit right in with the songs on Up. That’s not me being nostalgic; that’s me saying that one of the best bands in transcendent rock-and-roll, one that sounds like no other band, is back and they haven’t lost a thing. These faithful collaborators — bassist Tony Levin, guitarist David Rhodes, percussionist Manu Katché — are so synergistic, so confident, and, in the album’s strongest tracks, so adventurous.
At times, Gabriel’s writing lapses into a familiar mode where things sound more like preachy platitudes than poetry. (The closing anthem “Live and Let Live” makes too much of the cliché, and lacks the arresting lyricism of songs that like “In Your Eyes” and “Biko” that have become global singalongs.) I miss the avant-garde songwriter whose breakout album So was loaded with Lynch-ian strangeness like “Red Rain,” “Mercy Street,” and “This is the Picture.” So, my favorite tracks are the darker, more dreamlike territories of “The Court” and “Four Kinds of Horsemen.”
But the track that rises above it all to be one of 2023’s most inspired and inspiring tracks is the stirring summons to hope from the point of view of a man waking from a coma and recovering his senses: “Road to Joy.” (Jon Pareles at The New York Times agrees with me!) I’m going to rely on that song for a rejuvenation of my spirit for a long time to come.
PJ Harvey — I Inside the Old Year Dying
What a thrill it is to hear the great PJ Harvey refusing to compromise her vision — I’d argue that she’s one of those rare artists who never has — and inviting us into a singular new musical vision. And it might qualify as her first musical work of fiction: That is to say, it’s a sequence of songs that sound like they’ve been discovered in some ancient Celtic tomb, referencing ancient mythological figures and giving us cryptic evidence of an epic story.
This is explained by Heather Phares in her AllMusic review:
The album expands on Orlam, [Harvey’s] epic poem about the coming of age of Ira-Abel, a young Dorset girl whose companions include the bleeding, ghostly soldier Wyman-Elvis and Orlam itself, a lamb's eyeball that serves as the village oracle. As complex as this sounds, there's a lightness to I Inside that's especially welcome following the scope of Harvey's last two albums. Like Orlam, I Inside the Old Year Dying weaves the old Dorset dialect Harvey grew up hearing into its songs, and the local idioms only heighten its bewitching strangeness. "Seem An I" takes its name from the Dorset phrase for "it seems"; lyrics like "Billy from the boneyard / Wrangled 'round the orchard" set the scene immediately (and set the tone for the beguiling and terrifying psych-folk of "A Child's Question, July" later on). Even when the language is obscure, the mood is clear when Harvey sings about "the chalky children of evermore" over church bells, brittle guitars, and booming drums on "I Inside the Old I Dying." When Ira-Abel is told "leave your wandering" in the clearing that follows the distortion and feedback ambush of "Noiseless Noise," it's apparent that something has changed irrevocably.
Paul Simon — Seven Psalms
Perhaps the most pleasant surprise of the year was Paul Simon’s emergence from retirement with a profound and poetic reflection on aging that will serve beautifully as an unexpected 33-minute encore. That is to say, while there are several new songs here, they are woven together into one seamless performance, with recurring motifs and a meaningful coherence that makes clear Simon’s hope that we will listen intently all the way through.
Thank God for this bold rejection of the TikTokk-ification of music, this invitation to a patient, attentive meditation.
Seven Psalms is exactly as advertised: several summons to prayer. And those prayers, like the Biblical psalms, zigzag between praise, celebration, curiosity, confusion, rage, and desperate appeals for more time, more life. What’s more — there are responses, including an angelic visitation from none other than his longtime creative partner and wife Edie Brickell.
Lucinda Williams — Stories From a Rock ‘n’ Roll Heart
In view of the fact that Lucinda Williams has come back from a stroke to record another full album, I’m grateful for this mixed bag of songs. They may not achieve the heights (or, better, the depths?) of whiskey-sour poetry that has characterized her strongest country-rock records (Car Wheels on a Gravel Road) or the blistering energy of her angriest hard rockers (Good Souls Better Angels). But they’re spiked with wisdom and joy, and she has notable support from Bruce Springsteen on more than one track. If I made up a list of ten favorite songs from 2023, “Where the Song Will Find Me” would be there.
[For some reason, it’s difficult to find some of the album’s best tracks — most notably, “Last Call for the Truth” — on YouTube, and many are missing from Apple Music.]
Pretenders — Relentless
I sure didn’t see (or hear) this coming: Pretenders are back with one of the year’s fiercest and boldest rock records. I’ve been a fan since the ‘80s, but I’m not sure I’ve ever been as captivated, beginning to end, by any of their records. This doesn’t sound like a band saying “Hi, folks! We’re still here, and we’ve still got it!” This sounds like a band on the front lines, playing with more urgency and inspiration than ever.
Has Chrissie Hynde ever sounded more like a rock goddess? There’s a sense of exhilaration in some of these songs — and that’s not unrelated to the fact that this is a post-breakup album, an album about the relief of being free from the harm and self-harm of a relationships that went on too long.
Note: Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood had much to do with the beauty of the closing track, “I Think of You Daily.”
Ron Sexsmith — The Vivian Line
I doubt we’re ever going to get another album from Ron Sexsmith that feels like he’s breaking new ground. He’s the definition of the songwriter who had found his groove and he’s happy to just let the needle spin in it for record after record.
And that’s okay with me: He’s a master craftsman, not an innovator. While my favorite record — Retriever, which is reaching its 20th anniversary — was an exception that found him in a playful mood and ready to disco, he’s seemed content to settle into low-key coffee-shop folk-pop, making irresistible singalong choruses and heart-warming sentimentality seem like his highest aim.
Having said that, The Vivian Line has some of the strongest lyrics in his impressive discography (is that still a word?), and some poignant reflections on aging and hope. I wouldn’t be surprised if he started a lot of shows going forward with the tongue-in-cheek confessions of an out-of-touch old man, “Outdated and Antiquated.”
I found his irresistible melodicism and dreamy vocals to be a comfort in a chaotic year.
Here are some highlights:
Cowboy Junkies — Such Ferocious Beauty
Has it been a while since you checked in on Cowboy Junkies? They’re still around, even if they’re name-checked as a souvenir of the good old days in one of 2023’s new songs by The National. And, if Such Ferocious Beauty is any evidence, they still have a lot of fuel in the tank.
Mark Deming’s review of this record at AllMusic will refresh your memory about the band’s distinctiveness and what they’ve been going through — losses that became the focus of this record’s bittersweetness:
While bands organized around siblings have a tradition of volatility -- think of the Kinks, the Blasters, Creedence Clearwater Revival, or Oasis — the Cowboy Junkies are an exception. Three of the four members — vocalist Margo Timmins, guitarist Michael Timmins, and drummer Peter Timmins — are siblings, and the fourth member, bassist Alan Anton, has known them since childhood (he and Michael were in the same class in kindergarten). The Junkies have had the same lineup since they first formed in 1985, boasting a stability few groups of their generation can match. However, even happy families have issues to deal with, and while 2020's Ghosts was written and recorded after the death of the Timmins' mother, 2023's Such Ferocious Beauty came not long after they lost their father, who was living with dementia in his final years. Grief was the subtext of Ghosts, and on Such Ferocious Beauty, it takes center stage; these ten songs are open in their contemplation of death and its aftermath, the gnawing sense of loss, the anger and confusion brought on after losing a loved one, and the not-always-comforting contemplation of the afterlife. The group's traditionally languid sound is punctuated with occasional peals of feedback and noise from Michael's guitar, as well as the more traditionally melancholy report of the violin, and there's an edge in the sweet, smoky tone of Margo's voice that matches the more difficult mood of the lyrics.
This post has just been Part Three.
Did you miss Part One? It’s still here for you! What about Part Two? Still available!
Coming soon: Lowland Hum, Buddy and Julie Miller, Sufjan Stevens, Mitski, and more!