2014’s Best Songs

2014 could have broken you or saved you—I’m still not sure which it did for me. At least the music made sense.

I cycled through the same songs all year. Lorde, St. Vincent, Robyn, FKA twigs, Arcade Fire. They just kept working no matter what else was happening. St. Vincent’s guitar sound alone was worth staying, all those fractured angles and precision. Lorde sounding like she’d already figured out something you were still struggling with. Robyn just moving forward like the world couldn’t slow her down. FKA twigs making something so strange and specific that nobody else was even trying.

The rest of the playlist spread wider: Perfume Genius, Great Pagans, Wild Beasts, Jessie Ware, Lykke Li, Angel Olsen, Yumi Zouma, The War On Drugs, Elderbrook, Grouper, Woman’s Hour, Blood Orange. Different moods for different times of day. Different ways of being alive. Songs that understood something about you before you understood it yourself.

Good songs age differently than years do. You forget what 2014 actually was, who you were talking to, what happened in the news. But you remember the songs. They don’t fade like everything else fades. They just become part of how you think now.