AHC's Top Ten Albums of 2017

Number 10: Lilly Hiatt: Trinity Lane

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Lilly Hiatt is her father's daughter; like John she understands the hits a life can take, how hard it is to get back up from the floor and that judging others is never a good or fair choice, if you've been there then you understand what it's like for someone else who's life may be falling apart, as she sings in Trinity Lane, "I think my neighbors are selling drugs, I know how that goes, I ain't judging nothin''. In So Much You Don't Know, she sings to her lover, "there are places you have no idea that I have been, like that time my little angel got on heroin, and I thought my throat was closing every time I tried to sleep, there's just so much you don't know about me," a powerful song about the places we've been and wanting the ones we fall for to know about some of the pieces of hell we've seen, "who doesn't love a little mystery, I just want you to want to know about me."The Night David Bowie Died is the hit of the album, a rocking break up song that hits right up against the bone, "I realize that I screwed up" Hiatt sings.  Trinity Lane is definitely one of the most powerful records of 2017, like a 12 step meeting full of people who have been through some serious, life or death shit and come through the other side, and it serves as the antidote to an empty culture which holds Taylor Swift's music video release as the most anticipated and fawned over event this year.

Number 9: Annie Gallup: Lucy Remembers Her Father


Annie Gallup has long been one of America's best kept secrets, which is unfortunate, as she is one of the most poetic and profound voices in modern music. From her long solo career to her frequent collaborations with Peter Gallway in Hat Check Girl, Gallup, time and again, takes up Werner Herzog's challenge to filmmakers to make each movie as if they were working with the last strip of film in existence and applies it to music, each album crafted as if the last piece of music we'll ever hear. Lucy Remembers Her Father is a prime example of the primacy Gallup places on poetry. "When he planted this tree, it was just a twig and so was I, Willowy was his word for me, and so he chose a willow tree" she sings in the title song, "we were rich in colored pencils and brown paper bags, poor in long distance calls and cruises, we were rich in homegrown tomatoes and river rocks, poor in family feuds and excuses, we were rich in books and strangers on the porch steps, poor in political influence, we were rich in wood smoke dust bunnies, mouse traps, poor in pedigree and regrets." All in all a quiet and reflective album, but each record Gallup has made occupies that strange twilight hour between literature and music, Lucy Remembers Her Father is no exception. 

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Number 8: Catie Curtis: While We're Here
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Marking the end of the road for Catie Curtis, who announced her retirement from music and touring earlier this year, and leaves us with as good an album as any Curtis has made. A profoundly personal album, but all of her albums have been, she juggles despair and joy like few songwriters can, both being two sides of the coin of every life. We are never only our pain, we are also never just our best moments. It gets better, it gets bad and it gets better again. Curtis has always threaded through these spaces of hope and despair and aptly here regret. "Words are just words if you don't know this pain, a bird on a wire sings her song, I hear your song and I don't belong to this world." Curtis sings in Don't Belong to this World. Then there is the beautifully touching song written to her daughter, You are loved tackles this weird digital age we are in and how tough and unforgiving it can be on kids most of all. "You are fact and you are fiction, searching for the piece that's missing, still thinking you need some fixing up... You are loved, no matter what you do or what you've done, if you need someone to say it, come to me and I'll relay it." A beautiful album that takes the bruise in every fruit as a sign of our humanity and offers bitter sweet refuge from the storm. While We're Here life both hurts and sometimes doesn't, joy and sorrow live next door to each other, and this album, like her others, reminds us not to dwell too long in either room as if there were no where else we could go, there always is.

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​Number 7: Kate Fenner: Middle Voice


Kate Fenner is another all too well kept secret, Middle Voice straddles that magical line between Jazz and folk-pop, with songwriting that matches Joni Mitchell at every turn. Recorded quickly before an impending throat surgery, the album is deftly executed with precision and a timeless quality that Fenner has brewed up with every single release, a lost decade of female confessional pop that was more soul centered and poetic than what we are given by the mainstream standards of today. Pain, regret, loss, the mixed ingredients of every life play out seamlessly here. "The title, "Middle Voice" comes from a grammatical term (!), wherein the subject of a sentence is both the actor and the acted-upon, both agent and patient; it is meant to reflect the middle part of life--its equivocations, its ambivalence, its modest epiphanies." This album does just that, and sorely deserves to be heard.

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​Number 6: Sister Ray: Untitled


Sister Ray is a bit of an enigma, I don't know much about her except that this album, recorded live and mostly improvised, is one of the most haunting albums I've heard since Cat Power's Dear Sir. Like early Chan Marshall, there is a sense of total emergency at work here, this hour, this moment, right now, this is where it hurts. "Come in like a whisper, well I'm a disaster, come in now sideways, so I can't feel you", "I only use my hands for loving on a dirty floor" she sings in 5:44. The entire album is like a howl of pain, a bandage coming off a wound too early. It is visceral, it is scary, it is beautiful, it is oddly perfect in its imperfection. 

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Number 5: Jennifer Kimball; Avocet


Avocet marks Kimballs third release over a long and distinguished career which began with The Story in the mid 80's. As far as I'm concerned there can never be enough Jennifer Kimball music in the world, but perhaps its scarcity is precisely it's magic, that it doesn't come that often makes its arrival a thing to marvel at. Her sense of rhythm is a type of strange alchemy, there is purposeful dissonance that shores up the moment in each song where the harmony reaches an ungodly level of perfection, isn't this like life, we must feel completely out of joint in order to ever experience our wholeness. Build You A Barn is one of the most beautiful songs Kimball has penned. The whole album shines and is a testament to the fact that the best things in life you simply have to wait for.

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Number 4: Jeff Finlin; The Guru in the Girl
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If there were any justice in the world Finlin would be ranked among the best of the best, alongside Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams, Jeff Finlin doesn't make bad albums, ever. The Guru in The Girl is a masterful recording and Finlin's voice is an instrument unto itself, vocally he is the most believable man your ears will ever meet. Also, like Lilly Hiatt, he's been there and back,  and his music is an archive of survival, pain and perhaps most importantly hope. "Someday, these walls will all come down, on this shitty border town we carry in our hearts, someday, it just might be today, if we imagine it is so, and put it into play." Indeed. If you want music that goes well beyond the surface, start here.

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​Number 3: Kris Delmhorst; The Wild

I don't know if I can do justice to just how good this album is. Delmhorst is a powerhouse of a songwriter, she can both break your heart, kick your ass and shine a little light into rooms too long darkened by despair. Like Finlin, there is the believable voice, no faking or phoning it in, Delmhorst carves up pure, aching sincerity out of each and every song. On the The light in the Hall, she sings:

"Don't let me fall asleep, I know it gets dark and deep
Promise you'll keep a light on in the hall
You know me, my limit and my lie,
Grief and my greed, I know you know sometimes I need it all
To just go away"

The Wild is like that light left on,  the one we all need, the one that is sometime hard to name, that sometimes isn't even there at all. These  songs are a companion to all down and out hearts. "You can see that I'm tired, tired of dancing the delicate line." When you need to know someone else has felt it too, put this record on and let the hurt and howl wash over you.

The best description is on her website: "THE WILD comes to terms with what Greg Brown memorably called “All this terror and grace.” The stakes rise as we go along. Our babies arrive and disappear into children, friends die or get weird, our parents distill. We lose the path – to our story, our partner, to the muse – and must reckon the way back.

And The Wild, where has it gone?"

For right now, into a damn fine record.

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Number 2: Phoebe Bridgers: Stranger in the Alps

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With Stranger in the Alps, Phoebe Bridgers achieves what is nearly impossible in this day and age, a flawless, perfect and utterly honest debut album. Wise beyond her years, youth does not hinder Bridgers from understanding the truths that take many of us a lot longer to begin to grasp. That the world is much bigger than us, and we must humble ourselves at the altar of that immensity. In Funeral, Bridgers is asked to sing at a funeral for "a kid a year older than me," awash in narcissistic despair "Jesus Christ I'm so blue all the time" Bridgers reminds herself that someone's kid is dead; 

Last night I blacked out in my car
And I woke up in my Childhood bed
wishing I was someone else
feeling sorry for myself
when I remembered someone's kid is dead
and it's 4 am again
and I'm doing nothing again."

Humility. We need more of it, not just in music. Stranger in the Alps is proof that youth is no reason to be naive. We all have the opportunity to pay more attention in life, this album has its eyes and its heart wide open.

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​Number 1: Matthew Ryan; Hustle Up Starlings


Matthew Ryan is the embodiment of what it means to fall in love with music. We all have the iconic sounds that forever changed us, Ryan is a conduit of the universal notion that what hurts also makes you human. 

Ryan still sings of survival, and where light may have narrowed in the past, on Hustle up Starlings, it painfully, beautifully widens. A central message can be found from the opening track (I Just Died) Like an Aviator where Ryan sings, fully convicted by experience, "Don't die, don't disappear, I swear to God we need you here". Throughout the years Ryan's albums have always sought to reassure listeners that they are not the only ones who feel as if their lives are on fire, and if "the same thing that makes you live can bury you alive", it also means we can dig our way back above ground. "Don't let your heart go out like this," run till the numb shakes off, till you can feel the burn as an indication of stars and fresh air still ahead, of new beginnings even with the scars we bear.

                 "I think that the main lesson I've learned is that there's no arriving, there's only traveling. There's only going and looking and working, and learning to laugh at the more absurd parts of our lives. We're all tourists. And love really is everything", Ryan says, "it's the only engine of survival."

                "I've been simultaneously lucky and unlucky. But that's true for all of us I think. I have some scars from my travels, both in the soul and on the skin. I'm hungrier now than I've ever been, and I was starving when I started."

"Every little bit hurts when you're in the past." But here in the now we get a little distance between ourselves and what happened. This record is the distance between disaster and survival. It's also a love letter to music, and quite simply the best album of 2017.

Hustle up Starlings reminds us that "our guts are born in that fiery trench between hurt and hope," and the trenches are where we find out how strong we really were all along. The weapons of living don't always kill, they also clear a path, and if music is an indication of the kind of life one has lived, if it tells the story well and honestly, without filler or filter or comfort food, then success is better tallied in the number of lives saved by the work's creation than any industry standard. It is no truism, but a profound reminder, that some may never have heard anyone tell them before; "I swear to God we need you here."

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