AHC's Top Ten Albums of 2020

10:

Catie Curtis: The Raft

"True, we are pieces of light from the moon, we bring it all into the room," sings Curtis on the opening title track, The Raft, from her new album of the same name. 30 years on and the territory Curtis has spent her calling exploring has probably never been more needed than it is right now. It's been a hard year, and Curtis, whose songs have always felt like phone calls from an old friend during a hard, dark hour, is here to remind us; "tribulations from a clear blue sky / will knock the wind out of us every time / but as long we're side by side / even if we fall we will rise / I got you / I got your back / I've got your heart through everything." Curtis's wisdom cuts through the hard years like a shot of light, on songs like "You don't have to burn your own house down" and "The world don't owe me nothing", her greatest gift has always been the ability to speak right into the hurting hours that find most of us needing these gentle little reminders. That if we can wait something out, that 'something' will change. No accident, an album called a Raft, a life boat, lighthouse and friend. As one of the darkest years in recent memory comes to a close, the year, not the dark, The Raft is one of the best musical companions to bring along with you on this wild, scary ride into the unknown. 

​9: 

Kris Delmhorst: Long Day in The Milky Way

"Don't worry cause ooh, wind's gonna find a way / I don't need no radio, gonna listen to the branches sigh / I know all there is to know about the history of decline." On Delmhorst's latest, the wisdom runs deep into earth and water and sky. "Keep on pushing and you find a way through / No shame in the long game, look around and see that time is all we got." All of this in the first song alone. The whole album reads like the very best books of poems do, transforming our hearts and minds whether we are ready or not for such transformation. The hour is getting late, these things simply cannot wait. If each book is a risk to open, so too is an album such as this. The very best kind of risk. "Walk down through the melting snow / See the river overflow / There’s only so much she can hold / there's only so much," Delmhorst sings, on one of the best and closing tracks of the album, Call Off The Dogs. Adding; "Why you wear that armor for / Kept it from some ancient war / Maybe you don't need it anymore / You ain’t got no secret curse / Ain’t no better ain’t no worse / Just another leaf hanging on the tree / Just a little leaf hanging / Leave the story you can’t shake / Leave your pile of old mistakes / You'll find a new one you can make / You'll find a new one." For music that is both deeply wise and brimming with love, in the vein of Jackson Brown and Janis Ian, look no further, Long Day in the Milky Way delivers just enough light to help keep one's total despair at bay. 

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8:

Bill Callahan: Gold Record

"Hello, I'm Johnny Cash..." so begins Callahan's latest lo-fi twang masterpiece. "Well the pigeons ate the wedding rice and exploded somewhere over San Antonio," He sings on in his deep baritone voice, from the album's opening track, Pigeons, about a limousine driver. Chauffeuring  a newly wedded couple around, Callahan's character muses from a question asked by the newly blissful two passengers in back, "You got any advice for us, old man?"; and sings;  "Well, I thought for a mile, as I drove with a smile / Then I said when you are dating, you only see each other / And the rest of us can go to hell / But when you are married, you're married to the whole wide world / The rich, the poor / The sick and the well / The straights, and the gays / And the people who say we don't use these terms these days / The salt and the soil." Now those of are the kind of narrative pearls you might find in a Leonard Cohen Song, and so the song actually signs itself off as; sincerely; L. Cohen. A tribute to two songwriters no longer with us, but oh, still very much with us. From opening to closing, Gold Record runs aphoristic bits of wisdom deep into your bones; "Tickets please / It's times like these / That the forces at work begin considering me / As the link between death and dreams / For some sweet minutes, everyone is counting on me / To get them home / Say / Before the track ends / Through the wayward symphonies of steel on steel / As the city falls away to single bricks in the field / As if I were the conductor and this train were real." A metaphor for the songwriter's soulful effect on us, perhaps. The Mackenzies reads like a beautiful poem, a car that breaks down in the driveway, turning it over and over, an old man who comes running out saying; "don't you do that, son / You'll only make it worse" "I'll call my buddy Koji, he can fix anything, and he owes me," invited on over to wait with these words that seem like water in a desert in this modern America of isolation and to each his own; "Come on inside with me / Join the family / it seemed a place had already been laid for me." 

"We never met before
Despite livin' next door
See I'm the type of guy
Who sees a neighbor outside
And stays inside and hides
I'll run that errand another time"

Gold Record is one of the best in Callahan's canon, a tall order since all of Callahan's works bear streaks of gold running through them. This is the kind of record both Johnny and Leonard would have spent many an evening listening to, with a steady fire going in the backyard pit, evening coming on, and the celestial stars making themselves felt in the darkening, and forever going, sky above. Gold running through everything, field and town and all eternity. 

7: 

Lilly Hiatt: Walking Proof

"Sometimes I pretend this isn't who I am / I throw caution to the wind / And don't give a damn / But I can't get away / I know you've been there my sweet Rae," we've all that one person who gets what and where we've been through like no on else in our lives possibly can, for Lilly; it's Rae, the character song opener of another hell of an album from the great troubadour. "Don't you hate when people say; it is what it is", she sings on P-Town, oh, hell yes. From opener to closer, this is a howl of a record, a reckoning, a cleaning out and seeing through. "Me and my baby / Looking at Christmas lights / I was angry and he drove 'til my head was right / Year after year running from home / I want someplace that's just my own to scream / And I ain't slowing down for nobody," Hiatt croons, from the gut, on the closing track Scream. A room of one's own here is a howling room. "Veins of this city, so small and pretty / You could pump her up with some kind of drug / Her arms are open, wild eyed and hoping / Somebody could give her that kind of love / Now Cory just listens to the radio / He has no other place to go / So we pick him up now and then / Drive him back to the bus station again," Hiatts sings on 'Some Kind of Drug,' as she brings us into the clotted, glorious and ragged arteries of Nashville. From Royal Blue to Trinity Lane, Lilly's third act is a force to be reckoned with. I've said it before and I'll say it again; like father, like daughter. Have a little faith in the where the music will take you. Lean into the ride, the howling wind.  Where the dirt road meet tracks at the edge of town, meets the down and outers and rock 'n roll shouters. The future of music feels just right in Lilly's lane. 

​​6:

Jonatha Brooke: The Sweetwater Sessions

Some reworkings are also beautiful rebirthings. Such is sweetwater. Opening with 'Taste of Danger' a Woody Guthrie song put to original music by Jonatha on her 2008 album of Guthrie originals; The Works, sounds wiser and crisper than ever before. "Some things I steal / Most things I earn / The angel's getting older / But the devil never learns / I toe the line, but then I fall / Cuz' heaven knows I like the taste of danger most of all," Guthrie is the gift of heart that keeps on giving, and Jonatha's rendition is a living soul choir swell of sound and season. Revisited also is a song from her duo days with Jennifer Kimball in The Story; The Angel in The House. "My mother moved the furniture when she no longer moved the man / We thought nothing of it at the time /  She painted walls, painted smiles, / Checked herself in the mirror one more time, / Then yoked her heart to a whim,"  a beautiful song that tackles the painfully ingrained notions of femininity that make one feel one must "clean the house" before writing a song, before feeling like one can turn to those deeper works and passions that call out in different ways. 'Full Fledged Strangers' is also revisited, another strong piece in Brooke's canon; "I've got a river of kin, a footbridge of neighbors / The rest of my little world is full-fledged strangers." As the chorus kicks in with the wisest moment you'll find in any song; "I'm waiting and there's still no one to meet my train / I'm waiting and there's no one but myself to blame." Old gems can be reworked into new forms that feel lit and alive from the inside with a vital kind of spark. Jonatha's soul drenched voice carries these old musical friends into new mountain ranges, sonic valleys and mournful rivers. "I can finally see it... the whole world is made of faith." And then some. 

​5:

Patty Larkin: Bird in a Cage

Larkin's latest "mines the intersections of Poetry and Song, making music of some of her favorite poems, five from US Poet Laureates, as a way to “hold brilliance in my hand.” And the heart, too, holds space for these beautiful and mournful songs and celebrations. The line between poet and songwriter has always been permeable and thin, in the right hands the distinction hardly holds and the difference makes no damn difference at all, it's all the same thing really. If you've a truth burning in you the only way to tell it is with words written in blood and fire. Since the mid 80's, Larkin has written some of the very best truths of her generation of songwriters. Now, with 'Bird in A Cage,' her 14th album, Larkin speaks through the work of ten poets. Nick Flynn, Marie Howe, Natalie Diaz, Kelle Groom, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Pinsky, May Sarton, Kay Ryan, William Carlos Williams, and Billy Collins. A perfect marriage of poem and song; these birds in a cage with open door and a midnight line running straight to the heart. 


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4: 

Lori McKenna: The Balladeer 

"When the weight of your troubles sends your knees into the dirt / And all your loyal distractions only magnify the hurt / When lonesome doesn't quite define how so alone you feel / I'll walk with you, even if it's uphill," McKenna sings on the beautiful soul-compass of a track, Uphill. These lyrics are the best description I know for McKenna's songs. Each album she has made in her now 20 + year career have been like tried and true companions on uphill stretches of heartache and wonder. To know one is not alone, that there is an understanding that runs deep beneath all that we can't get a hold on just yet, but will one day. "When you're my age / I hope the world is kinder / Than it seems to be right now / And I hope the front page isn't just a reminder / Of how we keep lettin' each other down," McKenna sings to her children in a song as enduring and endearing as Cat Stevens' Father and Son. And likewise on 'Till You're Grown;' "Your daddy's hands won't feel so rough / And his fuse won't seem so short / Running away won't look like a cure / To anything that really hurts... Smoking won't seem so cool / Drinking in a parking lot won't be fun / Time moves faster than you think / You just can't see it when you're young."  McKenna's songs, over the years, have attracted the attention and adoration of many big name Nashville Country music stars, but much like Mary Chapin Carpenter before her, McKenna has always been a folk singer at heart, with a knack for telling a damn good story. And here it shows, not least of all in the title of the album itself; "The Balladeer." A rich and storied poem book of song. Step on into the kitchen, and let Lori sing for you a song of the tattered and tiring, but never entirely defeated, human, all too human, heart.


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​3:

Kathleen Edwards: Total Freedom

After the release of her last album, 2012's Voyageur, and having reached a crossroads of burnout and that impossible, aching place, of no longer really loving what you do, Edwards walked away from the music business, opening up a coffee shop in the suburbs of Ottawa called 'Quitters Coffee.' The opening track, Glenfern, tells a bit of the story behind her leaving; "Now when I find myself lookin' back / I think of all the cool shit that happened / Like, we had a tour bus with a bed in the back / We bought a rock and roll dream it was total crap, / well We toured the world and we played on TV / We met some of our heroes, it almost killed me / And I will always be thankful for it." The gift, and the success of it, can almost do us in. Add Depression to that and it can be a perfect storm. But with time spent healing comes Total freedom, and happiness, after all the dark and unending nights, it really is a thing worth celebrating and making room for in a life. "I picked up this habit I'm just trying to lose / Called courage in a glass that / Helps me keep up with you," Edwards sings, in 'Who Rescued Who?' Here, a dog, but also the song, the changing seasons and turning of tides and god almighty, how we almost don't even make it. "I don't want this anymore / This thing / Heavy on my shoulders like the summer rain / I don't want it anymore / The hurt / That lives under the bed in the smell of your shirt / Take it with you when you go." Can't keep what isn't ours, give it all back, more than enough in our own pack to sling over shoulder, up mountain, down wind. After years of pain, comes, if not happiness, years of contentment, of being ok inside one's own skin, of calling it quits in order to begin again, in a brand new and beautiful way. Total Freedom. 


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​2: 

Sarah Harmer: Are You Gone

The first album in ten years since 2010's Oh Little Fire, Are You Gone is one of Harmer's best efforts to date. "If you're too tough to wait / And you can't see the sun / If you've something to say / But you ain't got no one / Whatever you do / If you have to / Use your thumb / Just get here / Just come,"  Harmer sings in one of the most beautiful tracks from the album 'Just Get Here.' "I might need help to forget," she sings to a trusted confidante in 'Take me out.' "I'm searching for something I might have been / before I lost my mind." "I heard it on the wind from some place that I've been and won't go back to / It rattled the lock on an old thought, on an old thought that I was attached to," on 'The Lookout,' it is to that inner personal place Harmer reminds us to keep an eye on. What's inside us, not the obfuscation of 'out there.' What we know now from lessons learned, always, on our knees, it seems. "I am not here at the bar / Because I want to be," Harmer's down and turned inside out character confesses on 'Wildlife,' "I sweep up the mess and lock up the door / Of these memories / Lately I've not been myself / I could go out and seek help / It'd just do more harm than good that way / I'm scaring all the wildlife away." Harmer's landscapes are cluttered with woebegone lives and dreams deferred, a whole earth being slowly destroyed. But also houses deep in the night that keep their lights on for the weary of us. Just get here. whatever you do.

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​1:

Mary Chapin Carpenter: The Dirt and The Stars


Each chapter of Carpenter's lifelong musical songbook offers something so precious and wise it's impossible to be forced to choose the best from the rest. They are all just one big part of the human story, told with an enduring grace, grit, and ease that is unparalleled in music. Carpenter's oeuvre, like the very best literature, like Proust's Remembrance of Things Past or Faulkner, Oates and Carver, hold up a picture of the world so recognizable the heart just weeps to see itself reflected there, so humanely, in every single song. Take "It's Ok to Be Sad" for starters; "Could there be healing instead / Instead of breaking, I'm hoping / That the cracks beginning to spread / Is me breaking open / And if I let everything in / The shadows as well as the light / How else could I know I'm alright? / How else would I know? / It's ok to be tired / Fuck all the excuses / Whatever's required / There's no day that's useless / What's hollow and empty / What's lost and undone / What can and what can't be / Is how you become." Wisdom comes from the wilderness of nights lost and frayed and down to nothing but the sound of the wire sizzling against the skin of our soul. After that comes grace, knowing, letting go. There is music and then there is transcendence. Immanent hope wrung out of the cloth of our lives. "How long it took to arrive right here / Where what you want and what you need / Is little more than the air you breathe." Back to basics for us complicated creatures of habit and perpetual desperation. "Some are watching the enemy / Surprise kid, it's you and me." Have you not known this place before?  Where "Some are trying to tear it down / Some are shaky on solid ground / Some confuse guilt and blame / They can't admit when they feel ashamed / You're not the first, you're not the last / It could be worse, this will pass / I know you hurt, you hurt so bad / But a light comes shining to stitch and mend / One day you'll find you're you again / It takes some time." Time and sitting with the pain, nursing the wound, the bottle and the bitter, the broken bone, the broken everything, while knowing, it truly could be worse. Stitches, mending, making due, doing better, in time, sweet time. It's true; we grow through what we go through. The dirt and the stars. Our one and only precious, hurting-healing life.

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