It’s chosen by the author with input from the WMOT staff and informed by the station’s playlist. As I like to say, stream to discover purchase what you love.Īs always, I note that this is an unranked list of “outstanding and essential” albums, not a 30 Best list. Ask how you’re directly supporting the artists you most appreciate. Use the LP boom to inspire musical gift-giving.
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Or buy download albums direct from artists on Bandcamp and add a t-shirt. So in 2022, recommit to your physical music collection. But the pandemic showed us, as if the pre-2020 business already hadn’t, the precariousness of careers and the sacrifices these artists make to live their lives of art. It’s famously easy to hear all of these albums on your choice of streaming services as much as you want. Lastly, I’d offer my takeaway from looking at this musical abundance. At a time when record producers enjoy a lot of freedom in the studio to layer and mix, projects like The Marfa Tapes and the first solo album from The Next Waltz honor the value of unadorned performance. Veterans like James McMurtry and Todd Snider released some of the best work of their careers. A cadre of extraordinary African American women showed remarkable individuality and compositional ideas that stretched the format in beautiful ways. Artists like Maggie Rose, Southern Avenue and Nathaniel Rateliff brought big band R&B sounds to the mix. This year’s outstanding albums were brimming with vigor, righteousness and principle. While the country was roiling politically and waiting for a Covid-19 vaccine, we listened for escape and emotional surrender, while artists created new music with insights from a bewildering, taxing plague year.īut if you’re looking for ennui and resignation, Americana music is the wrong place. Bandcamp became a juggernaut and the conscience of the music industry with its periodic Bandcamp Fridays, when they waived their sales commission on music and put more money in artists’ pockets. By January 2021, our national relationship to recorded music had changed, because we’d spent almost a year mostly locked down and locked out of the live music experience.