Once again, the year has served up a copious number of outstanding albums, some from long-established names, others by newly arrived diamonds, and I could easily have doubled the best-of list. However, these are the ones that haunted me most and helped give 2024 a real lustre.
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Luke Jackson – Bloom
Luke’s first in four years saw him expanding his musical palette, colouring his folk base with more blues and even some hard rocking. Both punchy and tender, the heavily autobiographical songs reflected the wildness but also ruminated on the growing maturity as he turns 30. As always, his guitar work is outstanding, and that voice carries his distinctive stamp, which is brilliantly showcased in the unaccompanied Trouble. This coming-of-age album marks the first steps on a new and exciting path.
Julian Taylor – Pathways
Another heavily autobiographical album, looking, as the title suggests, both back and ahead as he reflects on the burdens he carries and those he has placed on the shoulders of others, and finding time to “let things soften”. Rooted, as ever, in his acoustic folk sound but also finding room for swampier funk moments, it’s an album that firmly seals his place alongside fellow Canadian greats such as Cohen and Cockburn.
Norman Paterson – Stornoway/Loved
A bit of a cheat here as Norman released both these this year, with both anchored in songs about the characters and landscapes where he grew up. Poignant and pointed in equal measure, both albums underscore his craft as a songwriter and storyteller with a deep empathy for people and the land and the trials and tribulations both endure and survive, all sung in a warm burr that feels like sipping peat whiskey.
Amy Speace – The American Dream
Autobiographical reflection seems to have been a recurring theme this year; The American Dream finds Speace looking back on her journey as both a musician and a person, tracing her path from a young girl with big dreams, literally and emotionally moving beyond her childhood roots and the experiences that have forged the woman and artist she is today. With backing from Joshua Britt and Neilson Hubbard and co-writes with both him and Robby Hecht, one of the Americana elite, she also evokes the vintage days of the Brill Building sound while working alchemy in transforming the memory of her son’s Christmas pageant into an encapsulation of a mother’s love.
C. Daniel Boling – Love, Dan
Reminiscent of his good friend Tom Paxton in both his voice and songs, but also with hints of Don McLean and Stan Rogers, Boling is very much rooted in the 60s coffee shop troubadour tradition. His songs are both personally wry (the title track recalling a hate/love letter his young self sent his mother) and politically keen as he calls for a turn of the tide in America’s increasingly xenophobic attitude, All Of Us Are Immigrants an anthem for the times. But he can then serve up a childhood memory of the family dog as a metaphor for the need for love and support.
Zachary Lucky – The Wind
Another in the travelling folk troubadour vein, this time from Calgary, and evoking such greats as Guy Clarke and Tom Rush, as per the title Lucky’s seventh album, stripped down to guitar and dobro, explored how we can be blown this way and that as we travel through life, facing crossroads and twists of fate. He spins a well-crafted story and introspective musings as he speaks of the loneliness of the long-distance singer, the metaphor-laden Water In The Fuel drawing from the same Nebraska well as Springsteen.
Malachy Tallack – That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz
Who could have predicted that the year’s best and most authentic old time country album would have come from someone born in the Shetlands and based in Fife? An author as well as singer-songwriter, this is Tallack’s debut and serves as a companion piece to his novel of the same name, the songs written and sung in the voice of its central character, a man in his mid-60s living alone in a remote Shetlands’ cottage whose past unexpectedly turns up at his door. The music embracing country honky tong, bluegrass and Americana, with pedal steel, fiddle and mandolin, like Paterson’s, it speaks of the tug of home and absent friends and really holds up a mirror to what revivalists across the ocean should be aiming for.
Mary Lee Kortes – Will Anybody Know That I Was Here: The Songs of Beulah Rowley
Another with a literary conceit, this ambitious project was a celebration of a fictional blues singer from Detroit who aspired to a life in showbusiness, became a local star but was killed in a house fire at 21; her songs were lost until being found in her old piano bench by Kortes’s family, she now bringing them to the world. Not only does Kortes fashion Beulah’s supposed songs, but the album also provides a whole backstory of her life while reflecting on her own musical path and aspirations, its central message being that we should always hold fast to our dreams.
Lizzie No – Halfsies
Out of Brooklyn, No’s a queer African-American singer-songwriter, harpist, a guitarist; her album, like Tallack’s and Kortes’s, is based around a fictional character, Miss Freedomland, here from a video game as the songs chart her existential angst path from internal and external exile to liberation while being pursued by Pac-Man like white supremacist ghosts. With guest spots from Allison Russell and the Attaca Quartet, it veers from spare acoustic to driving guitar rock as No finds catharsis through the stories she tells, both letting go of the bruises of the past and reaching out for the hope that lies ahead, observing how “to be Black in America is to be a stranger in a strange land”.
Ruth Theodore – I Am I Am
Making her debut for Ani Di Franco’s label, a natural home for her idiosyncratic songs and style, Theodore flits from style to style, one moment driving with a propulsive beat, the next offering a gentler caress, 70s soul or channelling a French chanteuse while her songs, which often address capitalist injustice, are steeped in metaphor and symbolism, which, we you may have to work harder to dig into them, always repay the investment. Tuned into world events, at one point, she references Romina Ashrafi, the Iranian who was murdered by her father after eloping with the man he refused to let her marry and also a protest about the Windrush deportation scandal. I Am, she says, and she most certainly is.
More end of year lists can be found here (more to come)