The ________ of 2015

1. Sufjan Stevens, Carrie & Lowell

Sometimes he dreams of a time when he was in Oregon, in those crazy mid-20s, when the world seemed infinitely expansive and the only care he had was doing good work and maximizing contact with the people he loved and cared about. He still does this, but things sometimes drift off-course. Making new memories can be a chore, like trying too hard to generate a spontaneous dance party. The sadness of that effort.

In Carrie & Lowell, Sufjan dreams of an Oregon of the past. Places that mattered, and still matter. Tillamook. Eugene. Cottage Grove. Spencer’s Butte. Mom’s. Step-dad’s. The scattered spirit atlas of the soul. “Every road / leads to an end,” he sings, because all roads west do, indeed, end at continent’s edge, at that rough-break of the Pacific Ocean. It’s a hard place. Nobody said paradise would be easy.

2. Beach House, Depression Cherry

Once again he ends his year back home, in the dewy, drippy streets of mosslandia [Portland], in the back booth of the morbid art bar [Astoria], legs flashing through troughs of tea-water within earshot of the pounding surf [Fort Stevens State Park], and elsewhere. This is a far cry from the wind-whipping meringue of Wyoming, where snow is impossibly dry. One does not even know what ache there is in not finding water out there, even in the precipitation.

In the background of “Sparks,” the first single off of Beach House’s fall album, one can hear an ethereal voice. The lyrics for this background loop are unpublished [they were accidental/incidental], but what he hears is: “As you fly around the sun / As you fly around the sun / ….” and there’s this neat circular journey that we may acknowledge, or not. It is this idea that with each year he gets one more chance to make it better, to do right, to finally unleash: the whole foundation for New Year’s resolutions.

3. Kevin Drew, Darlings

But let Kevin Drew bring him back from the brink of bullshit: It’s just a place, dude. Chill. Don’t overthink it. Why complicate the goodness with an elaborate scheme for building a profitable business? This year we all heard about the Cascadia Subduction Zone of Obliteration: the apocalyptic earthquake terror that precedes the drowning in the tidal surf, a watery throat swallowing the survivors whole, as if their day wasn’t already shot to hell.

Maybe it’s not about the foundations anymore. Maybe it’s about the flexible. Maybe we can all just go to a Mexican Aftershow Party, and try to make it all feel real. Maybe it’s about combining everything you love into one thing and just making it work. Keep all that you love, but kill your darlings.

4. Grimes, Art Angels

Grimes knows apocalypse. But she also knows big summer festivals, the epitome of anti-apocalypse. He thinks he can trust in Grimes, because if she can write a song that disses her adoptive home [California] and still make it sound like a love letter, then there is a certain hope for humanity; a melting of a surface envy.

He wants to write a similar love letter to Wyoming; an amicable document expressing just how the place nourishes and how the place kills and wishing just for once that the millionaire land barons didn’t rub the shoulders with the millionaire outdoorsman and the millionaire bards didn’t write witless odes to the shale pits of capitalism. You can be so much greater than Colorado, he wants to write, but it’s time to make peace with Greater Sage-Grousing hybridity. Kill the myth, and open up to the sky. [Kill the cowboy.] But in Wyoming, as elsewhere, everyone is an art angel, shucking for survival, jostling for a salable identity: welcome to Realiti.

5. Panda Bear, Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper

He was at a crossroads in Cheyenne and didn’t know which way to turn, left or right. His compass made it seem like the archangels were confused, but they were just drunk. Up ahead, in the distance, the sky folded over the horizon, pulling cerulean nightshades on the earth. He made the decision to drive straight through.

6. Beyoncé, Beyoncé

Did this come out this year, he asks? It’s still good. It’s still one of the best.

7. Tame Impala, Currents

There was a moment one night when his brain would not turn off and there was no need to worry because he only had to wake up in two hours and be a presentable presence in a classroom where freshman students looked to him for instruction and a thin line of wisdom but he just did not care — well, he cared about the students, but just did not consider something bad would happen as a result of this clashing of the personal and the professional. Late in the semester, one of the best students in the class kept failing to turn in any assignments. After repeated reminders, the student withdrew further. Something was happening in the student’s life, but he could not know what that something was. The student did not turn in a final project, did not present on the final project, and so the decision was made to give the student a failing grade, further reinforcing whatever dark and deathly spiral trajectory the student was already on.

And Tame Impala sings: “It’s getting closer.”

8. FKA twigs, M3LL155X

He contemplated life without the Internet; he contemplated life inside the Internet. He thought about the Internet-alization of the human, the internalization of the cloud. So much hope, so much danger. So much potential for good and evil, both. He made structures of thoughts that led to the conclusion that the first step to true freedom will be recognizing that freedom used to be something one did not have to purchase on credit, was once something that did not require preemptively killing or cutting down people before they stopped our machine in its tracks. The “free” and the “cheap” is attractive when the population is poor and so suffers through advertisements and manipulation in order to participate in conventional life, or else pay their way out of it, or else drop out. But why does the future have to be like this? Why is it so difficult to be a meaningful contributor to society? Is there any society left to contribute to, or is it just a system to buy into, or not?

He senses that there are more out there who desire a change.

A change from within.