hi friends, and welcome to my favorite time of the year. I’ll (probably) send something in the next day or two about why this dead, low-stakes time between christmas and new years is the best time of the year, but right now I have something else for you. sometimes this newsletter has kind of been something like a music blog, so I wanted to do a Best Albums of 2019, but the truth is that my way of relating to music, in which I listen to one song on repeat for a month at a time and also find it necessary to put The National’s entire discography on every playlist I make, means I get through new music slowly and haltingly and rarely discover my favorite albums of a year within that same calendar year (my favorite album of 2019 is an album from 2018, for instance, but there’s another letter coming about that, too). My point is: I didn’t feel like I was qualified to write a Best Albums of 2019 post, so I asked Thomas — who is one of those people who listens to new music at an almost incomprehensible rate the week it comes out, and who is constantly sending me albums that look fantastic and imploring me to listen to them while I put “Hairpin Turns” on repeat again — to write it for me. I’ll turn this over to him now:
best albums of 2019
best albums of 2019
best albums of 2019
hi friends, and welcome to my favorite time of the year. I’ll (probably) send something in the next day or two about why this dead, low-stakes time between christmas and new years is the best time of the year, but right now I have something else for you. sometimes this newsletter has kind of been something like a music blog, so I wanted to do a Best Albums of 2019, but the truth is that my way of relating to music, in which I listen to one song on repeat for a month at a time and also find it necessary to put The National’s entire discography on every playlist I make, means I get through new music slowly and haltingly and rarely discover my favorite albums of a year within that same calendar year (my favorite album of 2019 is an album from 2018, for instance, but there’s another letter coming about that, too). My point is: I didn’t feel like I was qualified to write a Best Albums of 2019 post, so I asked Thomas — who is one of those people who listens to new music at an almost incomprehensible rate the week it comes out, and who is constantly sending me albums that look fantastic and imploring me to listen to them while I put “Hairpin Turns” on repeat again — to write it for me. I’ll turn this over to him now: