Another great year of music comes to a close.
Here are my Top 10 albums of 2024.
Portland, Oregon-based singer, songwriter John Craigie released ‘Pagan Church’ on January 12, 2024.
Frontman Taylor Kingman of TK and the Holy Know-Nothings were recruited for this one-off collaboration.
LaurelThirst Public House, a gathering place for musicians in Portland, serves as the cover for Pagan Church and a reference to this place of communal and spiritual life.
Vancouver is no stranger to John Craigie. For the past six years, Vancouver has been part of his annual November and December ‘Keep It Warm Tour’ where $1 from every ticket sold is donated to regional non-profits.
Craigie continues win over audiences with his easygoing banter, observational humour, and witty songs. If you have not heard of John Craigie, you’re really missing out. He’s up there with John Prine and Todd Snider.
The title track that closes the album is inspired by John Craigie’s father’s last weeks of cancer three years ago.
The clocks are turned back twenty-three years when Pete Yorn was twenty-six years old. In many ways, ‘The Hard Way’ remind me f his critically acclaimed debut Musicforthemorningafter.
All the songs were written by Pete Yorn and Josh Gudwin (also produced and mixed), except track 2 written by Pete Yorn, Josh Gudwin and Michael Pollack.
‘The Hard Way’ is an acoustic-based album, but it’s more than that. It has that rawness, stripped back sort of sound that reminds me of Nick Drake.
Widely respected as a leading light of the Britpop movement, Sheffield native Richard Hawley releases his eight solo album, ‘In This City They Call You love’.
The Moore Street electricity substation in Sheffield is featured on the album cover. Windowless and made from reinforced concrete, the building is optimised for fireproofing, noise reduction and to support heavy floor loads.
Step inside this enigmatic bunker and disappear ‘In This City They Call You love’. This is vintage Richard Hawley. He takes the listener on a melancholic tour of meandering rivers, shivering hills and roaring furnaces on the album’s fifth track, ‘People’, is an ode to the hardy individuals who have shaped and continue to embody the city’s resilient character.
At age 75, Nick Lowe’s old magic was on display the whole night song after song when I saw him live at the Commodore Ballroom with Ron Sexsmith last June for the Great Indoors Tour. With the release of ‘Indoor Safari’, the Los Straitjackets were hired to give Lowe a little rock and roll kick. The songs ‘Love Starvation’, ‘Tokyo Bay’, ‘Trombone, and ‘Lay It On Me Baby’, all previously released and performed during the Great Indoors Tour made their way onto ‘Indoor Safari’.
I’m looking forward to seeing Nick Lowe and Los Straitjackets with their personalized Mexican wrestling masks next March in Vancouver.
Luke Winslow-King met Roberto Luti busking and through mutual friends in New Orleans in the early 2000s. Winslow-King teamed up with longtime musical associate/slide guitarist for ‘Flash-A-Magic’, his eighth full-length album. Produced by Winslow-King and Luti, the album was recorded in April 2023 in Livorno, Italy and in May 2023 in Memphis, Tennessee and Jamestown, South Carolina.
Vancouver’s Paul Pigat is one of Canada’s premier roots, swing and rockability guitarists. He plugs in his Gretsch guitar and turns the reverb up to ten.
Cousin Harley is the rocking hillbilly trio and the central touring project of Paul Pigat.
To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the passing of the late, great Canadian western swing and rockability musician Ray Condo, Cousin Harley picked some of their favourite songs that Ray made his own and put a little Cousin Harley spin on them with the release of ‘Ray Condo Forever’.
Wisconsin-born, New England based Jeffrey Foucault’s ‘The Universal Fire’ is heavily inspired from the grief of losing his long-time partner in music, drummer and best friend, Billy Conway, to cancer in 2021. Jeff gives us a working wake for his friend.
Foucault parallels the loss of Billy Conway with the day the music burned in 2008 when a fire swept across the backlot of Universal Studios Hollywood, California that destroyed master tapes of hugely influential American recordings.
‘Passage Du Desir’ arrives with a Parisian air of mystery.
The album title and album cover is from 84 Passage du Désir in Paris, located on Rue du Fauburg Saint-Denis.
Sturgill Simpson doesn’t follow trends. He’s always ahead of the curve and doesn’t pander to the press. When he moved to Nashville, his plan was to carve out five sort of conceptual country records. And once done, it was over.
In his early twenties when Simpson had just gotten out of the navy and moved back to Lexington, Kentucky, there was this bartender named Dave wearing a black trench coat and just stood outside flipping a zippo pocket lighter all the time. When Sturgill walked in the bar every day, the bartender would call out “Johnny Blue Skies”. And to this day, he has no idea why.
When he did an anime film for a rock and roll record in Japan, he put it under Johnny Blue Skies productions. So when he needed a name, that just seemed like a pretty obvious choice.
Sturgill Simpson thought he was done touring. He had a really bad vocal injury a few years ago and hit kind of a funk, a pretty low period because of that, and just decided to travel to kind of fight depression.
The songs from ‘Passage du Desir’ were written in Paris.
Here we are again. How many times does Mojo magazine need to plea “Somehow, some way, this cult and infinitely class songwriter must get his due wider recognition”?
You see that rooster on the cover? Roosters crow for a variety of reasons, including to establish dominance, to alert other birds to potential danger, and to attract mates. Here, I thought it was a way for Peter Bruntnell to get his due wider recognition in establishing his musical dominance in 2024 and attracting new listeners.
The fact is that Peter Bruntnell was playing a show in 2022 at Lulu’s Downtown in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and that picture of the rooster was on a wall in the dressing room. Bruntnell saw the photo, liked it and thought it would be the album cover.
Excellent album cover. Excellent Peter Bruntnell album.
Peter Bruntnell’s writing partner Bill Ritchie of Vancouver has seven co-writes on the album. Bruntnell and Ritchie’s songwriting relationship go back to the early 1990s when Bruntnell lived in Vancouver for some time where he met Ritchie.
‘Houdini and the Sucker Punch’ sees Bruntnell re-employing his long-term band members Mick Clews, Dave Little and Peter Noone, along with a number of his favourite musicians: pedal steel virtuoso Eric Heywood, Jay Farrar (Son Volt / Uncle Tupelo), Mark Spencer (Son Volt), James Walbourne (The Pretenders) & cellist Laura Anstee.
On October 25, ‘Wake The Dead‘ was released. The album sees Prophet collaborating with ¿Qiensave?, a Cumbia Urbana band from Salinas, California with roots stretching back to Michoacán, Mexico whose sound enchanted Prophet when he first heard them back in 2022.
Everything that can be said about this album has been reviewed when I saw Chuck Prophet & His Cumbia Shoes at the Tractor Tavern in Seattle last October.