My Favorite Album of 2023
Why Galen Ayers and Paul Simonon's collaborative duet debut ruled my world last year, and continues to do so in 2024
Happy New Year, Jagged Time Lapsers!
Hope you made it into 2024 safely, and that all manner of joys await you in the next 12 months.
Hopefully, this Substack will add a little joy to your life, as well; I’d like to take this opportunity to send out heartfelt “molto grazies” to all my JTL subscribers, including my old pal Jeff Garlin who just ponied up for a “Founding Member” plan. Jeff has been a loyal friend and big supporter of my work since my early ’90s Chicago days with my band Lava Sutra, whom he engaged to write the theme song to his one-man show I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With. I am delighted to have him along for this ride — and I am just as delighted to have all the rest o’ youse here, as well…
Many of my fellow music writers on Substack have recently been posting their Top 10 Albums of 2023 lists, and that’s awesome. There was once a time when I absolutely lived for such an exercise — years like 1993, when there were more new albums that I loved with my entire heart and soul than I could possibly wedge into a Top 10 (or even Top 20) list — but it’s been ages since I’ve felt the desire to compile a year-end Top 10.
In part, this is because sorting out my Top 10 has increasingly seemed like a three-way battle between new albums I genuinely love, new albums I like a lot but don’t love (but which could use a signal boost because not enough folks know about them) and new albums whose widely-perceived “importance” (whether due to genuine cultural impact or simply because they’re by a major artist) seem to demand representation on my list, whether or not I actually dig them.
It’s always a tricky dance to do; plus, my listening tastes — as I’m sure you’ve gleaned from reading Jagged Time Lapse — are all over the fucking place. So unless I’m making a list limited to a specific genre, I risk alienating readers who might find some of my picks up their alley, but also might be completely turned off by some of the other records I choose.
Back in early 2007, for example, I got into an unexpectedly nasty argument with a friend of a friend who was completely appalled that I’d put Mastodon’s brilliant Blood Mountain at the top of my “Best of 2006” list, while leaving Bob Dylan’s Modern Times (an album I respected but never fully warmed up to) off of it entirely. There were other albums on my list that this guy would have surely enjoyed; but in his mind, the fact that I failed to adequately venerate The Mighty Zim — who surely didn’t need my advocacy — yet touted Mastodon (“Ew, heavy metal? Gross!”) immediately invalidated everything else I might have had to say. And that was well before Facebook, Twitter, etc.; throw in countless similar arguments that I’ve been involved in (or just witnessed) on social media over the last 15 years, and you’ll perhaps understand why I’ve lost my taste for doing year-end Top 10s.
And let’s be honest: While I did hear a lot of good new music this past year, I’ve become increasingly disinterested in, as Ray Davies once put it, eagerly pursuing all the latest fads and trends; at the same time, I’ve increasingly become more interested in catching up on all the incredible things I missed out on from the 1980s and earlier. As I laid out in the original mission statement for this Substack, I’ve been actively exploring why and how music had such a major impact on my life by revisiting certain songs and albums I heard during my childhood and adolescence; as a result, I spent far more time in 2023 with Lou Rawls, Jimmy Buffett and the soundtrack to The Warriors than with the latest albums by, say, Metallica, boygenius or The Rolling Stones. And I’m okay with that — not because those artists’ new records are unworthy of my time, but because I know that I have different priorities at the moment.
There were two new albums from 2023 that I did spend a whole lotta time with, however, albums which I kept going back to long after the initial “Maybe I’ll write something about it” introductory period. One, Anders Parker’s deeply moving The Black Flight, is something I’ve already written about here at JTL. The other, Can We Do Tomorrow Another Day?, the charming debut album from Galen & Paul — a.k.a the collaborative duo of singer-songwriter Galen Ayers and former Clash bassist Paul Simonon — likewise keeps returning to my turntable.
I interviewed the duo for FLOOD magazine back in May, which in some respects seems a lifetime ago. But instead of just filing it away and moving on to my next order of business, as so often happens when you cover music for a living, I’ve almost unconsciously kept Can We Do Tomorrow Another Day? in regular rotation. And while I described it at the time as “the tuneful soundtrack to the European summer vacation you wish you could have,” its joyful warmth has totally hit the spot for me in spring, autumn and winter, as well.
There’s so much that I love about this album: The humorous/flirtatious/world-weary back-and-forth between Ayers and Simonon, which remind me a lot of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood’s playful duets like “Jackson” and “Lady Bird”. The songs themselves, which cover everything from disappointing vacations (“Never Had a Good Time in Paris”) to failed relationships (“Hacia Arriba”) to haunted houses (“Room at the Top”) to piratical silliness (“A Sea Shanty”), yet all seem to fit together quite perfectly. Tony Visconti’s beautifully understated and atmospheric production, which creates a groovy sonic world with just a handful of instruments — some of which, like the Hohner Melodica and the Farfisa Organ, are not the sort of things you regularly hear popping up on records these days… ditto for the twangy guitars and understated rocksteady rhythms, two things which I’m always a sucker for.
And then there’s the organic nature of the music, which truly sounds like it was cooked up by a few pals messing around with some songs in somebody’s living room. “There’s the feeling of friends getting together and celebrating music,” Ayers told me, “rather than machines or AI taking over.” “I told Tony, ‘I don’t want to hear any technology on this record,’” Simonon recalled. ‘“I want to hear humans at work.’”
Humans at work is exactly what you hear on Can We Do Tomorrow Another Day?, as well as humans at play, and humans branching out from their creative comfort zones to experiment with something new. “One of the parameters that we set very early on was that we had to do something that neither of us had done before—to allow for a third thing to happen, which is what you hear,” Ayers told me. “It’s not something either of us could have done alone.”
Creative collaboration is something that I used to be extremely leery of; whether writing songs, articles or books, part of my reluctance to participate in such an arrangement was simply due to sheer “my way or the highway” stubbornness, and part of it was due to laboring under the misguided notion that “collaboration” essentially meant “compromise,” and that “compromise” necessarily meant “mediocrity”. But in recent years, thanks to working on such collaborative book projects as The Captain & Me and the forthcoming Redd Kross autobiography, I’ve begun to understand and appreciate that “third thing” Ayers talks about, and realize that something different and unexpected and really cool can indeed result from working with a like-minded person who’s bringing their own skills to the table. Crossed Channels, my new podcast with
, is another example of that — and hey, we’re recording a new episode this week!
Can We Do Tomorrow Another Day? is positively radiant with the pure joy of creativity — and like The Black Flight, it’s a record that makes me want to create; it makes me want to stretch, to try new things and take new chances, and to untether myself from the worry of whether or not there’s an audience for whatever I’m doing/writing/making. Obviously, it’s lovely if people pick up whatever you’re laying down, but you’re the one who has to lay it down in the first place…
As this new year dawns, it’s clear to me that we all have less time here than we think we do, and that we will all face any number of rigorous challenges, expected and otherwise, in 2024. So let’s do whatever we can to make this year count — and for us creative types, that means getting off our asses and actually creating, rather than finding new ways to talk ourselves out of it (“I’m too busy,” “My best days are behind me,” “Nobody cares,” etc.) or waiting around for someone else to give us permission to forge ahead with our ideas.
I’ll be carrying Can We Do Tomorrow Another Day? into 2024 as a helpful reminder of all of the above; maybe it’ll do the same for you, too.
As someone whose tastes are also "all over the fucking place," I think(?) that we're more the rule than the exception. Maybe I'm reading the tea leaves wrong, but in my experience there's a huge appetite for writing/creating that reflects that, rather than a narrow menu of picks that gatekeepers have decided we all "need" to be listening to.
Oh man Dan you’re right. 🤯 This album is such a fun listen. Zero pretense, just fun songs and amazing chemistry. It’s over before you know it and you can easily just start it over from the top.