The Best of 2023

An idiosyncratic list for readers of my idiosyncratic newsletter

Dec 29, 2023

Since I started teaching at Penn this past August, I’ve written fewer cultural (Above the Fray) posts than I did before that, and fewer in total than I expected to. I feel bad about that and have wanted for some time to make up for it by doing a big year-end post listing my cultural high points of the year.

No surprise that what I’ve written is very heavily weighted to music, the art form that touches me most deeply, and the one I am most knowledgeable about, both as a fan and as a performer. (I play piano and guitar, sing, and have a mid-level knowledge of music theory.) On that note (pun intended), I wanted to acknowledge that Chris Cillizza, who has a very good Substack to which you should all subscribe, posted his own music list for 2023 that reveals that he and I have very similar taste. Lots of overlap! I just wanted to highlight that so anyone who already subscribes to his Substack and mine didn’t conclude I’d just cribbed from his list. I assure you, we come at this from different starting points but end up in much the same place wholly by chance (and no doubt partly because of the fact that we’re both middle-aged white guys who make our living as what the sociologists used to call “symbolic analysts.”)

Anyway, you’ll find a list of ten songs below, followed by some comments about films, TV shows, books, and essays that stood out this year. I hope you find it worth your time. Happy New Year to all. See you 2024 (aka, next week)!

(One final introductory note: I’m not doing an audio version of this post. It’s just too choppy and includes too many links for a recording to do it justice.)

Ten Songs that Meant a Lot to Me in 2023

The National, “Eucalyptus”

The National, my favorite band at this moment in my life, released two albums this year, First Two Pages of Frankenstein and Laugh Track. Like rock critic Steven Hyden, I think it would have been better for them to pare back both, consolidate the songs, and release one excellent album (which Hyden fittingly titles Frankenstein Laughs) than do what they did instead, which is release two solid but bloated records that feel filled with lots of very similar (good but not great) songs. (I endorse Hyden’s idea but disagree with several of his choices for inclusion on the imagined combined album.)

This isn’t to say there aren’t some top-notch songs on the albums. There are, and this is my favorite of the bunch, and the song that hit me with the biggest emotional wallop of anything released this year. I wrote a stand-alone section of a post on “Eucalyptus,” so if you’re a long-time paying subscriber, you’ve heard about it already. If not, I suggest skipping back to what I wrote then and then watching the video for the song there or below.

Ruston Kelly, “Michael Keaton”

I’ve become a big Ruston Kelly fan over the past several years. His first full-length album, Dying Star from 2018, was one of the best released that year, with nearly every country-inflected folk song a beautiful expression of longing and self-loathing. It was a record devoted to self-examination and regret over addiction, the damage it does, and how its allure can be so difficult to shake. I give it my highest recommendation. Released two years later, Shape & Destroy was more mixed—its musical highs higher and its lyrical lows less compelling than his debut LP. His third record, The Weakness (2023), is similarly mixed, at least to my ear. But boy do I love some of its songs.

My favorite may be this peculiar single, about a guy who goes on a date, tries CBD, and ends up getting far higher than he expected to, which inspires some truly wild (and darkly hilarious) speculative thoughts, like the one partially captured in the song’s title, “Michael Keaton”: “What if Michael Keaton killed himself in multiplicity: Would that be genocide?” Musically, the song is vintage Kelly, with an indelibly tuneful melody conveyed via Kelly’s multitracked harmony vocals. I hope you’ll check out the song, and the artist more broadly.

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, “Save the World”
Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, “Cast Iron Skillet”

As with The National, I shared a Jason Isbell song earlier this year, at the conclusion of an essay inspired by an HBO documentary about his life, career, and marriage. That was just a couple of months before Isbell released a new album with his band (The 400 Unit). I had a mixed reaction to the new collection of songs, loving a couple of the songs, liking about half of the rest, and responding with indifference to the others. My favorites are the two below.

The first, “Save the World,” marries a tense, workhorse verse to a rousing chorus with a glimmering guitar solo added in for good measure—all as a vehicle for conveying Isbell’s anxieties about and struggles with raising a child in a country permeated by senseless, random acts of gun violence. Man, do I get it—and feel it. This kind of song is really hard to pull off without sounding preachy and narrowly political. But Isbell manages it because he’s such a master lyricist—easily the most gifted of his generation, in my view.

That lyrical talent is shown off to chilling effect in the second selection below, a quiet ballad titled “Cast Iron Skillet,” which ventures deep into a small town in the South to record the little snippets of folk-wisdom and bigotry its residents trade amongst themselves to make sense of and simplify a harsh and confusing world.

boygenius, “Not Strong Enough”
boygenius, “True Blue”

Is boygenius really a “supergroup,” as so many music journalists and publicists insist they are? I’m not sure I buy the hype, since the supergroups of the past were comprised of artists who were already superstars in their own careers, whereas the members of boygenius (Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker) are indie-folk critics darlings but hardly household names. Bridgers, whose last album (Punisher) I named the best record of 2020, comes closest, especially since serving as the opening act for part of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in the U.S. and completing guest appearances on just about every indie album released over the past two years. But Dacus and Baker? I don’t see it.

But it doesn’t matter, because they put out a damn fine record this year. (Titled, with deadpan false modesty, The Record.) I don’t love all of it, but I’ve already played its best tracks to death without growing tired of them. Best of all is the song I consider the single of the year, “Not Strong Enough.” Bridgers and Baker each sing a verse, and all three harmonize beautifully on the soaring chorus. But what raises the song to the highest level is the final restatement of the chorus, when Dacus takes the lead vocal for the first time and alters the melody in ways that mine it for even more beauty. What a fabulous song.

The second track I’ve included here is a moody, mid-tempo track that Dacus dominates. I first took note of it while waiting around with my daughter for the Taylor Swift show to begin in Philly last June. “True Blue” came on the PA, I recognized it as one of the songs on the boygenius record, but for some reason in that context I heard it with fresh ears. “Hey, this is a great song,” I said out loud at one point. And so it is.

Glen Hansard, “There’s No Mountain”

I’ve been aware of Hansard for a long time without ever taking much of a liking to his music. But I love this song from the album he released this year, All That Was East Is West of Me Now. I first encountered it on Reels, where a snippet of this performance from an appearance on the Jimmy Kimmel show was circulating. I immediately took notice and sought out the song. It’s a great one.

Peter Gabriel, “Playing for Time”

I’ve loved Peter Gabriel since my early teens, a few years before he became a superstar with the So album in 1986. The four solo studio albums that followed his 1975 departure from Genesis and preceded his commercial break-out were “difficult” in the best way, combining beguiling melodies with compelling lyrics and genuinely bizarre, pathbreaking arrangements that heavily emphasized rhythmic experimentation. On So he pulled back on the arty approach, sold a helluva lot of records, and left me kind of cold. I liked his follow-up, Us from 1992, much better.

I also liked his next album, 2002’s Up, but that was 21 years ago. When I began to hear a year or so ago that Gabriel was preparing to release his first album of new material in two decades, I wasn’t expecting much. The man is 73 years old, and he’s among the least prolific artists in rock history. Could he still sing? What would his songs sound like after so much time?

The album Gabriel released this past year, I/O (pronounced Eye-Oh), is actually very good. I can’t think of a rock singer whose voice has been better preserved into old age, and he retains the ability to craft a touching and powerful melody. Lyrically, his vaguely pantheistic New Age-y preoccupations on many of the tracks leave me cold, but that can’t keep me from enjoying a good tune. “Playing for Time,” a meditation on aging, is one of my favorites from the album, both lyrically and musically. Make sure to stick with it until the final minute or so, when it undergoes a dramatic shift in sound and mood from the muted and mournful piano ballad that takes up the bulk of its run-time.

Manchester Orchestra, “The Way”

I’ve really come to love Manchester Orchestra over the past few years. Their last two albums (A Black Mile to the Surface [2017] and The Million Masks of God [2021]) were filled with highly melodic prog-rock-influenced songs. (Come to think of it, they’re one of the few bands working today seemingly to take inspiration from the pre-So Peter Gabriel.) This year, they released a six-song EP titled The Valley of Vision. The songs were outtakes from the sessions for their previous LP, but they were solid, if a little subdued. “The Way” is one of the best and will give you a good sense of what they sound like and help you to decision whether to take a deeper plunge.

Glen Hansard and Lisa O’Neill singing “Fairytale of New York” by the Pogues at the funeral for the band’s lead songwriter and singer, Shane MacGowan.

I wasn’t a big fan of the Pogues, but I love “Fairytale of New York,” which may be the saddest and most beautiful Christmas song I’ve ever heard. (It’s even been called the best Christmas song of all time.) The original recording remains my favorite version, for several reasons: the lovely string arrangement; the fabulous performance from the band; and Kirsty MacColl’s hilarious duet with MacGowan. (I’m a huge MacColl fan, but that’s a topic for another post.) But the version led by Glen Hansard and Lisa O’Neill at MacGowan’s funeral earlier this month gives the original a run for its money. What an incredible song. What an incredible performance.

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A Few Words about Films

Movies used to matter quite a lot to me—almost as much as music. But that hasn’t been true for a long time. At some point over the past couple of decades, I began to lose interest. Some critics would say this is because movies began to suck. But I wouldn’t go that far. Some good and great films are still getting made. The problem is they aren’t getting made and promoted in a way that puts them on my radar. What does get my attention are comic-book inspired blockbusters, about which I couldn’t possibly have less interest. Finally, there’s been the collapse in my trust in critics to single out the best films for attention and praise. I can’t tell you how many times over the past two decades I’ve gone to see an awful mess of a movie because “all the critics” assured me it was a masterpiece.

So I’m afraid I don’t have much to say about film here. I saw and liked Oppenheimer, and I wrote about it here. I also recently saw Maestro and hated it. Really thought it was appallingly bad. It took an incredibly interesting man (Leonard Bernstein), reduced his entire private and public life to his sexuality and marriage, and then did an atrocious job of telling even that incredibly narrow story. So much creativity and effort wasted.

Did I see any other movies this year? I don’t remember. Which maybe tells you all you need to know about me as a film critic in 2023.

Always Late to the Television Party

I’m usually far behind on what everyone is watching on television and talking about at the digital water cooler. Succession was an exception. I actually watched that show in real time and wrote a mixed response to the final season midway through its run. I should add that the show’s conclusion was extremely well done and quite satisfying. Though I think my exploration of the show’s limitations stand regardless.

But as I say, my solicitude with regard to Succession was quite unusual. What’s more typical? Only getting around to watching Breaking Bad this past year, a full decade after the show’s finale transfixed its audience. Yes, it’s true: I only verified this past summer and fall that the show really is as great as everyone said it was back during the first term of the Obama administration. I still think Mad Men is the greatest television show in history, but Breaking Bad comes pretty damn close. (I continue to side with the former in large part because it deals with a wider range of human types and a broader cross-section of American life during a crucially important decade in our recent history. Breaking Bad’s focus is much narrower, but it sure does excel in exploring it with single-minded ferocity.)

I’m afraid I can’t say the same about Better Call Saul, which I watched in its entirety immediately after completing Breaking Bad. I know a lot of people who declared Saul to be “even better” than the show that spawned it, but I find that inexplicable. The best parts of Saul, for me, were those focused on the character of Mike Ehrmantraut, his family, and his “business” dealings with Nacho, Hector, Lalo, and other members of the Salamanca drug cartel and its rivals, including Gus Fring. That part of the show was a fitting and worthy spin-off/prequel to Breaking Bad.

But the parts about Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman, his brother Chuck, and his girlfriend/wife Kim Wexler? I’m sorry, but much of that left me completely cold. The actors did the best they could, but I found the characters pretty thoroughly unsympathetic and inscrutable. Maybe I just don’t get, or care about, the psychology of conmen and those who love them. (And maybe this explains some of my struggles to comprehend American politics over the past eight years.)

Best in Writing (Books and Essays)

I spend the bulk of my reading life these days focused on journalism. That leaves me little time for book reading. But I did read a few books this year that I can recommend.

Best Political History
That would be Nicole Hemmer’s Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s. (The book came out in 2022, but I read it this year and then assigned it to my class at Penn this past fall.) Anyone who likes to tell themselves that the conservative movement was thoroughly Reaganite from the 1980s on down to Donald Trump’s sudden hostile takeover of the GOP in 2016 needs to read this book and its lively account of just how Trumpy the Republican Party started becoming immediately after Reagan departed the White House. That faction only took over entirely with Trump’s victory in the Republican primaries eight years ago, but its members were there making trouble and pointing the way toward the future for a long, long time.

Best Intellectual History
I really loved Jerry Z. Muller’s Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes, which also came out in 2022 and I only managed to finish this year. (At more than 600 pages, it took a while!) Taubes’ life intersected with so many aspects of 20th-century culture that the book serves as a powerful and engaging introduction to numerous dimensions of Jewish, continental European, and American high culture. I highly recommend it.

Best Biography
McKay Coppins’ Romney: A Reckoning is easily the best biography I read (or attempted) this year. The author, whom I used to work with at Newsweek and the Daily Beast, does a really fabulous job of telling Romney’s story. That’s in part because the Republican senator gave Coppins extraordinary access. But it’s also because Coppins is such a gifted storyteller—and the story he has to tell, which is as much about the GOP’s evolution over the past couple of decades as it is about Romney himself, is very much worth thinking about.

Best Novel
J.M. Coetzee is my favorite living novelist. That’s a judgment based largely on three books he published between 1999 and 2005: Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello, and Slow Man. I like and admire several of his earlier novels as well as his series of fictionalized autobiographies (especially Summertime from 2009), but many of his novels since 2007 (above all his three books focused on a young man named Jesus) have really failed to hold my interest or stimulate my imagination.

Thankfully, the novel (really a novella) he published in 2023, The Pole, is a return to form—or rather, a return to a form I prefer. It tells the story of a reluctant love affair between a middle-aged Spanish woman and a much-older pianist from Poland. The story is minimal, as is the eroticism. As usual in his best work, the novella acquires and maintains its gravity due to Coetzee’s writing, which is spare, tightly coiled, psychologically astute, emotionally restrained, and alive to existential questions while never veering into philosophical pedantry. When it comes to style, imagine a blend of Ernest Hemingway and Samuel Beckett.

My only regret about the book is that Coetzee’s American publisher diverged from his publishers in Canada, the UK, and Australia in opting not to include five additional short stories in the volume—four of which involve the character of Elizabeth Costello, who was the main focus of his 2003 novel and also appeared in Slow Man. I have no idea why this decision was made, but it irritates me. I can only hope these five stories will appear in the U.S. at some point in a separate volume.

Best Essay
It’s possible I’m forgetting a stellar essay I read last winter, but from the perspective of the final days of the year, I’m prepared to say the best, and deepest, piece of nonfiction writing I read in 2023 was Leon Wieseltier’s lengthy, erudite reflection on storytelling and argument in a time of stark partisan and ideological polarization. Wieseltier’s title is “The Rise of Narrative and the Fall of Persuasion,” and he’s trying to understand the former as a function of the latter. His conclusion is an impassioned defense of what he calls “hold[ing] strong beliefs undogmatically,” and that’s how I understand my own thinking and judgment—which isn’t surprising, since Wieseltier’s work has influenced me greatly, especially when it comes to my self-understanding as an intellectual.

You might not be able to read the essay without subscribing to Wieseltier’s quarterly journal Liberties, but either way you should join me in doing so if you can afford it. There’s nothing else like it today, and no other intellectual endeavor more worthy of your support.