The Best Songs of 2022 So Far

ISSUE #203

My sincerest thanks to all who were able to donate last week. Your contribution helps more than you may know. I hope to treat my donors to something special one day, but for now, know that I don’t take it blithely—my roots of my gratitude run deep!

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A confession: I have not finished a single book all year. I normally average between 15 and 30 by year’s end. And listen, I’ve tried—oh! have I tried. I’ve picked up at least two each month. Often, I get right up to the very end, and then I stop. Atlanta Noir. Detransition, Baby. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. All unfinished. I feel as if half my mind walked out one night, and the other is stuck waiting for its return.

It’s the same problem I’ve had with television for years. I never watched the last episode of Girls. Season six, episode nine? Watched that. But not the finale. Same with Twin Peaks: The Return. The Underground Railroad. The Wire. Desperate Housewives. Doesn’t matter the show or its quality—it just keeps happening to me.

I’ve never identified as someone afraid of endings—I started dreaming of death when I was six, accepted it by twelve. But it seems, subconsciously, I am afraid. It’s a compulsion—something as innate as what draws me to these songs.

I sleep only when my body forces me to. I’m a year behind on my favorite podcast. I feel deeply loved, yet afraid to speak to friends. And I have forgotten how to finish a book. Such is the fracturing of these past few years. Perhaps, by closing the book before the final word, I am preserving some state of existence. Perhaps, I simply fell in love.

Whatever the answer, the formal exception is the album—this playlist is built primarily from final tracks, and I love them without question. If a song is not from the beginning, it’s the end, with the exception of #10, #5, and #3. You can hear it in their final moments: those are silences, pauses, places to breathe. I walk out after: maybe it’s snowing, maybe it just rained; maybe I grab a drink, maybe I just walk. No matter what, they’re still playing in my head.

I will finish a book again some day, just as sure as I will publish my final Earwyrms. But the songs, they stick—through brightest days and darkest nights, they never fade.

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10. “Mistakes” | Sharon Van Etten

You might expect a COVID album recorded at home by a woman who writes starkly of abuse to be drenched in despair, but “Mistakes” is the brightest song Sharon Van Etten has written to date. She’s having fun, being funny: “I dance like Elaine, / But my baby takes me to the floor, / Says ‘more more.’” I saw her in April at Variety Playhouse, Atlanta’s red-velvet vaudeville theater. A mother now with a loving home, she took the stage in sleeveless black with a short, new haircut. Mighty, radiant, self-effacing, shy, she sang openly of her love for her son, made me cry when she dedicated a song to her partner. By the end of “Mistakes,” the crowd was roaring—we love a queen of darkness who gets to see the light.

9. “Bad Love” | Dehd

Is it crazy that a three-piece from Chicago wrote the year’s best beach song? You’d be forgiven for thinking so—but only if you’ve never seen June’s sapphire sky melt into Lake Michigan, stood cool in a Great Lake’s freshwater breeze. Dehd’s sound—weathered but hopeful, wise but not bitter—blooms from their Chicago roots, not in defiance of them. It’s a subtle difference from their Pacific-coast cousins, but an essential one.

8. “Being in Love” | Wet Leg

“What if Tegan and Sara, but more like Ween?” said no pop music boardroom exec ever. Turns out they were leaving millions on the table. Like illuminati hotties, another Earwyrms favorite, Wet Leg writes funny songs that still get to rip—and “Being in Love” better expresses what I once made too portentous: that falling in love can make you sick.

7. “You Are Every Girl to Me” | MJ Lenderman

There’s something about art that straddles old and new, like the perfect execution of an action movie. Rather than innovate, it hones and perfects. Asheville’s MJ Lenderman, like J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. before him, is a guitar master who covers his shredding with fuzzed-out irony. Like if William Carlos Williams had watched Jackass Forever, “You Are Every Girl to Me"is a modern, pedestrian portrait—both are masterpieces of 2022.

6. “Eternal” | Tourist

Blissful, thoughtful EDM that I put on every day to write. There are still days where I simply cannot stand words. I have too many filling my head already. But please, not silence—anything but silence! Which is how I got to spinning Tourist’s Inside Out almost eight hours straight every day. It’s, like, an enormous vibe. The whole thing is great, but “Eternal” is my favorite. Somehow, he makes synthesized strings sound like both vinyl scratches and jet engines at the same time.

5. “A Coat of Butterflies” | Kevin Morby

This is a Photograph is Kevin Morby’s ode to Memphis, a true American music capital. This is the home of Sun Records—Elvis and Johnny Cash—and, more importantly, Stax—Otis Redding and Isaac Hayes. Morby tapped session players from both. “A Coat of Butterflies” features drummer Mackaya McCraven—erstwhile drummer for Kamasi Washington—and opens with a field recording of the Mississippi, specifically the shores where Jeff Buckely drowned in a bout of drunken swimming. Morby’s delivers a beautiful elegy to both, and anyone who’s ever seen the mighty river or heard Buckley’s music will recognize in his arrangement the verdant force they share.

4. “The Plains” | Wilco

The Midwest’s ethos is that of self-pity. People will accept anything you say about the place, as long as it’s negative. Jeff Tweedy closes Wilco’s new double album with a guitar song that sounds like winking stars in a black and beautiful sky over plains. You can almost see the camera pan over corn fields. There’s sorrow, but it’s not sorrowful; there’s regret, but it’s not regretful. That’s the thing about a place full of nothing: maybe it’s no good, but there’s also no evil.

3. “Where the Light Used to Lay” | Yumi Zouma

I’ve put on many a new Yumi Zouma album in my years. I always enjoy them, but their catalog is a little more background than foreground, more passive than active. Which has its place! But it’s why, when I put on their newest, I was instantly pleased. I saw them this spring—it was one of their first times playing live—and I was shocked at how many new songs I could already recognize, how many melodies stuck before I knew their names. They keep getting better, and the lilting melody on the chorus of “Where the Light Used to Lay” is the sound of my summer.

2. “Step by Step” | Braxe + Falcon (feat. Panda Bear)

These two are French house pioneers, but what is it about Panda Bear? He’s got the Midas voice—one touch and a song is gold. I was driving down I-20 to help a friend move to a house next door when this song came on at golden hour. I had euphoria unlike anything I’d felt in five years. I was struck by one of those moments where mundane becomes profound—I couldn’t believe how every minute builds on the prior; how quickly my mood can change by the turning of my head; how a home becomes a home with nothing but time.

1. “The Place Where He Inserted the Blade” | Black Country, New Road

When you can’t stop thinking about someone, or you can’t get a song out of your head? That’s the same force, baby. An inner pull is immune to reason. It’s like a cellular magnet—like how it must feel when a bird flies south, or a moth to the moon, or a cat to the bath tub to sit like a little freak. That same pull keeps bringing me back to this album, stronger than any I’ve felt since Saint Cloud. It is a tour de force. Each song holds enormous catharsis, but none more so than “The Place Where He Inserted the Blade,” which starts with Irish Christmas piano chords and ends with a wailing saxophone sing-along. It’s operatic; it’s overwrought; it’s a gothic poem; it was made for me.