Favorite Albums 2023

So much great music out there. Here are the ones I couldn't stop listening to.

These are the fifteen albums released during the last year that I loved the most, ranked in no particular order…

One need only listen to “Some Misty Morning”, a duet between Logan Ledger and the exquisite Erin Rae, to know that Ledger is one of the best singers working today. The thing is, every song on the album Golden State shows that off, over and over. This is a stellar collection that puts the emphasis on great music, period. Golden State is the kind of record you can play to carry you through the day.

The next time someone tells you that country music is dead tell them to listen to Brit Taylor’s Kentucky Blue (produced by Sturgill Simpson and David Ferguson). The fiddle leads much of the music throughout the record but the constant is Taylor’s knowing vocal delivery that reminds you of exactly what country music truly sounds like. Along the way she celebrates rural life, dogs, and love while offering countrypolitan heartbreak or critiques of mainstream country’s obsession with men who all sound alike. She even branches into country pop with “For a Night”, proving she can do it all. Brit Taylor is the real deal and I hope her audience continues to grow. This is not only one of my favorite albums of the year but also one of my favorite country albums in recent memory. To see why, just give the title track, “Kentucky Blue”, a listen.

I love everything about Boomerang Town by Jamiee Harris. So much that I have listened to it over and over, from beginning to end, ever since it came out. There’s the title track, a perfect meditation on the dreams of people who might be suspecting of having none at all. The empathy it takes to pull off a song like that shows up throughout this lovely album, often in songs that are heartbreaking—but the kind of heartbreaking that is also a balm. That’s best articulated in “How Could You be Gone?”, a track that deeply explores all the layers of deep grief in a way that few other pieces of art have managed to do. There’s the clever wordplay and foot-tapping tempo of “Fair and Dark-haired Lad” (a song I can’t help but to sing along with), the complex poetry of “Good Morning, My Love” and the bloom of hope and joy found in “Love is Gonna Come Again”. Boomerang Town begs—and deserves—to be heard in order as a complete piece of art. It is such a beauty.

I wrote about this album for Salvation South this fall and I’ve been listening to it ever since. In my feature, “Voice Like a Church Bell”, I spend time talking about that incredible voice and her precise songwriting, as well as the lovely production of Freeman’s latest album, Do You Recall. If you’re not already a fan of Freeman, get on board. All the songs could be documents of the small-town, working-class life that is rarely seen in contemporary media. In our interview Freeman told me “People have certain ideas of what it means to be Appalachian and I just want to be not the example but one example of what that looks like, so that’s what I wrote about on this record.” She certainly accomplished that, and much more. Listen to the title track here.

Weathervanes, Jason Isbell’s sixth studio collaboration with the 400 Unit, is among his best three records ever. As I wrote in my feature, “Jason Isbell Is Finding His Purpose”, for Time back in June, the album operates as a collection of precise short stories, full of imagery and sensory details: a woman “in the moonlight, digging up the garden bed,” “a warm wind blowing in the laundromat” with “a young man crying in a cowboy hat,” a landscape where “the highway’s straight and night’s so still.” The songs are full of desperation, beauty and wit, populated with everyday Americans fighting tremendous battles but also living lives of complex joys and sorrows. I would also argue that Weathervanes contains some of Isbell’s best vocal performances, especially on the plaintive “Middle of the Morning”, which is one of my favorite songs of the year, and “King of Oklahoma”, which has quickly become a fan favorite. This is an album you should own a physical copy of.

Abby Hamilton has become known as a lively and mesmerizing live performer and has certainly kept the roads hot lately opening for acts such as Kelsey Waldon and Tyler Childers. But recordings capture her mesmerizing vocals and lyrics beautifully, too. As much as I love seeing her live I love spending time alone with her recordings so I can hear all of the nuances of her singing and her songwriting. #1 Zookeeper (of the San Diego Zoom) is her debut full-length album and it announces a vital new talent, packed with thoughtful and infinitely singable tracks. One of my favorites is the haunting ballad “Soccer Field”, which might be described as Phoebe Bridgers meets Bruce Springsteen but I think it’s more accurate to say it’s completely Abby Hamilton (just listen to all the emotion in her delivery of the line “Just because it wasn’t real to you/doesn’t mean it’s not real to me”.)

You’d be hard pressed to find a more positive and profound album than the latest one from Hiss Golden Messenger, Jump for Joy. The upbeat sound is sometimes deceptive—in the title track the narrator happily sings “Gimme apocalypse” against piano and drums that would sound at home in a honkytonk or a fundamentalist church either one. This is a deeply intelligent concept record that demands your full attention from one of our best contemporary songwriters and one of the tightest bands around.

Miles Miller is one of my favorite new singers and songwriters and his debut album, Solid Gold, is—no pun intended—about as solid a collection of songs as you’re liable to find. His voice reminds me of the suave crooners of the 1980s like Steve Wariner, Lee Roy Parnell, or Dan Seals, and his songs are built to last. There’s so many great one tracks that it’s hard to name a favorite, so I’ll tell you my top five: the title track, “Highway Shoes”, “A Feeling Called Lonesome”, “Don’t Give Away Love” and “In a Daze”. Do not miss out on this one.

Some of you may be surprised to find this one on my list but the truth is that it is one of the best albums of the year, with four of my favorite tracks released this year— “River”, “Used to be Young”, “Flowers”, and “Thousand Miles”. It makes for a powerful collection from one of my favorite pop singers.

Tommy Prine first had me when I heard the great line “You remind me/of every single dogwood tree” in the title track for his debut album, This Far South. The thing is, every song has at least one line like that, a line that works so perfectly with wordplay or embedded rhyme or imagery, that I get drawn into this album over and over. It’s been one of my constant plays this year. I love it from beginning to end. Standout tracks for me besides the title track are “I Love You Always” and “Elohim”.

There’s a lot about death and rebirth on Zach Russell’s debut, Where the Flowers Meet the Dew. Sometimes these are delivered in waltzes like “I Thought I Was the Trees” and other times in a rockabilly/funk delivery on a number like “Born Again”. Russell’s music isn’t easy to categorize and each track opens a whole new universe of sound and thought, which makes the whole thing even better. Just witness the leap from “Playing House” to “Take Me Back to Tennessee”. Each track is so expansive that it’s hard to believe this is his first album.

The Returner is Allison Russell’s second album and it’s a celebration of survival that serves as a pointed sequel to her 2021 solo debut, Outside Child, which focused on trauma. Despite being joyful, The Returner still tackles big issues while also expanding Russell’s sound to a more epic canvas. This is one to listen to with your earbuds to get the full experience of the soaring string section on the title tracks, the precision of “Demons”, or the layered vocals on the spectacular closing track, “Requiem”. One of the main things I love about these songs is how often they go places I am not expecting.

One of my favorite albums of recent years was I Walked With You A Ways by Plains, which came out last year. Plains is Waxahatchee and Jess Williamson. The latter made one of my favorite albums of this year, which No Depression wrote about here. I love the songs, every one of them, but for me it’s mostly about the way Williamson sings them. She sings with such pining and deep emotion that she always makes me feel something. My favorite song from this album is “God in Everything”. If you’ve read my novel Southernmost I think you’ll see some similarities between her thoughts on the Divine and the way Justin in my book creates his own theology.

If you know much about me you probably know that Tyler Childers is a collaborator and friend of mine, so you might think this is a biased pick. I truly believe I am being objective when I tell you that this was one of my favorite albums of the year despite my closeness to it. This isn’t even because working on the video for one of its tracks—“In Your Love”—earned me a Grammy nomination along with the other producers (the ceremony is February 4—wish us luck). It’s simply because this is a great collection of songs, from the barn-burning opening track to the superb covers of “Space and Time” by S.G. Goodman and “Help Me Make It Through the Night” by Kristofferson, to everything in between. It's also important to note that the Food Stamps absolutely tear it up on this album, proving they are one of the best bands working today. If you haven’t seen them live, try your best to do so. I wrote about the album for The Bitter Southerner in my feature “The Evolution of Tyler Childers” and I hope you might give that a read. Here’s the Footnotes video for “In Your Love”—a sort of Pop-Up video version where I give you behind the scenes information, such as why that wedding ring quilt is so important, and much more.

I don’t usually put Christmas records on my favorite albums of the year lists but Happy Holiday! by My Morning Jacket is one of the best and will now be dragged out at the beginning of the holiday season every year. From the perfect cover of The Band’s underrated “Must be Christmas Tonight” to originals like “Feelin’ Sorry” or a “snowy” cover of their own classic “Wonderful (The Way I Feel)”, there’s not a bad track in the bunch. The perfect way to close the year from one of my favorite bands of all time.