Favorite Songs of 2018

As you will know from past years' lists, my favorite songs each year are often dominated by covers. This year is no exception.

It almost seems wrong to choose just one song from Kamasi Washington, and from his EP The Choice, at that, not even from Heaven and Earth, the follow up to The Epic, that critics called "masterful." Coming in at one album shorter than 2015's The Epic (double, rather than triple), Heaven and Earth is still epic-like, and I just haven't been able to settle into it properly yet. The Choice, which came out a week after the double album, with its 5 songs, 2 of them stunning covers, is easier to get one's arms around. That doesn't mean it's not still ambitious, though. The gorgeous "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" comes in at almost 10 minutes, and the vocals don't even drift in until over 2 minutes in. Languorous and sprawling, vulnerable and insistent, the song feels like it's breathlessly tangled up in the bed sheets.

It's been hard for me to listen to Chris Cornell's voice since he took his own life in May 2017. I was truly devastated when he died. For almost 3 decades songs like "Outshined" and "Fell on Black Days" reflected my own dark feelings, let me immerse myself in them ("down on my knees," as it were), and yet offered me hope that I could and indeed would get back "up on my feet again." Even in songs that did not explicitly address these issues, his voice howled and  growled and soared and soothed like no other. He really could "reach down and pick the crowd up." That he ultimately could not do this for himself was really hard to accept. So I haven't yet done a deep dive into the Chris Cornell compilation, but his cover of Prince/Sinead O'Connor's "Nothing Compares 2 U" has been a tender surprise, perhaps more so for its restraint. As he sings, he seems to once again be voicing my deepest feelings, only about his own absence from the world. "Like a bird without a song," indeed.


Tanya Tagaq is a Righteous Bad Ass whose voice has the power to rain down Retribution (incidentally one of my favorite albums of 2016). The vibrations of her growls, breaths, and wails carry both healing and destructive properties, and easily transmit everything from rage to orgiastic ecstasy. Above all, she cannot be ignored. She demands that we listen, see, feel, and ultimately act differently. In addition to her stunningly original music, her cover songs utterly transform The Pixies "Caribou" (on the 2014 album Animism) and Nirvana's "Rape Me" (on Retribution), which from her mouth become incantatory cries protesting the systematic oppression of Inuit culture and mourning violence against First Nations women. Her 2018 cover of Iron Maiden's metal epic about the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, "Run to the Hills," with Fucked Up's Damian Abraham, brings an urgent immediacy to what she calls Maiden's "colonization saga." As her website ominously states: "Just don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s all in the past."