The Retrographer
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The Retrographer, Issue 73 (1 0 0 2 0 2 0)

The Retrographer, Issue 73 (1 0 0 2 0 2 0)

December 30, 2020

The 100 best songs of 2020, top albums, other great music, and more

The Retrographer 73 (1 0 0 2 0 2 0)

LISTEN TO THIS PLAYLIST ON SPOTIFY OR YOUTUBE

Four years ago, the annual issue of this newsletter grasped for the bannister. A reality-show host who held the country in disdain was elected president. It seemed like a joke that came true, and in a way it was. Things seemed headed for a new, unknown kind of bad.

Today, we live in that new kind of bad. One in every thousand people in America have died from a pandemic, some denying its reality to their last breath succumbing to it. We’re lured into such misapprehension by media whose financial model rewards bombast instead of truthfulness. This bombast exploits the disappointments and broken promises, compounded generation over generation, toward a government staffed by representatives who benefit by making it fail. It exploits a politics and media that succeeds if we see one another in the worst light. Today, millions are quarantining at home, cut off from the outside world but by the very media that has distorted us to one another.

Artists are home with their instruments. They’re just people, feeling this pain and alienation too. The only difference between them and others is these feelings are crystallized in work which we may someday get to experience. Many are in an excruciating writer’s block; others are in renaissance. Only a fraction of their quarantine creation has made it into the world so far. Without shows to promote their music or scrape by a living, they’re suffering. But that suffering is going into their work. Their work will go out into the world. And it will make it here.

Many people will respond to the ugliness of this year with cynicism. For them, 2020 will show just how bad things are, how useless it would be to try to reverse it. Many think: this is broken, why try to fix it? But others see a broken thing and start fixing it before that’s what they realize they’re doing. That’s what artists do. They sit with a blankness and try to imagine what could be there. They ask how they can take what’s in them and make it apparent to others. They really succeed when whatever they were moved to make moves someone else, especially someone who they may never even meet in person. Someone who knows nothing about them and has no reason to care but encounters their work and feels different – maybe less alone, or wiser, or understood.

That was my story. Before I wrote music, or wrote about it, I was a listener, Music was like magic. When it stirred me I felt like a spell was being cast on my spirit. How could someone access me like this? Someone who didn’t know me? Someone who might have been dead before I was born? How do they make my heart ring like a tuning rod?

It became even more mystifying when I tried to write something myself: When I was 16, 19, 21 years old, late at night or in solitary moments during the day, I tried pairing chords with rhythm and melody and lyrics and they always came out like a cake that didn’t rise. I wanted to put my feeling into something that made me feel something back – maybe made someone else feel something too. Then one day I wrote something that surprised me, something I wanted to return to. I wrote more and more, year over year, until writing music became a way I processed my feelings. I had songs that made me feel sad, songs that made me feel happy, songs that made me feel free when I felt trapped. When my father died, writing music took on a new meaning: When I felt adrift in a dark sea of grief, I could peer into my instrument and try to find light. I peered and peered until I all that peering became an album. I put it out in a year when I wouldn’t be able to play it for anyone, when my means of connection were more limited than ever before.

Soon after I released it, I got a message on Instagram from someone I’d never met. It said:

“Hello Charlie Kaplan

I’m such a very big fan of your music man😭it touches me every moment I listen to it you inspire me with your lyrics and what you say you make me a better person and listening to some of your songs on your Project Sunday made me feel something special”

I remember my heart stopping while reading those words. Strangers have rarely aroused suspicion in one another like they did in 2020. People never had more of a reason to shy away, stay closed off, assume the worst. I made my music to find emotional resonance, but never imagined that would translate to anyone else, certainly someone I didn’t know. But even in the midst of such wariness, music – my music no less – still found its way around and through our moment’s minefield of deterrents and misgivings. This private moment of generosity both pulled me out from the hermitage I’d found myself buried in, and pulled me forward. The magic of music moved me once again, a timeless trick.

I listened to thousands of songs this year. I marked almost 800 off as consideration for this list, and now cut it down to 100. Some are funny, some are sad. Some tell the story of this year and some help you escape from it. No doubt that music will come out for years into the future describing the pain and privacy of 2020. But its alchemical resonance shimmered and hummed through the darkest leagues of this year, a flicker of light from one ship to another.