2023: A Retrospective Through Music
It’s that time of year again: a chance to look back through the lens of my top songs, linked to important or particularly memorable events that occurred throughout the year. This year can be summed up in one word: change. I finished my PhD, moved across the country, and started a new job; I often felt unbalanced, unmoored, and generally like I was free-falling through a series of highs, lows, and everything in between. This year challenged me to mature in ways I didn’t feel ready for, whether it was dealing with a family emergency through what should have been a week of celebration following my PhD defense, or dealing with a slow, frustrating injury following a trail wipeout. What were ultimately successes—defending my PhD, starting my first time role in a job I love—were marred by the sadness of saying goodbye to friends and making a major life adjustment with our move back to a city and away from the mountains I had come to love. I ultimately felt like I left this year better equipped to handle a menagerie of internal emotions, but I’m also feeling a little bittersweet.
And so, some songs that got me through it:
Horizons by Gus Dapperton
In a surprising twist, my most-played song of the year was by an artist I didn’t discover until May. Gus Dapperton opened for Hippo Campus in their Red Rocks concert, and though I hadn’t heard any of his songs beforehand, I left the concert as a newly dedicated fan. Dapperton’s most recent album, Henge, is a concept album inspired by the idea of “Manhattanhenge” — an event when the sun lines up perfectly with the avenues of New York. The album follows a person who becomes trapped in the New York City underworld and has to make it home before sunrise. I’m already a sucker for concept albums, and this premise—along with its fantastic music video—harkened back to the urban fantasy settings that had been a staple of my childhood imaginings. The chorus’s refrain of “old horizons fall to pieces” stuck in my brain like a thorn, serving as the bittersweet ending to my PhD.
Favorite lyrics:
You gave me more than the world
And I gave up on my wordYippie Ki Yay by Hippo Campus
I saw Hippo Campus live for the first time at the Red Rocks Amphitheater in May this year, and they certainly did not disappoint. As a band, they’ve been a bit of a sleeper hit for me; I probably have over twenty of their songs saved to my playlists, but rarely do I think of them as a true favorite of mine. This concert solidified them in my list of top modern bands, and this song perfectly encapsulates tumultuous series of emotions framed in the context of a Western, and I loved running to it all year.
Favorite western: Blazing Saddles
Free by Florence + The Machine
I consider it an act of fate that I discovered this song right around my PhD defense date. Florence Welch, man…she did it. The drum snare, the synth, the lyrics through the bridge—I loved everything about this song on my first listen; the fact that Bill Nighy plays the embodiment of her anxiety in the music video was just a bonus that I frankly did not deserve. The song is addictive, cathartic, and makes me want to dance around like a lunatic.
If you haven’t seen the video, go do yourself a favor and check it out.
Favorite lyrics:
But there is nothing else that I know how to do
But to open up my arms and give it all to youTonight (feat. Ezra Koenig) by Phoenix
Phoenix was one of the first bands I discovered in high school, after switching from the public school system to the strange fey underworld of a private boarding school. As a full-scholarship kid, I was perhaps a bit anal-retentive in my quest fit in, find friends, and appear ‘normal’ in this new environment. I vividly remember hanging out with some girls during one of the first few weeks of my freshman year, exchanging music recommendations; Phoenix was one of the bands I was introduced to, and Litsztomania became the soundtrack to my fall as I tumbled head-first, like Alice, into this new environment.
Parallel to this was, of course, Vampire Weekend. Darling of the late 00’s and early 10’s, Ezra Koenig became the avatar of my teenage years: zany, self-aware, prep-as-punk; I have trouble describing just what it meant to me to hear Vampire Weekend, this sound that somehow both captured and parodied life in an east coast prep school. And of course, the lyrics “I’ve had dreams of / Boston all of my life” from Ladies of Cambridge would follow me well into adulthood, as I can’t seem to escape this town just across the Charles river. Hindsight is of course 20/20, but it only makes sense that these two absolute powerhouses of indie rock would collaborate just in time for me to move back from the west. Tonight is a bop that combines Phoenix’s catchy base beats with Ezra Koenig’s lyrical witticisms, and it was perfect for the times.
Favorite line:
Now, I talk to myself and it's quite surprising
Epitaph by Hippo Campus
While it was released in 2017, I only discovered Epitaph by Hippo Campus this past year. There’s something haunting about the lyrics through this song; I don’t often imagine stories to go along with music, but this painted the most vivid picture for me, and maybe someday I’ll write about it. Something about the line “you've got tact and I've got bravado / I'm a ghost and you are a shadow” seemed to land like an arrow in my chest, and it captured a sense of nostalgia that became the undercurrent to my year.
Favorite lyrics:
I knew a girl once
There were splinters from her thoughts
Unless you knew a god
With kindness in her heartYou’re Gonna Go Far by Noah Kahan
At the risk of navel-gazing, this year presented me with many opportunities to look back and see how far I’ve come: at age 27, I finally left school after completing a terminal degree, I attended friends’ weddings, and I even got the chance to go back and give a talk at my high school, which gave me time to reflect on the place that I had called home for four years. There was a strange sort of melancholia there, a feeling of happiness for how far I’d come mixed with a sort of bittersweet nostalgia at how little had changed for that school and town, and how much had changed for me. This feeling follows me: I bring it with me to the town in Canada where my extended family still lives, and it haunts the back roads of New Jersey where I grew up.
Maybe its the crippling imposter syndrome, but I never know how to respond when people express that they’re proud of me, or that they’re so happy that I ‘made it.’ There’s something about entering what are objectively niche or expert fields—like aerospace engineering—that make it easy to feel like you’re nowhere near the best, or the most passionate, or the most dedicated person in the room, and so it can come as a cold shock when you finally talk to folks that are fully removed from those environments, and they treat you like you are the best or smartest person they know. They don’t know that you just got a paper rejection—to them you’re the one who studies rocket science, and so are smart by default. And this isn’t just conversations with old teachers or high school classmates; it happens weekly in phone calls with family. It’s an uncomfortable, isolating feeling, to live with one foot in each world, to be placed on this strange pedestal as the one who makes it from the small town or a ‘normal’ working-class family. I’m still figuring out how to internalize it.Favorite lyrics:
So pack up your car, put a hand to your heart
Say whatever you feel, be wherever you are
We ain't angry at you, love, you're the greatest thing we've lostSelf Love by Metro Boomin and Coi Leray
It’s no secret that I love the Spider-Verse movies. Where the first movie featured a bombastic soundtrack to the tune of What’s Up Danger and Elevate, Across the Spider-Verse dialed it back with a more intimate soundtrack that explored the complex relationships between family members and friends. I really like this song, and think everyone should go see the movie if they haven’t already.
Favorite Spider-Man: Miles Morales, duh.
Life on Mars? - Live in Glastonbury, 2000 by David Bowie
In 2012, I discovered three strangely coherent things in sequence: Rocky Horror Picture Show, Pink Floyd, and David Bowie. Of the three, Bowie has certainly had the most lasting impact on me, in everything from my music taste to my style of storytelling. This year, I discovered this live recording of a classic, and it managed to make one of my favorite Bowie songs even better. There’s just something about Bowie’s coy admittance of having had laryngitis, so he might not hit the notes, and then him going on to absolutely smash it that makes me smile every time I hear it.
Favorite Bowie Look: Alladin Sane
Lights (feat. Cruel Santino) by Gus Dapperton
I mentioned above that I was initially drawn to Gus Dapperton’s latest album, Henge, due to its framing as a concept album. However, I stayed because of Dapperton’s lyrics, and in particular the picture they painted of New York City. As a kid born and raised in the Garden State, I have a weird relationship to that place; I was only a 40 minute drive from one of the biggest, most well-known cities in the world, and yet my home town didn’t have its own grocery store. And so it existed as this absolute future, this other world where everyone went when they got out, where the possibilities were endless. It’s cliche, I know, but it’s real.
This song captures the fairy-tale version of the city that I love and have never really known.Favorite lyrics:
Sinister, remote, and stark
You always say you miss the stars
But when the lights come on in Central Park
It steals your heart, it steals your heartMarie Douceur, Marie Colère by Manon Hollander
And finally, a fun one! One of the highlights of this past year was getting to run the Marathon du Mont Blanc in Chamonix, France. I signed up for the race lottery in December of 2022, and was shocked when I actually got in; I had always dreamed of running the Alps, and while not quite ready or qualified to run the Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc, I felt like the marathon distance was the perfect place to start. I justified the trip as my own personal gift to myself after successfully defending my PhD, and so after six months of nonstop researching, writing, and terror, I got to run.
I discovered this song—a French version Paint it, Black by the Rolling Stones—after watching the latest John Wick movie (I know, I know, but it absolutely slaps over the Arc de Triomphe car chase scene). Turns out, it also makes for a great running soundtrack.
Favorite Alps Activity: Paragliding
Anyway, that’s all for this year. Stay tuned for some more personal writing in 2024!