Number 3: Felice Brothers - Crime Scene Queen

Around 20 years, there were two bands I heard about via music magazine sampler CDs and whose work I started to follow and by one route or another acquire their music as it was released. One was the Decemberists and the other the Felice Brothers. Both were very distinctive musical styles and lyrics that made them not really like anyone else. Colin Meloy from the Decemberists sounded as if he had swallowed a thesaurus from the extensive and arcane vocabulary appearing in his songs, which also had unusual subject matter, songs about pirates, people being swallowed by whales and the like. Ian Felice used a lot of quirky wordplay, a bit Dylanesque but more playful. Both had a penchant for story songs.

As I no longer kept abreast of the charts or any other measures of popularity I never really knew which of the two was the more commercially successful. If anything the Decemberists seemed more likely to be the niche act and the Felice Brothers stronger candidates for mainstream success.

So I was surprised when seeing the latter at Islington Assembly Hall a couple of years back that they said this was a relatively large venue for them, and they normally play bars. The Decemberists by contrast have had hit records and perform at much bigger venues.

So this is leading to saying The Felice Brothers really do deserve to be better known. While they released a couple of fine albums early in their career, Tonight at the Arizona and a 2008 self-titled one, subsequent releases have been more inconsistent with occasional style changes that didn't quite work. But their 2022 record From Dreams To Dust is I believe truly outstanding album which I would encourage anyone who likes music in the broadly Dylanesque style to listen to. It ought to be regarded as a classic,

This year's long player, Valley Of Abandoned Songs is a more low key offering. As the title suggests it is a collection of songs that didn't quite fit on other albums, although I think all have been recorded afresh. But this is by no means an album of B-sides and rejects.

Crime Scene Queen is the opening track, a pretty good representation of what the Felice Brothers do. The addition of bassist and backing vocalist Jesske Hume a few years ago has brought another dimension to their music. This is also my top song that has actually been released in 2024.

Number 4: Bruce Cockburn - Closer To The Light

Bruce Cockburn has long been an artist I feel that I should like more than I actually do. He ticks all the boxes: sort of folk rock style singer-songwriter who writes intelligent and thoughtful lyrics. Yet I have never quite taken him to my heart. I listen to an album, think it's pretty good but then don't go back to it. Part of the problem is that I found some of his political songwriting in the 1980s overly didactic and dogmatic. (Don't get me wrong, as a fan of Bob Dylan and Neil Young I hardly object to political songwriting but I want to be moved rather than hectored.)

This year, though, I decided to give him another whirl, in particular his mid-1990s albums Dart To The Heart and The Charity Of Night. Both have a political as well as a personal dimension, but are less direct and in your face than his previous work, and the more rewarding for that. I've only just realised that both these albums were produced by T-Bone Burnett, which probably helps explain why I like them so much. Closer To The Light is an elegy to Cockburn's friend the songwriter Mark Heard who died tragically young at the age of 40 in 1992. I hope to write more about Heard another time, but this is a quietly powerful song that I ended up playing over and over.

Number 5: John Hiatt - Through Your Hands

John Hiatt is hard to categorise as an artist. He seemed to come out of the New Wave movement and could have been seen as an American Elvis Costello. But then he also seemed to be part of the Americana, new country thing and a bit like a rockier version of Steve Earle.

I suppose, though genres shouldn't matter. His best and most successful albums Bring the Family and Slow Turning were hardly off my turntable (or actually tapedeck) in the late 1980s. But then the quality of his albums dropped abruptly it seemed and I allowed myself to be influenced by poor reviews into not buying.

Because I did listen to him so much back then his work had laid fallow in my music app, but this year I have had a revival of interest leading me to listen to things I missed before. I don't know if this quite counts as a duet as the vocal contributions are unequal, but the lines sung by the Innocence Mission's Karen Peris really make the song.

While others in my list this year have been more nostalgic, this is looking positively to the future - a kind of pep talk from the angels.

Number 6: Pernice Brothers (featuring Neko Case) - I Don't Need That Anymore

Now I'm back on the more familiar ground of indie, Dylan-influenced music that I think of as the sort of thing I listen to.

Despite the moniker, the Pernice Brothers are really a vehicle for Joe Pernice, a songwriter who has previously recorded as a solo artist and as the Scud Mountain Boys and Chappaquick Skyline (an album under the latter name being described by one critic as 'terminally-depressed orchestral pop musings', which sums it up quite nicely).

The fact that he wrote a song about BS Johnson made me take to Pernice immediately, whatever he happened to be calling himself at any given time and he can be depended on for thoughtful, intelligent lyrics even if all a little downbeat. I see the line-up has at some point included James Walbourne, who is the current lead guitarist of The Pretenders as well as Richard and Linda Thompson's son-in-law. This only increases my positive feelings towards the band.

This year's album Who will you believe maintains the consistently high standards of his output, with this song, featuring the excellent Neko Case, being its outstanding track. I can only find an audio track but this is one worth savouring without the intrusion of video.

Number 7: Sailor - The Old Nickelodeon Sound

Writing up this list is bringing home to me quite how untypical many of the songs I've listened to the most this year are of my usual preferences. Perhaps the realisation that I am not far off 60 years old has made me feel wistful and nostalgic and led me to play tracks that nurse that sentiment.

At the start of this year, I would have been shocked to think I had listened to anything by Sailor, let alone that one of their songs might be among my top listening material this year. I was vaguely aware of their 1976 hit Girls Girls Girls, which seemed insufferably naff not to mention off-puttingly sexist even by the standards of the time it was recorded. I assumed that they were one of these artificial, put-together groups such as were formed to enter the Eurovision Song Contest.

So I am not sure why I even clicked when the Youtube algorithm suggested one of their songs to me - perhaps it was incredulity. But having done so I discovered they have a more interesting history and quirky output than I had imagined.

I'm not sure quite how much of this online biography is true, but evidently they have some kind of curious back story. At least they clearly were a proper group and while Girls Girls Girls remains a troubling listen, in the context of their wider output it seems more a reinterpretation of music hall style than boorish sexism. 

Their trademark was an instrument they called the Nickelodeon, a two-person keyboard, described as comprising 'a custom-designed all-purpose machine, the constituents of which were two upright pianos, two synthesizers, mini organs and glockenspiels all mechanically linked and contained within a wooden frame'. I have a weakness for such quirkiness so having clicked I was converted.

At least two of their members went on to interesting post-Sailor careers, the lead singer and chief songwriter Georg Kajanus, who himself seems to have an exotic background, went on to produce classically tinged electronic music with a band called Data, while one of the nickelodeon players, Phil Pickett, later played keyboards for Culture Club and co-wrote Karma Chameleon. (I've triangulated the latter point enough to think it is true not a Wikipedia editing prank.)

Anyway this song has chimed with my mood this year and climbed my personal chart. More typical examples of my musical taste will start again tomorrow.

The video is not of the best quality but I think conveys the spirit of the song and the band better than linking to an audio track.

Number 8: Justin Hayward - Forever Autumn

My theme of nostalgic and retrospective listening in 2024 continues.

I never really got into the Moody Blues, nor indeed musical versions of pioneering science fiction novels, but remember this coming out when I was starting to take an interest in the charts as a 12-year-old in 1978. This was before I realised that my peer group would disapprove of my liking such stuff and that I should keep quiet about it.

Anyway as the leaves began to fall this year I compiled a playlist of autumn-related songs, including this one that I ended up playing over and over as if to atone for years of denial. The video is not of the original but a live version recorded last year with Justin Hayward's current band. It includes an introduction in which he relates the story of how he came to record the song.

Number 9: Susan Fassbender & Kay Russell - Twilight Café

This is one that an algorithm suggested, possibly influenced by my recent listening choices of obscure 1970s and 80s artists.

I was surprised I had never heard of this, because back in 1981 when it reached Number 21, I did follow the charts and watch Top of the Pops etc. Not having heard the song before nor even heard of the artists I looked them up to read the sad story that Fassbender committed suicide in 1991. 

It seems that although this song made the charts and led to television appearances, the next two singles failed to repeat this success, the record company decided not to go ahead with an album and Fassbender and Russell left the music industry and started families.

That seems to have been the way it was back then. Nowadays, when recorded music makes so little money, musicians earn their living by performing live and finding other income streams. Back then live performance was done first to obtain a recording contract and afterwards to promote records. Touring was a loss-making activity. So presumably after this brief brush with fame, there was no choice but to head back into normal life.

It seems that many years later the act's surviving member, Kay Russell, collected demos and arranged for them to be released. I would highly recommend it, but I wonder if their music didn't belong to any obvious style or genre and their songwriting output was quite varied contributed to their not achieving sustained commercial success.

Whichever way, there does seem to be some online recognition of their output, including a Facebook Fan Page, which appears to be run with involvement of Fassbender's family. Sadly, Kay Russell died earlier this year and I can't help but wonder whether that unhappy news might have been what pushed this track up the algorithm and on to my screen.

Anyway I have enjoyed discovering and listening to the song, yet in view of what was to come the second verse feels all too poignant:

The music grabs me, spins me round and around
My spirit soars, no longer smashed to the ground
The cares and worries of a busy day
Just slide across me as I start to play