Number 1: Matthew Sweet - Devil With the Green Eyes

Before I begin, I should say that what I've learned from this little exercise is that perhaps I ought to try to listen to a bit more current music rather than things released years, even decades ago. Maybe I'll start listening to Radio 6 or buying Mojo magazine or something.

So the song I've played most this year is from 1993. In many ways Matthew Sweet should be one of my favourite artists - I love that jangly Byrds and Big Star influenced power pop sort of thing that he specialises in. He has also collaborated with the Jayhawks, one of my favourite bands of all time, and I once saw him live when he was part of a short-lived supergroup called The Thorns.

Yet each time I tried listening I came away thinking that it was nice enough, but nothing really to make me put it on again. Funnily enough I have the same sense of not liking his work as much as I expected to with the other Matthew Sweet, the historian and author of Inventing the Victorians.

This year I have given the musical Matthew Sweet yet another whirl in a bid to find out what it is I'm missing and I have warmed to him a bit more, in particular the 1991 album Girlfriend is consistently good and some of the songs on the Time Capsule best of compilation are very listenable. But nothing has compared to Devil With the Green Eyes, which I have listened to over and over again, this year, often hitting play again after the song has ended. 

With its haunting melody and guitar intro, distinctive use of harmony and background vocal, and dark lyrics about the destructive nature of jealousy, this is an awesome song that has been the runaway winner of my personal listening chart for 2024. The version I've linked to features Richard Lloyd from Television, who contributes a great closing guitar solo.

Number 2: Vigilantes of Love - On To Bethlehem

I take a further turn into obscurity today, albeit again with an artist who really deserves to be much better known. In many ways the best songwriter you've never heard of.

Vigilantes of Love, whose name was taken from a New Order song, was a vehicle for singer-songwriter Bill Mallonee. He at least started out under the alternative Christian music label and the lack of commercial success might stem from him having been too secular for the Christian market and yet too Christian for the secular market. 

And yet he has clearly had some mainstream affirmation, Emmylou Harris contributed vocals to one Vigilantes song, while Peter Buck out of REM co-produced an early album, and he has been named in one list of 100 best living songwriters.

He has also perhaps been too prolific, putting out around 50 albums in a career of about 35 years and while each one that I've heard has its high points, it can begin to sound a bit samey and there hasn't been much stylistic evolution. So one Vigilantes of Love or Bill Mallonee solo album can sound much like another.

Yet he has been a consistently very good songwriter and sometimes an outstanding one. Two albums from the 1990s, Killing Floor and Audible Sigh really deserve to be hailed as masterpieces. The review of the former that I've linked to describes their style as 'trying to get the biggest, most aggressive sound they can while using acoustic string instruments almost exclusively... a terrific set of Power Folk.' This seems as good a description as any of the Vigilantes sound..

This song is from a kind of outtakes album from the Audible Sigh album, 'Cross the Big Pond, recorded in 1999 in Cheltenham, apparently. This may at one level be considered a Christian song, but is also about soldiering on through adversity and looking positively to the future. Despite the title this isn't really a seasonal song, and it's one I listened to more in Lent than Advent.

Still, please listen and then explore further the Vigilantes of Love/Mallonee back catalogue at Bandcamp.

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.