2. The Walker – Fitz and the Tantrums
3. Shut Up and Dance – Walk The Moon
4. So Much For The Afterglow – Everclear
6. Bullet With Butterfly Wings – Smashing Pumpkins
8. One Headlight – The Wallflowers
When I was in high school, Bringing Down the Horse was the one album absolutely everybody had, and it is a travesty that the girls putting together our senior yearbook chose something other than One Headlight as our class song senior year because it was the ONLY SONG THAT EVEN REMOTELY MADE SENSE. This is small town we-need-to-get-out-of-here angst at its melodical best, and Jakob Dylan should have been made a Millennial deity for this song. There’s got to be something better than in the middle.
9. Make You Feel My Love – Adele
10. Trouble – P!ink
12. The Crow & The Butterfly – Shinedown
13. Faithless – Social Distortion
14. After the Storm – Mumford & Sons
15. Lovely Day – Lit
Yes, this song is about getting high as soon as you wake up and living in your own world (as many Millennial hits are). Minus the drug connection, though, for me this song is my fresh start and my time in England in four minutes and six seconds. I was high on LIFE, man. My other world was special BECAUSE it was ordinary, but still different. A demonstrable break from what was before while I decided what came next.
16. Sharp-Dressed Man – ZZ Top
17. Chop Suey! – System of a Down
18. Polka Dots and Moonbeams – John Coltrane
19. Time in a Bottle – Jim Croce
20. Look On Down From the Bridge – Mazzy Star
21. Grey Sky Morning – Vertical Horizon
22. Hopeless Wanderer* – Mumford & Sons
This is co-song of the year for a number of reasons. The lyrics. The life to it. The variance between slow and calm and frantic and exuberant. The contemplation giving way to confidence. The way-too-much-fun had making that music video. This is all such a major part of what this year was, and represents the parts of joy.
24. The Night We Met* – Lord Huron
The flip to Hopeless Wanderer, and equally as important to understanding this year, is The Night We Met off of Lord Huron’s immensely satisfying album Strange Trails (note the connection to travels with this one too). This is all of the hard stuff, the loss, the wandering but with a sense of displacement rather than wonder. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, haunted by the ghost of you” hits on multiple levels, and the song gives me pause every time I hear it (when he started taking guitar lessons in 2017, this is also one of the first songs my spouse practiced, and practiced, and practiced to train his hands, so I mean it when I say this song was in the background the entire year).
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