The Fifteenth Annual Jaybee-bies: Well, THAT Sure Sucked

Executive Summary:

2025 was everything we feared it would be, and more.

• Personal: I'm getting over (I hope) an illness.
• Music/Personal: Due to the above, I did the world a huge favor and stopped "playing" guitar for a while. The world took no notice. So I had no choice but to start again. This time with a focus on having fun. You've been warned.
• Music: Per my last post, I'm feeling more alienated than ever from the current music, probably due to thoughts on mortality. Jazz, Blues, and Oldies were great, as usual. Otherwise, I kept looking for the weirdos. Thank god I found some.
• Politics: After a long year, I'm seeing a little bit of daylight. How about you?

Humans:

Best:

• Some judges
• A very few congresspersons
• Janet Mills
• Many, many others who, in my current state, I just can't bring to mind. Feel free to write in your favorites.

Worst:

Some old winners (Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Jesse Waters) are working extra hard at being awful just to keep up with the new kids:

• All the tech bros with no balls
• All the media outlet owners who really don't give a shit about media
• Elon Musk
• Laura Loomer 
• Nick Fuentes (do I really have to point this out?)
• Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas 
• ICE
• Mike Johnson
• Pam Bondi
• Stephen Miller

Best Books:

I managed to read some books this year, none of which changed my life, but many that taught me things, some of which I might have been better off not knowing. I hope it's all made me a better person.

• Peter the Great by Robert Massie - Great Russian history. I see Adam Driver in the title role. 
• The Age of Revolution 1789-1849 by EJ Hobshawm - A tad (or two or three) drier than Massie's book, but it's got such a grasp of the entire era, it's worth it.
• The Killing Fields of East New York by Stacy Horn - History on a much smaller scale. Not to worry, there's still plenty of evil here to go around.
• The Family by Ed Sanders - Just some light reading before tackling Infinite Jest.
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion - Even less sixties nostalgia than The Family.
• Small Town Talk by Barney Hoskyns - Even less sixties nostalgia than Bethlehem.
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace - I read it on my tiny iPhone SE, which took nearly all summer. And as I did with Gravity's Rainbow, I ended up frustrated, annoyed, and wanting to read it again, maybe this time with a highlighter.
• The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin - Chuck D patiently explains it all to us. Great first line: "Listen up, motherf*ckers."

Best Movies:

• Wake Up, Dead Man
• Okay, Superman

I don't even remember if I saw anything else. I simply have to get out more!

Best TV:

I was stingy with my time this year, so I was reluctant to commit to an entire series. Mike Schur is a safe bet, though:

• A Man on the Inside

I simply must stay in more!

Best Concerts:

Do the 40th anniversary screenings of Stop Making Sense and Clue count? (Answers: Yes and No)

Music Awards:

Most Work (But Worth it): 

   Can

Most Work (And Possibly Not Worth It): 

   Luckily, nothing this year.

Most Surprising (and Not Necessarily in a Good Way): 

   Heartworms

Best Nostalgia:

   Louis in London

Best Artist:

   Cindy Lee

Best Albums of My Year:

1. Cindy Lee: Diamond Jubilee (2024) - A dark time, indelibly stamped by this odd, lonely, beautiful record.
2. Handsome Family: In the Air (2000) - Cindy Lee swapped for Johnny Cash, the cold tundra swapped for the country, where everything is Very Normal. Right.
3. Duke Ellington/Charles Mingus/Max Roach: Money Jungle (1962) - Seemingly effortless group creation on the fly.
4. CMAT: EURO-COUNTRY (2025) - Containing great tunes, great singing, and sheer gusto.
5. Lester Young with the Oscar Peterson Trio (1952) - Improvisational genius improvising away, accompanied by a crack trio, none of whom are exactly slouches either.
6. Hurray for the Riff Raff: The Past is Still Alive (2024) - This simple, straightforward country rock album patiently waited for me to catch up to it. I feel so dumb!
7. John Coltrane: Crescent (2024) My Coltrane sweetspot appears to be just before he takes off for the stratosphere. An excellent intro to his work.
8. Geese: Getting Killed (2025) This one gets extra credit for conceptual integrity.
9. Adrienne Lenker: Bright Future (2024) - Oh so fragile and yet it outlasted other, more "muscular" records.
10. Otis Redding: Dictionary of Soul (1966) - Of all his not-quite-great albums, this one is probably the best.

Honorable Mention: The Pretty Things, Oklou, The Housmartins, Waxahatchee, Iggy, Dijon, and Louis Armstrong

Best Compilations:

1. Slim Harpo: The Best of...

2. Big Joe Turner: The Very Best of... 

3. Little Richard: The Georgia Peach

The Album I Listened To Most but Had the Least to Say About It Due to Density (Mine, not the music's.):

 Boards of Canada: Music Has the Right to Children

Songs:

• Some of the best songs I heard this year can be found here. It's a weirdly folk/country/hard rock hybrid. Good luck!
• And since Cindy Lee is not on Spotify, here's a link to hear the entire album. I recommend you play it really early, or really late:

Conclusions:

I've been listening differently this year. Circumstances persuaded me to look to the past in hopes of finding something timeless. So I took my eye off the new and the shiny. A well rounded person would do both.

So then, how could you, dear reader, gain any useful knowledge about this year? You're busy, you want to have fun. Why am I dragging you to the old abandoned mine shafts? It's always been the conundrum of my approach. 

The other issue is ranking some new records against many that have stood the test of time. It's almost as though the new music doesn't belong on the list at all. But I'd rather think of it as how I feel about these records right now as opposed to for all eternity.

And yet, on Bluesky, I'm seeing more and more folks mixing the old and the new on their lists of books and records in the name of describing the year they had. As the inventor of this approach, I approve.

The circumstances I mentioned above pulled me away from playing guitar for a while. Time was looking more and more limited, and I decided listening to actual pros was a better use of it than playing mediocrely (yes, I just made that word up). I fight the same war on the reading/writing front. Why write a word when there are so many great books to read? I don't know, but I will anyway.

I eventually drifted back to theh guitar, ignoring the voice asking me what the point was to trying to get better at this point. Then Son Michael bought me a new guitar - a nice electric one I really have no business playing. But Mike said I had a rough year and should "have some fun", whatever that is.

On the real-life front, I've gotten past my horror, or at least compartmentalized it. Elvis C was wrong, you know. One can be disgusted by events, but given how many people get hurt, there's never a justification for feeling merely amused.

Have a great new year anyway.

Sotto Voci

I Kind of Like Lucy

                  

I Like Adrienne a Lot

       

I've covered a lot of female artists lately, and while I like most and love some, Mrs. Jaybee is lukewarm overall. She doesn't like the ones who sing with a "girly" voice, and wishes they would "sing like grown women."

I could probably put all of these artists on a spectrum - starting with Phoebe Bridgers and ending with Bessie Smith, with Chappell Roan, Carly Rae Jepsen, Olivia Rodrigo, Angel Olsen, Sandy Denny, Kasey Musgraves, the Beths, Alvvays, the Illuminati Hotties, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, to name just a few, order them by girly-voice-ness, and find the dividing line between acceptable and not.

But it's not that simple. What about all the other pertinent qualities? Songwriting obviously matters.  (Mrs. Jaybee has grudgingly come around on Joni Mitchell.) As do many other factors, each of which should be weighed based on its importance and pertinence. (At this point, friends from work would recognize a certain look in my eyes and say, There goes Jaybee starting another spreadsheet...) But really, how dare I think I can reduce my wife's taste, nuanced and thoughtful as it is, into a two-dimensional grid?

I'd sooner do that for my taste, which, come to think of it, would save us all a lot of time in the long run. Instead of writing rambling, nonsensical blog posts, I would simply publish my grid once, and upon hearing new music, indicate its coordinates on said grid and give a score. And when I don't like said score, muck with the numbers until I do. Easy and logical, right? 

The thing about spreadsheets is that they encourage my tendency to postpone actual thinking. Now I hate to think as much as the next guy, but sometimes it just can't be avoided. I could lie, I guess, but I'm bad at it. It's one thing to write something that makes no sense, which can be construed as being unintentional. But it would be worse to write what I don't mean, especially when you, dear reader, can tell.

So perhaps it's better to focus on outcomes. 

To a point.

Anyway, both Dacus and Lenker have distinctive voices. Not strong, mind you, but you sure do know who is singing right away.

Lucy Dacus: Home Video (2021)

Recently, while listening to Boygenius, Mrs Jaybee and I agreed that Lucy Dacus (below) had a lovely, deep voice. One would only naturally want to hear more of it. 

Alas, like Emmylou Harris before her, Dacus is a much better backup singer than lead.

Her lyrics, though - and there are lots of them - are quite good, and worth delving into. It's just her voice doesn't break through quite enough to make them front and center. 

I don't hear anything wrong with this record, but after having spent a couple of weeks just trying to hear it, I'm not sure I've heard anything exactly right, either. And it's that very voice that's keeping me from hearing the melodies, if there are any.

Mrs. Jaybee originally liked what she heard, but after about a half dozen listens, agrees with me - a rarity - that it all sounds the same. But thank you, Ms. Dacus, for contributing to our marital accord.

I hope I'll get to revisit this again, at which time I'll note an excellence that slipped past me this time around.

B

PS: Okay, okay, I figured it out. The first problem is that many of Dacus's songs are melodically similar. The second is that you have to play this loud to make out the differences. It is thus, Pretty Good.

B+

Adrienne Lenker: Bright Future (2024)

On another co-listening occasion, this time a Big Thief CD, Mrs. Jaybee may have told me to never play it again. I don't quite (want to) remember. 

Adrienne Lenker is Big Thief's lead singer and songwriter.  Together, they've made several records, one of which I love and another I wish I liked more. The former provides a perfect musical accompaniment to her voice, while the latter lays bare when things don't match as well.

One can't accuse Lenker of a gloss, though. Her voice is so fragile, you're afraid she's going to emotionally collapse mid-song. Further, she typically chooses minimal accompaniment for her songs, which could just a consequence of doing a solo album to begin with. The first song almost doesn't qualify as one, but she persists, and by the end, you believe it actually does. 

And all the ones that follow more than qualify.

A-