Rob Sheffield’s Top 25 Songs of 2019

Would it really be a perfect Seventies L.A. album without an end-of-the-world song? Of course not, so Lana spends her great big ballad blowing margarita-flavored kisses as it all slides into the ocean. (Or goes up in flames. She’s not picky.) Goodbye to Long Beach, Malibu, Dennis Wilson, Kanye, Whitney, Bowie. Farewell California and every love song ever written there. Good night to the rock & roll era. Bye-bye love. Goodbye small hands, goodbye small heart. Melt on, MacArthur Park. It’s like the old joke from noir novelist Ross MacDonald: “Nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn’t cure.” Somebody tell Warren Zevon the mystics and statistics were right. Someone take Donald Fagen back to his old school. ’Night, Joni. (Just kidding — she’ll outlive us all, just for spite.) Los Angeles Plays Itself, and re-plays itself. Then as those final piano notes fade out, you start the damn song again, because of course you do. Welcome to L.A. The culture is lit, and if this is it, she had a ball. What a song.

A daylight song that also feels like a midnight song. “Lights Up” has a discodelic groove steeped in psychedelic Eighties R&B, capturing the moment where you step into the light and recognize yourself — even if the light is just coming from the disco ball in your heart.

“Why are men great until they gotta be great?” — the eternal question. “Truth Hurts” originally dropped in 2017, but went into hibernation until this spring, when it blew up in the instant-classic Netflix comedy Someone Great, starring Gina Rodriguez as a Rolling Stone writer. Like so many people watching it Easter weekend, I heard Lizzo drop that opening line — “I just took a DNA test, turns out I’m 100 percent that bitch” — and Googled to see where the hell this song came from before the scene was even over. “Truth Hurts” became a streaming sensation and has fired up the radio ever since. (Because of a movie about music critics, made by a music critic — how about that?) “Good as Hell” became a smash as well, putting Lizzo in the enviable position of an artist who’s so far ahead of her time, she can watch the world catch up with what she was doing a couple years ago.

How strange this song is just under three minutes, yet Taylor manages to pack in so many brilliant twists. “He looks so pretty like a devil” vs. “He looks up grinning like a devil” is the most divisive Swiftian lyric controversy since she sang the one about the Starbucks lovers. (Team Pretty all the way here.) Having spent two minutes and 40 seconds outdoing herself in every single trick she can think of, Taylor realizes the song needs one more absolutely perfect moment, so she screams one of the pithiest lines she’s ever written: “I love you, ain’t that the worst thing you ever heard?” Aaaaand scene. She turns “Cruel Summer” into her Springsteen song — “I snuck in through the garden gate, every night that summer just to seal my fate” — as if the girl in every Seventies Springsteen song, the one who ties her hair back in a long white bow and sneaks out to see him, gets to star in a song of her own.

An Atlanta teenager sleeping on his sister’s floor spends $30 to lease a sample of a forgotten Nine Inch Nails deep cut from a Dutch producer, turns it into a hip-hop country goth-trap song, slaps on a cowboy hat, gets Miley’s dad on board, comes out while the song is still at Number One, and rides until he can’t no more. Just beautiful. It’s like the whole American music tradition was all building up to “Old Town Road.” As 12-year-old Mason Ramsay put it, if you ain’t got no giddy up, giddy out of his way.

A quiet little two-minute song that stings so deep, you wish it lasted two hours. Ellen Kempner strums her guitar and sings about encountering that person you see only in your dreams — maybe an ex, maybe a dead loved one, maybe a lost friend you’ll never get back. She doesn’t handle it well, even though she’s asleep, and makes a big teary mess of the whole scene, with the hilariously deadpan chorus: “I’m sorry that you had to see that.” I don’t think I’ve ever played this once without immediately playing it again.

The Fifth Harmony star breaks it off and breaks loose, with a little help from co-writer Ariana Grande. Bonus points for her athletic tour de force in the video — Normani dances like she’s trying to win an Olympic medal, an Oscar, a World Series and a Nobel Prize for physics at the same time.

Mannequin Pussy’s Marisa Dabice sets out to write the ultimate punk-rock breakup song, from the band’s stellar Patience. She staggers home drunk after yet another wasted night, trying to numb her pain, until she finally loses her cool and makes that late-night call she vowed she’d never make: “I forgot we were broken up/I still love you, you stupid fuck.” Who among us, right?

Megan was the official boss of Hot Girl Summer, but she also helped make it the cruelest summer on record with “Cash Shit.” The DaBaby verse is a riot, especially when Megan gets him in a headlock, but it’s her show — her money’s so thick, she walks with a limp. Keep it hot, Megan.

From the tribute album Approaching Perfection: A Tribute to D.C. Berman, recorded and released quickly in the wake of David Berman’s death, by a semi-random bunch of friends and/or admirers who are grieving and sound like it. Dean Wareham sings the best and weirdest tune from Berman’s new Purple Mountains album, the kind of New York story that Wareham perfected with Luna and Galaxie 500. He sings about watching a blizzard out the window, seeing the whole city as his snowblind friend in need of some shelter. His voice is shaky but serene, even on the saddest lines: “Songs build little rooms in time/And housed within the song’s design/Is the ghost the host has left behind.” Wareham gives this song’s ghost a warm, dry place to dream, a place where the songwriter and the listener can feel at home. How to rent a room, or be rented by it.

Teenage London-via-Manila guitar hero Bea Kristi gets strung out on hormones in a song about crushing out on the rock star in your life, whoever she may be. Beadadoobee definitely has a Nineties indie-rock jones — one of the several tunes she dropped this year was the self-explanatory “I Wish I Was Stephen Malkmus.” And what could be more Nineties than a bittersweet unrequited fixation on the cool bassist? She doesn’t tell us much about her, just the most important thing: “She plays bass, she plays bass/Nothing matters because we’re both in space.”

No matter how many millions of times you hear “Bad Guy,” it always sounds weird, like the sullen teenager inside us all exploded all over the radio. You could argue Billie is the David Lee Roth of our time — she’s brilliant at the talking parts, when she drops out of the melody to spit her prose. “Duuuuh” is the new “Hey man, that suit is you!”

Karen O has been doing this shit for, what, nearly 20 years now? Without a single corny moment? What a run, especially for an artist initially dismissed as a fly-by-night NYC punk fling in fishnets. (It’s been a minute since the last Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, 2013’s Mosquito, but go back and listen to “Despair,” a glitzy anthem every bit as moving and perfect as “Maps.”) “Woman” is Karen stomping out of the shadows, in a spacey collaboration with visionary producer Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton. As she said, “Brian is as masculine as you get, but I just dragged him along my journey to the Divine Feminine.” With “Woman,” they take the Phil Spector “Be My Baby” beat to the astral plane.

“I’ll keep my IUD/And you will keep on lying to me.” Ouch. Lisa Prank advanced the Sad Girl Agenda this year with her accurately titled Perfect Love Song, produced by the legend Rose Melberg, who invented Sad Girl back in the day with the Softies. Just like on her excellent 2016 Adult Teen, Prank sounds sick in love and sick of love. “IUD” is a Blink-182–worthy pop-punk gem with a tiny little wincer of a bridge: “I miss the normal things you made me wanna do/Cooking breakfast, making up with you.”

The North Carolina rapper stands tall in the tradition of Petey Pablo, but DaBaby really aspires to the old school of Death Row kingpin Suge Knight. In his breakout hit, DaBaby flexes his warp-speed virtuoso flow, over the Jetsonmade and Pooh Beatz bass,  talking shit about cash and cologne with enough “haaah” and “yeah” tics to remind you this is live. “When you got a sound that don’t sound like nobody else and it’s brand new, you’ve got to feed it to ‘em,” as he told Rolling Stone this year. “You’ve got to force it on ‘em.”

A hazy breakup ballad from Brooklyn DIY musician Johanne Swanson, from her excellent second album Mirroring. She filters her guitar through a My Bloody Valentine swirl while eyeing herself in the trick mirror of love, trying to figure out where she belongs.

Sam Cook-Parrott is one of the most consistently heart-piercing songwriters out there, as in this year’s Radiator Hospital Sings “Music For Daydreaming.” The one that slays me is “Personal Truth,” about the point in a relationship where you want to keep holding hands when your friends are watching, just because you’re both getting a little old for playing it cool. Just a boy and a guitar and a doo-wop melody, killing you softly in just under two minutes: “Kiss me on my leg like I’m your girlfriend/Heart’ll never break if I keep letting it bend.”

The Chicago poet Jamila Woods breathes in the air of her heroes on Legacy! Legacy!, whether literary (“ZORA,” “BALDWIN,” “GIOVANNI”) or musical (“MILES,” “MUDDY,” “SUN RA”) as if their presence in her soul inspires some serious introspection. “EARTHA” is a jazzy Seventies-flavored R&B ballad, as she sighs over the question: “Who gonna share my love for me with me?”

The Smog bard made a surprise comeback this year, just like his old friend David Berman. Yet another coincidence in their strangely linked stories: Nineties poets who slipped away for a minute, then returned this year at top strength with a big-deal statement, Berman’s Purple Mountains and Callahan’s Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest. They always made a beautifully odd couple. (Shameful confession: the first time I saw Smog live, in Charlottesville in 1995, he bummed me out so much I yearned to sneak out, but unfortunately I was sitting up front and Berman was a few feet behind me. I knew David would see me leave and I couldn’t stand the idea of disappointing him. I can’t believe I’m admitting this. Small towns, man.) Callahan came back full of fatherhood tales, but like Berman, he sounds like a guy who spent his forties staring at walls and trying to learn whatever he could learn from them. As he tells “Angela,” “Like motel curtains, we never really met.”

Claire Cottrill made her name with homemade viral hits like “Flamin’ Hot Cheetos,” but “Alewife” is her best yet, as the 21-year-old looks back on the hell-hole of adolescence. “Alewife” is an ode to sisterly teen friendship, her voice full of breathy affection.

Twenty years after Rilo Kiley made their debut with “The Frug,” Jenny Lewis is one of those Nineties rock artists still pushing forward. On her excellent On the Line, she plays the same piano Carole King played on Tapestry. In “Wasted Youth,” a daughter of the Seventies looks back on the addicted parents who let her down, wasting her youth along with theirs. She looks for a little compassion for them in her heart — and in that piano, where she finds some compassion for herself.

So a new generation of Sleater-Kinney fans gets to suffer the fate of their original fans: every new album pisses people off, because it doesn’t sound like the last one. (Strange but true: When they dropped The Hot Rock in early 1999, people were horrified at how different it was from Dig Me Out.) But this one was really different, and it tragically ripped America’s greatest punk band apart; drummer Janet Weiss quit before it even came out. If you got to see this band live in 2019, you know The Center Won’t Hold has worthy songs; it’s just tough to find them under the botched production. (It’s ironic these days to hear S-K do “Entertain” live, mocking all the synth-rock bands of 2004, when the new album resembles the Bravery or She Wants Revenge.) The keeper is “Love,” which takes off into New Romantic territory, evoking Depeche Mode circa Speak and Spell. Hopefully they’ll redo it with their frisky new live band: Aye Nako drummer Angie Boylan, bassist Katie Hart, Enon keyboardist Toko Yasuda. Some things you lose, some things you give away,

Like virtually all his One Direction brethren, Louis explored new places this year. He found his solo voice in the hedonistic Britpop guitars of “Kill My Mind,” but reached even deeper in “Two of Us,” speaking plainly about grief and loss. The line about calling his late mother’s voicemail — “I’ll leave a message so I’m not alone” — is just devastating in its candor.

Leslie Bear’s guitar is saturated with shoegaze melancholy — a little Mazzy Star, a little Pale Saints — articulating a feeling as fragile as a butterfly, in this highlight from her second Long Beard album, Means to Me. The guitar is so expressive it sends you searching for clues in her voice — especially when she ruminates, “I don’t know why I come/Just to see if you’ll have me?” But her guitar keeps all her secrets safe.

I realize the popular choice for the best song from Tim Robinson’s I Think You Should Leave is the one about the skeletons who came to life and how the bones are their money. I respectfully disagree. “Friday Night” — the one he sings at a funeral, after driving to the cemetery with a “Honk If You’re Horny” bumper sticker: Yes, that’s the one. It’s the faux-Eighties power ballad where he sings — beautifully — his fantasy of escape in a friend’s car, taking that midnight road going anywhere. “Friday night I’m thinking that we just might/Fly away to someplace they don’t know who we are.” It’s not even a parody — it’s too delicate for that. It makes me feel something; it makes me feel like an idiot for feeling something; it plays in my head when I’m trying to concentrate on something more important. Isn’t that what pop music is all about? I hope Eddie Money got to hear this at least once before he cashed in that ticket to paradise.