Wren Graves’ Favorite Songs of the Last 15 Years
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The post Wren Graves’ Favorite Songs of the Last 15 Years appeared first on Consequence.
It’s Consequence’s 15th anniversary, and all September long we’ll be publishing retrospective pieces informed by our publication’s own history — and the entertainment landscape in general. Today, News Editor Wren Graves runs down his favorite tracks of the last 15 years.
A good song is a good song, but a favorite song is a moment in time: The number one track on a cross-country road trip; the first dance at a wedding; the long hospital playlist that still didn’t cover 19 hours in labor. I’ve changed a lot over the last 15 years, and music has been there every step of the way, melody and memory hand in hand.
Critics sometimes put on a mask of objectivity, but I can’t pretend that this collection of songs has anything to do with words like “greatest” or “best.” As someone who lives their life with headphones on, it’s dangerously close to a diary. Check out my favorite songs from the last 15 years below.
15. HAIM – “The Wire” (2013)
Gallons of ink have been spilled about people on the wrong end of a breakup, but what happens when a split goes just right? After days, weeks, or months of dread, “The Wire” captures the elation of walking away. While the lyrics say all the things you’re supposed to say (“I know, I know, I know, I know/ That you’re gonna be okay anyway,”) the music underneath screams hell yeah, sunshine, freedom! All the time, enormous clapping drums keep a heartbeat rhythm, though after a few verses it may sound more like applause. Never mind kisses, kiss-offs never tasted so sweet.
14. Freddie Gibbs x Madlib – “Harold’s” (2014)
Harold’s Chicken is a Chicagoland institution and the best fast food restaurant on the planet. Freddie Gibbs is a Gary, Indiana institution and arguably the best rapper in the universe. And Madlib? He’s from another dimension. It’s a classic Madlib beat, woozy and full of swag, perfect, as Gibbs says, for “smoking on that strong.” This wouldn’t be the first of either of their tracks that I shared with a non-believer, but it does start to play in my head every time I get hungry. On the hook, Gibbs loads up with the slower, “Six wings, mild sauce,” and then pops off in an oil-soaked torrent of, “With all the fries you can give me/ I tear them bitches off.” Like its namesake, “Harold’s” always hits the spot.
13. PUP – “Morbid Stuff” (2019)
You don’t become an adult at 18, or when you leave school, you become an adult the first time you have a panic attack about your own death. “I got stuck,” vocalist Stefan Babcock wails, “On death and dying and obsessive thoughts that won’t let up/ It makes me feel like I’m about to throw up.” The track bottles that dizzy anxiety and then shakes it up and serves it with a fiery pop punk melody. There’s nothing like howling, “As my body aged, the feeling never did,” to make you feel alive.
12. Lil Uzi Vert – “XO Tour Llif3″ (2017)
“XO Tour Llif3” was the first shot of the emo rap revolution. Future’s frequent collaborator TM88 produced the track, and you can hear Uzi trying on some of Future’s clothes, especially the way he alludes to overwhelming emotions behind a numbing drug fog. Before then, these kinds of beats had rarely hosted such an irresistible melody, and while many artists have tried to capture that feeling over the last five years, Uzi’s lyrics have kept their edge.
“I don’t really care if you cry,” is a mean thing to say and a great opening line, hurling the audience full speed into the maelstrom of a breakup. The stakes are operatic. “On the real, you shoulda never lied,” he sings, “Shoulda saw the way she looked me in my eyes/ She said, ‘Baby, I am not afraid to die.'” It’s exciting, yes, and deliciously ludicrous, in the way that Romeo and Juliet’s love is ludicrous — and believable in the same way.
11. Brandi Carlile – “The Stranger at My Door” (2015)
“I’ve seen the fire-watcher’s daughter,” Carlile begins on this slow-burning indictment of a people who would rather incinerate their past than confront “their darkest sins.” The country scorcher withholds the scope of its ambitions by focusing on a simple image — a girl feeding a fire — and layering on enough charged imagery of twisting metal, melting glass, and the raging pit of hell to strike jealousy into the darkest of metal bands. Carlile reveals her true ambitions on the final verse, singing, “Nothing scares me more than the stranger at my door/ Who I fail to give shelter, time, and worth.”
10. Radiohead – “Weird Fishes/Arpegi” (2007)
Listening to Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood’s solo work — comparing, say, The Eraser to the soundtrack for There Will Be Blood — it’s clear that Radiohead’s singer loves dense layers of sounds, while his composer bandmate is drawn to sweeping transformations: quiet to loud, simple to complex. “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” is a glorious example of how these impulses can work together.
There are three arpeggios on the track: Ed O’Brien’s main riff; a second lick from Yorke that inverts the same chords and shifts the emphasis; and a final Greenwood arpeggio, which uses many of the same musical ideas to create a shimmering effect that sounds just about how light looks playing off a pond. As the song moves along, the rhythm section sometimes drop out or swells, and after about three and a half minutes, a second musical movement overtakes the main themes before the arpeggios return. “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” never stops moving.
09. Pusha T – “The Games We Play” (2018)
“Ain’t no stoppin’ this champagne from poppin’,” Pusha T spits, “…With Ye back choppin’.” Yes, this coke rap masterpiece rests on production from Kanye West, who sampled and slowed a couple of three-second snippets from “Heart ‘N Soul” by Booker T. Averheart. What began as a raucous guitar lick is transformed into a slow-motion strut, as King Push raps like he’s walking away from an explosion. When he boasts, “These are the games we play, we are the names they say,” it’s hard to argue that he’s wrong.
08. Fiona Apple – “Hot Knife” (2012)
“Hot Knife” is a song about emotions-as-textures, with thoughtfully-layered instruments that make the point as plainly as the lyrics. It starts with the drums echoing up from the deep. “If I’m butter,” Apple sings, first alone and later in harmony with herself, “If I’m butter then he’s a hot knife.” The old familiar piano is reinvented to sound less like a gentle backdrop than violently plucked strings, and that final polyphonic outburst, as Apple’s voice chases itself across the track, is as complex and glorious as infatuation itself.
07. Vince Staples – “Norf Norf” (2015)
The Clams Casino beat opens with a low moan that sounds at times like a siren, and others like a whale song bubbling up from the depths. Vince Staples kicks off with, “Bitch you’re thirsty, please grab a Sprite/ My Crips lurking, don’t die tonight,” and the song only gets more quotable from there, as his desire to have some flirty fun brushes up against the traumatizing lifestyle of a “Norfside” Long Beach gang banger.
“I just want to dance with you baby,” he says, before imploring his date, “Please don’t move too fast or too crazy,” for fear he’ll startle. While many great songs reach a zenith at the hook, Staples dials all the way back, lowering his voice and almost muttering, “I ain’t never ran from nothing but the police.” The second and third verses grow more violent, even as the quips keep coming. “Norf Norf” is grim and grand all at once.
06. Bon Iver – “Skinny Love” (2008)
In 2008, I was a painfully sensitive college kid who missed his home in Wisconsin, so you can bet that “Skinny Love” became my whole personality. Everyone knows the story — the legend at this point — of Justin Vernon retreating to a hunting cabin in the woods near Eau Claire. I’ve slept in cabins in those north woods, and Vernon’s lo-fi recording and very high singing is the closest thing to a winter wind through the trees. “Skinny Love” is lovely, brutal, and stark. Lines like, “And now, all your love is wasted/ Then who the hell was I?” evoke the barren nothing waiting on the other side of a bad split.
05. Waxahatchee – “Fire” (2020)
The melody for this song came to Katie Crutchfield as she drove over the Mississippi River and watched the reflection of the setting sun cast a glow over West Memphis. Lyrically, it’s an attempt by Crutchfield to talk herself into self-forgiveness, as she sings, “If I could love you unconditionally/ I could iron out the edges of the darkest sky.” This proves hard, as Crutchfield explains: “For some of us/ It ain’t enough.” Put it all together, and “Fire” sounds like the moment that inspired it: a moment of beauty and stillness on the outside as an inferno rages underneath.
04. Kendrick Lamar – “Backseat Freestyle” (2012)
good kid, m.A.A.d city is Kendrick Lamar’s most cinematic album, and “Backseat Freestyle” is a flashback: A teenaged Kendrick rides in the car with friends, goofing around, and rapping. Over Hit-Boy’s coldest beat, Lamar does all the voices of his freestyling friends, matching the language of horndog boys (“I pray my dick get big as the Eifel Tower/ So I can fuck the world in 72 hours,”) onto some of the most bonkers flows ever put to tape.
The third verse is especially compelling; Lamar puts a grind into his voice and machine-guns out the words, “I’m never livin’ life confined/ As I feel you even if I’m blind/ I can tell you who, what, when, where/ How to sell your game right on time,” before slowing down and revving up on, “Biatch! Go play.” The song becomes the exact thing it’s characters are trying to make: The ultimate windows-down banger.
03. LCD Soundsystem – “All My Friends” (2007)
The song starts out big and gets bigger, a rogue wave into a tsunami. First, jittery piano, bass, and drums. It picks up speed with the introduction of a guitar, and swells to towering heights as a synth streaks across the track.
The first time I heard “All My Friends,” I kept thinking about the line, “You spent the first five years trying to get with the plan/ And the next five years trying to be with your friends again.” When I revisited it for this list, I got the closing lyric stuck in my head: “If I could see all of my friends tonight.” What a great “if.”
James Murphy writes the kind of lyrics that change as you do. As a younger person, I thought the song was about aging. And it’s there, but that’s a minor subplot. The real story is right there in the title: It’s a song about friends. It’s about the hope, the loneliness, the nostalgia, the love, and the memories that come with wondering, “Where are your friends tonight?”
02. Jamila Woods – “GIOVANNI” (2019)
Last year I made a push playlist that was far too short for the 19 hours my wife was in labor, and so we turned to a cherished album. Jamila Woods’ LEGACY! LEGACY! was our most-spun vinyl during the long months of pregnancy, and we must have streamed it three times in the hospital as she gave birth to our son. “SONIA” is her favorite song but “GIOVANNI” is mine, a riff on the poem “Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)” by Nikki Giovanni.
Like so much of Woods’ most thrilling work, “GIOVANNI” is both mystical and deeply personal, as Woods makes her stand against historical aggressors. “My ancestors watch me,” she sings, “Fairytale walking/ Black Goldilocks, yeah/ My naps just right/ You got questions, I know that’s right/ There must be a reason why.”
Her images are charged and reward multiple listens, and the melody burrows deep into the brain. But the most singular quality of this song, and really all of LEGACY! LEGACY!, is that in watching Woods’ wrestle with artists like Miles Davis, Frida Kahlo, and Giovanni, she draws us into those conversations. Her decision to change Giovanni’s “there may be a reason why” to “there must be a reason why” forces us to think about those words and make our own conclusions.
01. Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit – “If We Were Vampires” (2017)
“If We Were Vampires” is about the anxiety that comes with finding once-in-a-lifetime love, because it turns out that a lifetime isn’t very long at all. “It’s knowing that this can’t go on forever/ Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone,” he sings. If you find yourself reaching for the tissues at, “One day I’ll be gone, one day you’ll be gone,” you’re not alone; but then again Isbell has been goosing the value of the Kleenex corporation since “Elephant.” But that’s not the point of the song.
“If we were vampires and death was a joke,” he coos, “We’d go out on the sidewalk and smoke/And laugh at all the lovers and their plans/ I wouldn’t feel the need to hold your hand.” It’s an optimist’s argument against immortality; there’s nothing like watching the hourglass run to make sure every grain of sand counts. He sings, “Maybe time running out is a gift/ I’ll work hard ’til the end of my shift.”
The song ends with another acknowledgment of death, that final journey that everyone makes alone. No one can change their destination, but “If We Were Vampires” makes a gorgeous argument for how to enjoy the ride.
Wren Graves’ Favorite Songs of the Last 15 Years
Wren Graves
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