The Best of Me, 2020
Here's my little annual rundown of some of the best stuff I worked on this year:
- The most popular piece I wrote in 2020 was definitely my Vulture interview with Al "T" McLaran, the voice behind the "Whores In This House" sample on Cardi B's "WAP."
- I wrote a lot for Spin in 2020, and especially enjoyed getting back to doing more interviews than I had done I had in years, and the people I talked to included T.I., Brendan Benson, Lee Ranaldo & Raul Refree, 24kGoldn, Beauty Pill, The Lemon Twigs, Sebastian Steinberg, and Infinity Knives. They also let me report on COVID-19's initial impact on the concert industry and do nerdy deep dives on things like the best Ted Leo songs, Eddie Van Halen solos, Bob Dylan covers, and '90s soundtracks.
- I wrote about some great overlooked Bill Withers songs for Stereogum.
- I contributed to Billboard's big The Greatest Pop Star By Year feature, and also wrote an essay about *NSYNC.
- My favorite thing I wrote for Complex this year was about the role music plays in Billions.
- I recently wrote for GQ for the first time, contributing a few blurbs to this list of recent TV to binge over the holidays.
- One of the greatest alt weeklies, City Pages, sadly published its final issue a few weeks ago, but I'm proud to say I got to write a couple dozen pieces for them over the last 3 years, mostly expanded versions of my deep album cuts playlist posts. My last handful of City Pages pieces that were published in 2020 were about Rush, Sloan, and Three 6 Mafia.
- Here on Narrowcast, I wrote a lot of stuff as always, and put a lot of my quarantine time into adding an insane 57 new playlists to the Deep Album Cuts library. A few of my favorite deep cuts pieces I did this year include Fleetwood Mac, Willie Nelson, The Replacements, Sade, and Busta Rhymes, and I also used the series to memorialize John Prine, Little Richard, Adam Schlesinger of Fountains Of Wayne, Kenny Rogers, Betty Wright, David Roback of Mazzy Star, and Joe Diffie. And this month I did my usual lists of my favorite albums, singles, EPs, remixes, and TV shows of 2020.
- I appeared on the Rap Rankings podcast.
- I went viral with a short-lived Twitter parody account.
- I am now sort of in the Oxford English Dictionary.
- I also released a lot of music in 2020, in fact more than in any other year of my life so far. I released the third album by my Western Blot solo project, 5/4 (my favorite song: "The Empty Space"), as well as two EPs: Casi-O (favorite song: "That Baby Walk") and Sorry For Arty Rocking (favorite song: "Freedom '20"). My band Woodfir released its 2nd EP (favorite song: "Fata Morgana") early in the year, and we recently added a bassist to the band and released our first song as a quartet. And in November I put together a massive compilation, Broken Sticks: Al Shipley on drums 2000-2020, of my work with numerous bands and collaborators over the last two decades (favorite song: Tuner's "Lava").
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