Susanna Kaysen's psychiatric hospital memoir Girl, Interrupted may seem like odd source material for a musical, and after plans to stage it were indefinitely delayed by the pandemic, the world may never know if it would work. But Aimee Mann has released the songs she composed for the musical as an album, and it's fantastic, sort of a fitting companion piece for her 2017 masterpiece Mentall Illness, with Mann's usual smart, dryly funny, empathetic songwriting bolstered by a sort of Bacharach-style chamber pop elegance. 

It's remarkable to me that John Linnell and John Flansburgh still have gas in the tank creatively to keep writing deviously clever and strange little pop songs after making literally hundreds and hundreds of them over the last 40 years. But Book is another unlikely late career highlight, almost as good as 2011's Join Us, full of catchy word games and cryptic concept songs like "Synopsis For Latecomers" an "Wait Yeah Actually No." 

I think this is probably Adele's best album, it just feels really unhurried and comfortable with itself, lots of complicated and ambivalent emotions, no unnecessary cover tacked on towards the end, incredible piano ballads like "To Be Loved" and some modest but very appealing experiments with modern sounds on "Oh My God" and "All Night Parking." I kind of wish she'd gone all the way and made "I Drink Wine" 15 minutes long like it supposedly was at one point, the album already ends with three consecutive 6-minute songs. I will say, though, not every great singer needs to do their own harmonies and I wish Adele used backing vocalists in the studio, there are like 3 songs on this album where she does these chirpy background vocals that I find incredibly irritating. 

Willie Nelson's band has been called The Family for most of his career and his sister Bobbie Nelson has always been his pianist. They've performed on many of his albums, including 1971's Willie Nelson & Family, and this similarly titled album reprises one of its songs, "Kneel At The Feet of Jesus." But this record really fuses Family and family, with four of Willie's seven kids appearing on the album, alongside band members like harmonica player Mickey Raphael and drummer Billy English (son of Nelson's longtime drummer Paul English, who died last year). It's beautiful that at 88 years old Willie can get together with some of the most important people in his life and just take a stroll through his immense songbook and play a song from Yesterday's Wine and a song from Phases And Stages and a couple from Spirit and it all just feels so right.

There's a great college radio station, WTMD, that broadcasts from my alma mater, Towson University, and sometimes they play a promo where Lindsey Jordan aka Snail Mail talks about growing up with her parents listening to the station all the time. And hearing that always endears me to her a little more and appreciate where she's coming from musically, just knowing her tastes were informed by the same station I listen to (which of course plays her songs a lot). Her previous album Lush had a very fuzzed out 'classic '90s indie' sound, but Valentine feels a little more original and carefully considered in its arrangements and overall aesthetic, I really dig "Ben Franklin" and "Glory." 

Young Dolph had mentored Key Glock and made him his top Paper Route artist the last few years, featuring him on big songs and doing two duo albums together. So I really feel for Key Glock that he just got his first top 10 solo album and days later Dolph is murdered, can't imagine what it's been like for him. But it really feels like he's coming into his own on Yellow Tape 2 and carrying the torch and keeping Dolph's memory alive, he's not as big a personality as Dolph but he's got some great flows, 

"!!! (Don't Know Who To Trust)" and "Ambition For Cash" and "Ya Feel Me"are early favorites. 

Exactly 5 years ago, I was in the middle of a week of operating the lyric teleprompter for Diana Ross for her performances at the Kennedy Center and the White House. It's one of my fondest memories of my prompting job, just a cool experience to see a legend put together a show, the fact that she's been doing this for over 50 years and will still tinker with the arrangements and the song selection and care about the details. So I think of that week a lot while listening to Thank You, her first album of new songs in over 20 years, which is a nice little varied mix of ballads and feelgood dance pop. The song produced by Jack Antonoff, "I Still Believe," is a standout, kinda wish he did more of the album.

Springsteen has a lot of live albums, and has added to that catalog considerably in recent years with a series of digital releases. But this is the first one in a while to get a big CD/DVD rollout, and obviously they're really going with the hard sell putting the word "legendary" in the title. But this set does live up to its rep, and it's a great representation of my favorite era of the E Street Band, touring in support of Darkness and previewing a couple songs from The River a year ahead of its release. And Bruce himself, the day before his 30th birthday, is in rare form, especially in the last 25 minutes or so of freehweeling covers that includes cameos from Tom Petty and Jackson Browne. Bruce has also never sounded more like John Travolta than when he talks at the end of "Sherry Darling." 

Sonic Youth has also made a lot of additions to their live album catalog in recent years with archival releases on their Bandcamp page, and in November they released two Texas performances, one from 1995 and one from 2006, to raise money for Fund Texas Choice and the Abortion Support Network. Both are great but I'm particularly excited about their first live release from the Washing Machine era, from their fall tour just after Lollapalooza. I was surprised that the set starts off with three songs from Sister, but those absolutely kick ass and the Washing Machine songs, which they never really played in any of the shows I saw from 1998 onward, sound great live.

There are more women rapping at a national major label level right now than at any point in hip hop's history, it's an exciting time and I'm glad somebody got the idea for the soundtrack to Halle Berry's new UFC drama Bruised to be all female rappers, plus a song from H.E.R. (the Birds Of Prey soundtrack did something similar with all female artists but it was just a few rappers and mostly singers). Cardi B, City Girls, Young M.A, Saweetie, Rapsody, Flo Milli, Latto, DreamDoll and Baby Tate are all here, mostly doing tough motivational bangers, it's great. 

Trevor Daniel is a white kid from Texas who blew up on TikTok singing over trap beats and his breakthrough hit "Falling" has over a billion streams, potentially the next Post Malone but without even Post Malone's modest charms. And these 7 songs are just endlessly insipid, a whiny boy band voice saying stuff like "the toxicity of your energy, it don't interest me, you're my enemy."

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