I contend that the last day of the year is the appropriate time to release an annual list of favourite songs. I mean, why rush something like this? I still haven’t had time to listen to everything I want to listen to (the new Cure album, for example, which I hear is great). Invariably, I’m late to albums that should make my list. Last year, it was Jess Williamson’s superb Time Ain’t Accidental.

Good music takes time to marinate in your head. Think of all the times you heard an album—back in the days of albums, instead of playlists—and how often the first listen left you cold or maybe even bewildered. Then, over time, you fell in love with it. 

But it’s December 31; I can procrastinate no longer.

I’ll start with Katie Crutchfield, who records and performs as Waxahatchee. She provided my favourite album of the year, Tigers Blood, and my favourite concert of the year, a stunning show at Massey Hall. The standout track on the uniformly excellent album is “Right Back to It,” which features MJ Lenderman, who put out one of my other top albums of 2024: Manning Fireworks.

Cassandra Jenkins, whose An Overview of Phenomenal Nature is my number one album of the decade so far, returned with My Light, My Destroyer. Alynda Saggera’s Hurray for the Riff Raff made my 2022 list with Life on Earth and she and her band are back with this year’s The Past is Still Alive.

Most of my other faves this year were from artists who have been around for a long time and are still putting out great music (a fact I find comfort in both as a listener and someone who has been around for a long time). They are Tindersticks, T-Bone Burnett, Nick Lowe & Los Straightjackets, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds and Gillian Welch & David Rawlings.

My annual playlist—on Spotify or Apple Music—features two songs from each of those albums as well as several other songs I liked, from artists new and old. (And if you make it to the end, I’ve included an unlikely cover.)

The one album in my top ten that isn’t on the playlist is Diamond Jubilee by Cindy Lee. Calgary’s Patrick Flegel, who performs as Cindy Lee, didn’t want to sell his music for fractions of a penny per stream. Good for him. I highly recommend you check out this fabulous album on Bandcamp or YouTube. And if you like it as much as I do, you may want to buy it and help Flegel fight the streamer power.