Paul McCartney - "Maybe I'm Amazed"
I will forever be in awe of how McCartney recorded this alone in his living room.
(Correction: This song was recorded solo at Abbey Road. He recorded the rest of the album at home. But the point stands that he's the only musician on this thing.)
There's goes 2025 and, somehow, 15 years of tracking whatever I've been listening to every day. That playlist with a song a day for a year was somehow more of a chore than this, believe it or not.
So here's to 2026 and letting old habits carry on forever.
Just in time for the year's end, I finished a way-too-long thing on Father John Misty's "The Next 20th Century" that I've had kicking around as a draft for more than a year. Which is unusual for me. But it seemed fitting to tie this one off and send it out into the ether, though.
Enjoy. (But be warned, this is heavily into naval-gazing territory...).
The Kinks - "Living on a Thin Line"
Here's a song I've loved forever, and I can feel it move me, but I can't really articulate how or why it has that impact. It's like the combination of words — lamenting the loss of whatever England was supposed to be in favor of a myth that doesn't serve anyone in their real lives — under the weight of the guitars and that heavy production creates something else entirely.
It's almost like the creation of that feeling rises above it's actual subject matter, and the result is something universal that feels so immediate. And so here's a song, that came out when I was 2 years old, feels that important and that timeless all these years later. That's something beyond magic.
Just spending my night getting comfortable and listening to this Wings box set I got for Christmas. And, it's crazy that this might not even make the top-50 most notable songs Paul McCartney wrote, because of the obvious volume of incredible work. But it's so goddamn good and weird and different and unapologetically him. Good lord.
