Craig's Favorite Songs from 2022

A cultivated playlist of the top songs from my top albums of the year. Albums list forthcoming!

Hey! Long time no talk!

While working on my top ten albums of 2022, I put a playlist of the top songs from my top albums. First things first, I cheated on one track. I ended it with a track that was released in 2019 but that I didn't discover until this year. One little cheat on the ole playlist but consider that a hidden track and not the real ending. Still, enjoy “Digger” by Great Grandpa, but stick until the end. The explosion of foot-dragging guitar lead is sublime.

I'm still messing with the order because I'm an obsessive psycho, but this was a good year with many hard choices. Take The Dear Hunter, for example. I wanted to do one track off an album - Antimai - where the songs all belong together. It’s an album with a real order that matters, with a storyline and everything. I don’t want to call it a rock opera because that seems wrong, but if someone else called it that, I couldn’t argue much. On Antimai, a song called “Middle Class” is incredible. It has the funkiest little section in an 8:41 epic song. It was painful to leave it out, especially after seeing the band perform it live at the Beachland earlier this year. Ultimately, I chose the song with one of my favorite vocal high notes of the year, LoTown.

Manchester Orchestra, The Wonder Years, and Caracara all got two tracks. Brutus could have had a second track on there too. I try not to overload a playlist like this with multiple tracks from single artists, but sometimes it just makes sense. “Monoculture” by Caracara is a perfect album ender, so I used it to end “Side 1” of my playlist. You know, pretend it’s a cassette tape or a record. The other song, “Colorglut,” is so bouncy and poppy, it shows the band's range without making the playlist feel redundant. Same with Manchester Orchestra because their song “Telepath” doesn’t sound like anything else on their record.

It would have been harder to do that with Coheed and Cambria. I absolutely adored their album Vaxis II this year. Still, all the songs sound distinctly Coheed in the best possible ways on a single album, but not necessarily appropriate on a playlist.

I didn't include any songs from my top album and top artist that I listened to this year because it was released in October 2021 and had a massive hangover into 2022 for me, but I featured it in my top lists last year. Still, kudos to TWIABP and Illusory Walls for dominating for more than 12 months. If I had to add any song to this playlist from that album, it would probably be “Infinite Josh.” It’s hard to add a song like this to a playlist, because it’s just over 15 minutes long. I don’t know if it will work for anyone else the way it worked for me, but if you get a chance to listen, you’ll see my soul. This album was like my musical “binky” this year. It was my pacifier when I just needed to relax and zone out. “Infinite Josh” was the song I always had to get to. I usually finish the record, and I love “Fewer Afraid,” but “Josh” was absolutely necessary for me on that album.

Forgetting the cheat at the end, "Laura and the Beehive" by The Wonder Years might be a nearly perfect album closer. Just a perfectly beautiful song with all its sparseness. Speaking of The Wonder Years and their album The Hum Goes on Forever, it was released late in the year on September 23, so it’s a bigtime candidate to be a hangover / carryover into 2023 and dominate the year the way TWIABP did in 2022. To a lesser degree, Never Before Seen, Never Again Found by Arm’s Length was released at the end of October and could also dominate my ears in 2023.

I know I’ve been absent from this site of late, but that was part of my goal with it was to have a home to my fits and starts with music writing in my 40s. I will write about my top albums for the year, but consider this a preview and let me know about anything you think I might have missed.