My Thanksgiving 2022 Playlist
There was so much great new music this year that my Thanksgiving playlist (Spotify link) is mainly new stuff and I moved a bunch of great old stuff into a second playlist!
Recorded while Yola was working with the Highwomen on their album, her anthem Hold On kicks it off. Highwomen Brandi Carlile and Natalie Hemby, as well as Sheryl Crow and Jason Isbell are on the track as well.
Next, a little East Bay grease for ya'll: fifty years later Tower of Power still blows the doors off with You're Still a Young Man.
Los Lobos put out the Grammy-winning (Best Americana Album) Native Sons this year, full of covers of the LA songs they grew up with. Here's their version of War's The World is a Ghetto.
The Iguanas' Oye Isabel is on here for my friend Max, who had a daughter, Isabelle, this year with his wife Kate. This is his life in about 18 years!
The next two songs feature Black Country/Americana singers that opened for Jason Isbell during his 2021 Ryman Auditorium residency (see Tressie McMillan Cottam's excellent piece on it), Brittney Spencer's Sober & Skinny and Shemekia Copeland's Too Far To Be Gone.
Miranda Lambert earned herself another Grammy nomination (Best Country Song) with her take on gender roles and cowboy myths in If I Was a Cowboy.
My personal song of the year, nominated for Grammys in the Best Song, Best American Roots Song, and Album of the Year categories, is Bonnie Raitt's powerful Just Like That:
I spent so long in darknessNever thought the night would endBut somehow grace has found meAnd I had to let him in
Bruce had a lot of fun recording his new album of soul covers, Only the Strong Survive. Here's his take on Jimmy Ruffin's What Becomes of the Brokenhearted.
Next, a few songs by Texans about drinking tequila, Miranda Lambert's Tequila Does (dedicated to my wife Leslie) and Midland's The Last Resort.
One of the highlights of Americana Fest this year was a panel discussion on Indigenous Americana, led by Shoshona Kish and Amanda Rheaume of Ishkode Records, and then a showcase featuring their bands. Rheaume's 100 Years addresses the recent revelations of the deaths of Native children in Canadian residential schools and the awakening of Native people:
Can you feel the heatUnderneath your feetRising on the land, stirring in the streetWaking from a hundred years of sleepA hundred years of sleepA hundred years of sleep
After hanging out with Joni Mitchell so frequently over the last few years, Brandi Carlile re-recorded her 2021 album In These Silent Days as In The Canyon Haze with a Laurel Canyon feel and Crosby, Stills and Nash-type harmonies. Here's the new version of You and Me On The Rock. (Be sure to check out the videos of Joni and Brandi at the Newport Folk Festival if you haven't already).
At the Americana Awards his year Brandi won Best Song for Right on Time (on last year's Thanksgiving playlist) and Allison Russell won Best Album for Outside Child (featuring Persephone and Night Flyer, also on last year's playlist). Then they premiered You're Not Alone.
He's Fine is a catchy tune from The Secret Sisters. I would not like to be a real person named Davey White.
Austinite Sunny Sweeney has a fine new song, Easy as Hello.
I wanted to include Amarillo By Morning by George Strait but it didn't fit in anywhere else so here it is. The fiddle is beautiful, especially the long solo at the end.
We lost three amazing women in the past year. Native Austinite Nanci Griffith wrote some great songs, including Listen to the Radio. In it she namechecks badass Loretta Lynn, so let's add her Fist City which includes the immortal line, "But the man I love, when he picks up trash, he puts it in a garbage can". And we would be remiss not to honor Ronnie Spector, here singing on The Ronettes' Be My Baby.
