Because I had to find a way to fit in a Pentatonix reference.
Over the past twelve months, I finished high school, questioned (and then came back around to) my faith, wrote a lot of angsty teen poetry, took too many selfies, and met a lot of great people. That aside, I also lost a good deal of my hearing listening to all of the fabulous music that came out in 2013. To put it this way: the albums on this list alone run for a combined length of 36 hours, give or take a few minutes. I've listened to most of them a good three or four times, and some of the ones near the top of this list I've heard upwards of ten times. For the sake of convenience, let's assume I listened to each of these about five times, making for a total listening time of 180 hours for only the 50 albums below. Then consider that this isn't even a third of the music I've heard this year when you count all of the other albums, EPs, and singles from 2013. I would estimate I spent about 600 hours (or 25 days) listening to music this year, which is 6.85% of the entire year--an even larger proportion when you exclude the time I spent asleep. It's no surprise that when I look back on 2013, music will be an enormous part of my memories.
But even when I'm old and deaf in one ear, I won't regret a moment of the time I spent here: MuzikDizcovery has become a home for me, not just for the fantastic community of staff members but for every single one of you who read, listen and (as our site's name suggests) discover. You make this one of the best places for a music lover to be.
Clicking on an album title will take you to an album stream or, failing that, a stream of a single. Onwards!
"We The Common," the first track on Thao Nguyen's latest album, We The Common, is addressed to one Valerie Bolden, a prisoner Nguyen connected with on a community service visit. The entire album, in fact, is dedicated to a similar struggle: the singer-songwriter took a sabbatical to reconnect with her surroundings, and that awakened desire for community bleeds into every aspect of her music.
A plucky banjo opens the song before Nguyen layers a litany of struggles over it, detailing desertion, heartbreak, and victimization from those who do not understand what it means to walk in the shoes of a prisoner. The band, however, turns this seemingly morose soliloquy into a slam-poetry festival, amping up the emotion and making it a learning experience for all listening. What's equally surprising is how resilient Nguyen herself is, firing off grievance after grievance but quelling the temptation towards woe-is-me posturing with bombast and vitality. As she declares, "How we the common do cry!" in the chorus, she finds solace in the voices echoing her own frustration--and perhaps more than a smidgen of hope as well. Later on, she asserts, "We die, we die, we die, we die until we try," and it's easy to see where she's coming from: We The Common is a musical--and spiritual--revival for anybody willing to take the time to connect.
We The Common is now available worldwide. You can also check out Nguyen and her band's Facebook page here.
