One of my great musical shames is my inability to appreciate Stevie Wonder.
I understand why he’s considered a genius, and one of the most influential and accomplished artists of all time. I hear the intricacy in his melodies and instrumentation, and I marvel that he often played all the instruments himself. I pay my respects to a man who once won three Album of the Year Grammys during a four year span in the mid-70s, a feat nobody else has managed.
‘Friend of the Devil’ is my fourth Song of the Day from Grateful Dead’s classic 1970 album American Beauty, and probably my favorite of the bunch.
American Beauty is considered one of the greats, and I can’t argue with that assessment. The folk rock sound is sublime, the songs are memorable, the lyrics are evocative. My knowledge of the Dead pretty much starts and stops with this album, but it’s enough to make me understand their appeal.
Best Films of 2020
#1 – Nomadland
It usually takes a second viewing for me to really know how I really feel about a film. In the case of writer/director Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, my revisit found me welling up with tears throughout. That doesn’t happen to me very often, and I didn’t expect it to happen here. That response left little doubt in my mind that this beautiful work is my favorite film of the year.
Based on a non-fiction book by Jessica Bruder that chronicled the lives of “vandwellers” left behind by a crumbling economy, Nomadland frames its story around the fictional Fern (Frances McDormand), a widow who takes to the road after losing her company housing to the recession.
Best Films of 2020
#2 – Sound of Metal
Director and co-writer Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal is another film that hit harder due to the pandemic. This story of a heavy metal drummer who has to find himself after losing his hearing wound up having deeper thematic resonance due to a crisis the filmmaker’s didn’t see coming.
Consider that the film’s main character, Ruben (played brilliantly by Riz Ahmed), is facing a sudden and foreign new reality, and struggles mightily to regain some semblance of his previous life. How many of us can relate, forced inside and into masks, away from loved ones, jobs and pastimes? How have we strained to find our old lives buried in this new existence?
We were lucky if we could find some grace in the solitude, some comfort in the silence.
Best Films of 2020
#3 – Minari
When I watched writer-director Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari, knowing nothing about its origins, my immediate thought was that it had to be based on real-life events. The details were too precise, and the emotions too full-hearted, for it to be anything but a collection of memories committed to film.
Sure enough, I soon learned that Chung based the film on his own Korean immigrant family’s experiences starting a farm in rural Arkansas. Every interaction feels so true to life because he lived it.
Meet Me In Montauk 