Back in October, my wife, Caitlin, and I saw Vampire Weekend in Charlottesville. Maybe you’ve heard of this band, maybe you haven’t, but you’ve almost certainly heard their song “A-Punk,” which crops up randomly in pop culture, on TV ads and in grocery stores, despite being nearly 20-years-old.
Caitlin and I have vastly different musical tastes (she likes ‘80s pop, I like “weird stuff,” as she puts it), yet Vampire Weekend, fronted by 40-year-old Ezra Koenig, is the one band that overlaps in our Venn Diagram of adored artists, so we make a point to see them every time they go on tour.
We went to a show in 2019, during what can only be described as their jam band era, and this year at Ting Pavilion we were down in the pit, just a few feet from the stage, where it was standing-room-only. We danced on our aging millennial legs for nearly three hours, and when the time came to leave, our hips and knees were so stiff we basically waddled to the exit.
Ezra, though, didn’t seem to be feeling his age: he moved around the stage with the grace of someone a decade younger, putting on one of the best shows we’ve ever seen…and we’ve seen a lot of shows, considering we were festival-going hippies in a past life. Our expectations were high, and Vampire Weekend, in their quirky, light-hearted glory, blew them out of the water.
Pop music is famously a young person’s game. Most artists release their best work in their 20s, when the flow of creative energy is more pure, the glow of youth not yet dulled. Look at Rolling Stone’s list of the greatest albums of all-time: 16 of the top 20 albums were recorded by people in their 20s. Young people make records that sound like music is a hieroglyph they discovered in a cave somewhere then translated for us, via song, as if to say look at the preciousness we’ve found.
By the time most musicians reach their 30’s, though, it’s as if they’ve accepted the fact that it’s all been done before, that nothing they could make would truly be new, and that the most noble aim is to create music that strives for a place within the framework of timeless music that has already recorded. Innocence has been mostly obliterated by the three-decade mark, the internal fire somewhat muted. All that’s left is to follow the muse and hope it leads somewhere worth going.
All this to say: 2024 was an exceptional year for five Millenial and Gen X artists in particular, all of whom released perhaps the best music of their careers at an age when, historically speaking, their peak should’ve been behind them.
I’m talking about Adrianne Lenker (33), Sierra Ferrell (36), Vampire Weekend (all three members are 40), Father John Misty (43) and Sturgill Simpson (46). These are well-known artists, if not quite household names, and they’ve been generally well-received by critics throughout their careers. Each has been nominated for at least one Grammy. All but Ferrell, a progressive Americana artist, have been in the relative spotlight for close to a decade, and because of their durability, it feels as though I’ve grown up alongside them, their music accompanying me at distinct stages of my life: with Simpson, I’m a 26-year-old hipster barista wearing an idiotic paperboy hat I thought was cool; with Father John Misty, I’m a 28-year-old bearded derelict living in Austin; with Vampire Weekend, I’m a 29-year-old on a cross country road trip with my soon-to-be-wife; with Lenker, I’m a 32-year-old entering the world of fatherhood on shaky ground; with Ferrell, I’m a 35-year-old driving through the mountains of West Virginia with a toddler in the back seat.
This is the strange magic of songs: they’re ability to bind so inseparably to our memory that they act as tiny landmarks signaling where and who we’ve been. As we age, all we can do is cross our fingers and hope the artists we’ve shared our lives with will continue to make music that resonates with us. Over the past year, the aforementioned artists did exactly that, and resoundingly so.
Vampire Weekend, Only God Was Above Us
When I play Vampire Weekend for someone who’s never heard of them, I get one of two reactions: they’re either immediately drawn to the catchiness of the music, or they can’t stand Ezra Koenig’s voice. I sympathize with the latter reaction: his voice is high-pitched with a vague English, or maybe Italian, lilt to it, which makes little sense considering Koenig grew up in the Upper West Side. I disliked his voice, too, when I first heard it in the mid-2010s: it seemed too gimmicky, and the music itself too shallow and bouncy, for my brooding hipster nature to accept.
The trick to getting past his voice, I found, is exposure therapy … that, plus a deep dive into the lyrics, which have been highly literate and witty from the start (the band released its eponymous debut in 2006) and only grew more thoughtful and introspective with each subsequent album, culminating in Modern Vampires of the City, released in 2010 and widely considered one of the best albums of the decade.
It’s acclaim is well-deserved: Modern Vampires is a sleight-of-hand concept record about love, mortality, and the tension between agnosticism and faith, but its tunes are so catchy and danceable you wouldn’t notice these deeper themes unless you perused the lyric sheet (See: “We know the fire awaits, unbelievers, all of the sinners the same/Girl, you and I would die unbelievers bound to the tracks of the train.”).
The band’s new album, Only God Was Above Us, is the most conceptual one they’ve released since Modern Vampires, and while the latter was a requisite reflection on mortality by an artist approaching his 30th birthday, Only God is written from a more mature yet no-less yearning perspective. It’s a record about coming to grips with one’s place in the universe as the slide toward decay accelerates, youth now undeniably in the past. “Too old for dyin’ young, too young to live alone/sifting through centuries for moments of your own,” Koenig sings on the chorus of “Capricorn” behind a wall of wailing guitars, words that feel like a gut punch for people of a certain age (see: aging millennials).
Still, you’d never know Koenig is four-decades old, considering his voice is still youthful, his face still babyish, and his performances injected with an almost childlike vigor. You’d be forgiven if you mistook him for a 25-year-old who’d just discovered that precious musical hieroglyph in a darkened cave somewhere.
Sierra Ferrell, Trail of Flowers
Sierra Ferrell’s breakout album, Trail of Flowers, was released in March, and it’s one of those timeless records that feels like the songs weren’t written, but instead have existed forever in ether, waiting to be pulled down onto record. It’s probably my most-played album of the year and, it should be noted, my toddler’s personal favorite, which I think says a lot.
The first thing that struck me about Ferrell, a West Virginia native and former addict who used to busk for money, is her timeless voice, which sounds like a mix of Patsy Cline and Fiona Apple refracted through an Appalachian prism. It grabs the listener in a firm-but-gentle hug and does not let go. I was driving through the mountains of West Virginia, heading for an escape along the New River, the first time I listened to Trail, and when she hit the high note on the chorus of “Fox Hunt,” it felt like she was shouting “I exist!” from the shadowy depths of the deepest Appalachian holler.
It’s apparent after just the first song on Flowers that she’s a singular talent, but don’t take my word for it, take my father-in-law’s, a long-time music lover whose discerning taste I respect as much as any so-called critic. I bought Trail for him on CD, because he’s a Boomer who still listens to CDs, and he’s been blasting the thing on his Bose stereo ever since. If it comes with the Tom Worsham stamp of approval, you know it’s good.
Sturgill Simpson, Passage du Desir
Sturgill Simpson has been one of the most unpredictable country/bluegrass/Americana/whatever-you-want-to-call-it artists of the past decade, so unpredictable, in fact, that he could hardly be classified in that category anymore. We’re talking about a guy who released a scuzzy rock album (Sound and Fury) in 2019 that also serves as a soundtrack for an anime film.
Simpson burst onto the scene in 2015 with Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, which features the first country song ever recorded that, and I’m confident in saying this, references LSD, psilocybin, DMT and “reptile aliens made of light [that] cut you open and pull out all your pain.” The rest of the songs on that album, for the most part, are straightforward country bangers (it’s still my favorite Sturgill album), but he’d spend the subsequent years taking so many left turns that he’d eventually end up somewhere close to where he began, considering his new album, Passage du Desir, sounds like the spiritual follow-up to his sophomore record, A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, which won him a Grammy in 2016.
Passage features two of the best songs he’s ever written: “Scooter Blues” and “Jupiter’s Faerie.” They appear back-to-back on the album and, in many ways, offer a perfect study in two character traits that define Simpson as an artist: iconoclastic eccentricity and gut-wrenching earnestness. On “Scooter Blues,” we find our man daydreaming about disappearing to a remote island and anonymously scootering around the streets of his newfound paradise, long brown hair flowing in the wind. It’s a catchy and carefree tune, the spiritual opposite of the song it leads into, “Jupiter’s Faerie,” which is a heavy seven-minute ode to a friend who’s committed suicide.
I know that sounds like a drag, but just listen to our man as he belts out the anthemic, hair-raising chorus about how he used to feel all of life’s magic, but now all he can think about is how he’s stuck on this dismal, unforgiving rock where loved ones are stolen from us for no good reason whatsoever. It’s Simpson at his most powerful, that unmistakable voice rising to the forefront and proving why he was once considered one of the preeminent saviors of country music.
Father John Misty, Mahashmashana
Like Only God Was Above Us and Passage du Desir, 43-year-old Father John Misty’s sixth album, Mahashmashana, also has the sound of an artist attempting to suss out his place in the grander scheme of things. Mahashmashana is the sanskrit word for “cremation ground,” and on the album we hear Misty, infamous for being a sort of satirical, cynical, acid-dosed lothario, shed his self-indulgence and arrogance to embrace an earnestness that seems a natural byproduct of his maturation.
Misty was already trending this direction on his previous two releases, including 2018’s wonderful God’s Favorite Customer, but on Mahashmashana, it feels as though he’s approached something akin to total ego dissolution. While in the past, long meandering songs like the two that appear on Mahashmashana (the title track and “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of us All”) would’ve featured self-referential lyrics and an almost crippling sense of self-awareness, that’s not the case here, as Misty evaporates his identity in an outpouring of heady verses that reach Dylan-esque levels of world-building (see: “The king regales his stepsons/when he’s loaded as a gun/says a real man is a like a country/you need a map to find you one/now why do you suppose you must approach the throne with its back up against the wall?/I guess time just makes fools of us all”).
On past records, and at his worst, Misty had a tendency to sound (and, indeed, look) like a college sophomore who microdosed too frequently and was halfway through the semester of a Philosophy 101 class. It seemed like he was trying too hard, using big words and wrestling with big ideas so everyone would think he was the smartest person in the room.
I say this as a fan: the genesis of Father John Misty as an identity may have been an act of self-indulgence, but it was an undoubtedly successful means of career revitalization, considering he released seven mostly-forgotten albums under the name J. Tillman (his real name is Josh Tillman) before hitting it big(ish) as Father John Misty. He’s kept his outsize image from veering into insufferable self-importance by deploying absurdist humor and self-deprecation (see the lyrics: “I’m merely a minor fascination to/manic virginal lust and college dudes/I’m beginning to see the end/of how it all goes down between me and them/some ten-verse chorus-less diatribe/plays as they all jump ship, ‘I used to like this guy.’”).
It’s an image that works because it’s a personality type everyone has encountered at some point in their lives: the well-read, slightly debauched misanthrope who’s above it all…and probably high, too.
Misty still maintains this image to an extent, but not to the level he once did, and much of his previous posturing is tempered on this year’s album. What we’re left with is a guy writing great songs by letting the words flow through him instead hammering them out by thinking “what would be the smart thing to say here?” It does feel as though Misty has reached something resembling transcendence, but don’t take my word for it, take these lyrics from the final verse of the title track, which are as good as anything I’ve heard in quite some time: “A perfect lie can live forever/the truth don’t fair as well/it isn’t perched on lips mid-laughter/it ain’t the kind of thing you tell/like there’s no baby in the king cake/like there’s no figure on the cross/it has gone the way of all flesh/and what was found is lost.”
Adrianne Lenker, Bright Future
From fabled try-hard Misty we turn to Adrianne Lenker, who’s something like Misty’s polar opposite, a pastoral rags-dressed artist who seems more pure creative conduit than human being. Lenker has fronted the band Big Thief for eight years, but it’s her last two solo albums that have resonated with me: 2020s fantastic double-album Songs and Instrumentals and this year’s even-better Bright Future, both of which could be described as stripped down, pastoral and lo-fi (if not in production quality, at least in spirit).
On both records, she proves why there’s no modern songwriter better at expressing the highs and lows of the human condition. If her music could be summed up in a single mantra, it’d be something along the lines of the whole world must be felt. Lenker is uncommonly gifted at making the listener feel exactly what she’s feeling, through obtuse yet precise poetry. She very well may be, as some random YouTube commenter put it, our generation’s Neil Young. Time will bear that out, but she’s well on her way.
How does she pull it off? Some combination of voice, which is raw, innocent, yearning and slightly androgynous, and lyrics, which are often visceral, and highlight the blinding beauty/tiny horrors of the natural world and human relationships. One instant she’s singing about a gentle moment at home while her significant other cooks dinner (“Stove light glows like a fire/we’re sitting on the kitchen floor/just when I thought I couldn’t feel more/I feel a little more.”) the next she’s wailing about the hollowness of a parasitic partnership (“You give me chills/I’ve had it with the chills/I am nothing, you are nothing, we are nothing with the pills/empty ‘til she fills/alive until she fills/in her vampire empire, I’m the fish and she’s my gills.”)
It’s Lenker’s willingness to lay it all bare, the ethereal and the obscene, that has made her one of the most fascinating songwriters of the past decade. On Bright Future, as she approaches her mid-30s, she seems more comfortable and capable than ever. The songs are less impressionistic and more defined, the voice more prominent, the choruses more singable, the whole endeavor more radio-friendly (relatively speaking). It’s no wonder, then, that it’s the first of her solo albums to be nominated for a Grammy.
It’s a recognition she’s earned while refusing to take short cuts, because in an industry full of artifice, of people donning cowboy hats and cosplaying as country artists, Lenker seems fundamentally allergic to putting on airs (although, it would seem, not opposed to wearing cowboy hats), and simply continues to churn out timeless music with little interest in being anything else but herself, which by all measures is more than enough.
Two Others: A Boomer and a Zoomer
I’d be remiss not to mention two more stellar albums released in 2024, one by a Zoomer and another by a Boomer. Twenty-five-year-old Asheville native M.J. Lenderman unveiled Manning Fireworks in September, a record that wouldn’t feel out of place in Neil Young’s discography: the guitar work has an feral Crazy Horse vibe to it, and Lenderman’s lyrical work, which calls to mind the late great David Berman (of Silver Jews semi-fame), is witty and wise beyond its years. It’s a quick, loud and lyrically-dense nine-song record that should be played, under all circumstances, at max volume, wild and unhinged as it is. Lenderman proves that guitar music, in the right hands, is as powerful today as it’s ever been.
Then there’s Nick Cave (and his band, The Bad Seeds), who was born in 1957, and released Wild God, perhaps the best record in his 18-album discography, in August. Cave is an interesting guy: he was a goth-rock, post-punk, prince of darkness figure who released some solid-but-niche music early in his career, but has grown more universally palatable as he’s gotten older. His late-era albums are infamously morose and grief-laden, for understandable reasons: he’s had to bury two sons, one who fell off a cliff at the age of 15, the other who was found dead in a motel at the age of 22. Wild God, while saturated with the requisite amount of brooding darkness, allows flickers of light to partially illuminate the void, both in the sweeping instrumental/vocal arrangements, as well as some comparatively optimistic lyrics: “We’ve all had too much sorrow,” he sings on the aptly titled “Joy,” “now is the time for joy.”
Counterpoint: Kanye West
Let me be clear: it’s not a foregone conclusion that an artist you’ve loved, even for an extended period of time, will continue to make music you love, or even like, for that matter. I offer Kanye West as a prime example: I, like so many people, adored his first five (maybe his first seven) albums, but with the release of ye in 2018, there was a steep drop off in quality that has dampened West’s legacy (the unhinged behavior and anti-Semitism didn’t help either).
Accepting that an artist once capable of recording some of your favorite music of all time is now unable to create a single track that resonates is a practice in grief, for sure, but it’s also a reminder of how special it is when a musician is able sustain their muse, in its ever-evolving form, as they approach and cross into middle-age. It’s a difficult feat to pull off, especially under the gaze of adoring fans, and because of this I can’t even fault musicians who fall short. Indeed, it’s their failures that make years like 2024 all the more exceptional, and it’s also a reminder that even though I, too, am rapidly approaching middle-age, my best years don’t necessarily have to be behind me.
If Father John Misty can record a song like “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All” at the age of 43, if Nick Cave can write a song like “Wild God” at the age of 67, if 40-year-old Ezra Koenig can bounce around on stage like he’s still in his 20s, maybe there’s hope for me yet, even if my legs do feel stiff as unboiled spaghetti after dancing in the pit for almost three hours.
My favorite albums from 2024
- Trail of Flowers by Sierra Ferrell
- Only God Was Above Us by Vampire Weekend
- Manning Fireworks by M.J. Lenderman
- Mahashmashana by Father John Misty
- Bright Future by Adrianne Lenker
- Passage du Desir by Sturgill Simpson
- Wild God by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
- Down in the Pitch by Jessica Pratt
- Endlessness by Nala Sinephro
- Mr. Sweet Whisper by Johnny Coley
Michael Schoeffel is a writer, firefighter, husband and father based in Staunton. You check out more of his work on his Substack and Ourland Mag.
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