The holiday season is here. Cue chestnuts on open fires, supermall shopping frenzies, and good cheer toward all. And year-end lists — lots and lots of year-end lists.
The year isn’t going to explain itself, and we have a lot to reckon with accounting for whatever the hell it was that happened to us over the last 11-plus months. Lists can help bring some order and sense to a universe that in 2016 proved itself to be, at best, chaotic, and at worst some kind of malevolent experiment designed by a capricious and vengeful God.
As the 2016 autopsies begin to pour in from publications near and far, perhaps we can look for answers in that most popular year-end list format: the best albums ranking. We can at least look for examples of local girls and boys done good on a national level.
Rolling Stone, which released its list of the 50 Best Albums of 2016 this week, may not be the barometer of youthful cool it once was, if it ever was. (The magazine more than lives up to its modern reputation for favoring Boomer legacy acts with Sting, The Rolling Stones, and Elton John all putting in appearances.) Regardless, it may serve as some indication of the North Texas artists who this year grabbed the most attention outside of their native stomping grounds. We’d expect to see these musicians appearing on a few more lists before the year is put to bed.
We have some reservations about calling Maren Morris North Texas’ next big thing, but the country singer is indisputably from Arlington, very good at what she does, and seemingly destined to be a big thing. Her debut, a fun collection of Southern pop tunes called Hero, comes in at No. 13.
Farther east than North Texas, Longview’s Miranda Lambert is at No. 16 with The Weight of These Things.
Parquet Courts, the last great New York rock band from Denton, arrives at No. 17 with Human Performance.
Norah Jones‘ Day Breaks, a return to the kind of soulful jazz that won her all those Grammys almost 15 years ago, is at No. 46. The former UNT jazz student returned to her old stomping grounds and performed in Denton in September.
Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein moved from Dallas to Austin before starting their band, the electronic outfit Survive. This was before Dixon and Stein were tapped to compose the original music for the hit Netflix show Stranger Things, and before that score landed at No. 47 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 50 best albums of 2016.
That’s four or five-ish artists with North Texas ties showing up in a national publication that people occasionally still read. A pretty good showing, even if it appears nobody at Rolling Stone heard the new albums from Sam Lao or RC & The Gritz, or, from last November, The Outfit TX‘s Down By The Trinity, which should still be eligible for inclusion on many lists because of its late release date and the constraints of deadlines and publication schedules.
What other local albums is Rolling Stone sleeping on? What local albums are we forgetting? Please submit your answers in the form of a year-end list. It is the season.
