This Year: 2022

"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.

This is not a Christmas song. Today's post has nothing to do with today; it's the end of the series that I've been doing all year. Sorry to disappoint you, or maybe happy to reassure you, depending.

This is the end. But I've liked writing about music once a week, and will have something new for 2024 - the fact that last week was a two-woman duo and today is a solo artist might just be a hint as to the direction I'm taking for the new year.

For the last song of the series, for the newest one, I picked a new artist, vastly younger than me and different from me, someone I discovered randomly, with a lovely touching, deeply personal song. All of the things that are great about popular music: it's always moving, always changing, with new people and ideas and sounds and songs.

The last song is Disco Ball by Caitlin Cobb-Vialet.

I’ve never been known for my patience

I love a song that can just drop a line like that in the middle - discursive, introspective, self-aware.

To close out the series, it's - yes, you guessed it! - one last break-up song, one last singer with a head full of regrets and a mouth full of thoughts that come tumbling out.

I’m starting to think you don’t
Want to be seen
I’m stopping myself from believing that you might
Exist on the same plane as me

There are a million ways to say "this isn't working" or "this is already broken." Cobb-Vialet has a great one here - fully fitting the talky, discursive narrator of this song, who runs around and round the same ideas, showing how restless she is at the same time she says so.

I couldn’t wait one more day
But I would wait for a month
For a year
If I had known at the time

This is a lovely, personal, pointed song. I don't know if it's "true," but it's as true as it needs to be for the space of a four-minute song. And it's a great song by a great new talent - Cobb-Vialet was just out of college when this album was recorded, and I think that's still less than two years ago. We could be at the start of decades more music like this: I hope so.