The year that was 2023 has come and gone, and we’re left with a lot of pieces I don’t know what to do with. I’ve really been struggling with managing my depression and anxiety, and coupled with the downhill road my diabetes seems to be taking and the less-than-stellar side effects some of the medication has had on me (as well as the shitty effects when I have to stay off my meds for two weeks in order to assess if the aforementioned side effects were from a specific medication (they were)) and the new joy of moving on to weekly injections has left me feeling numb and uninterested in almost everything.

I took some solace, however, in the fact that – like always – music was there to help.

As usual, I wrote about my favorite metal and metal-adjacent albums over at Nine Circles, spending about 11,200 words extolling the virtues of my favorite hard rock and progressive albums, my usual 15 Honorable Mentions, and my ranked top 25 metal albums of the year. That’s 49 albums, but that doesn’t scratch the surface of the music that positively affected me over the course of the year. So if you can’t get enough of my dumb pontifications, I also recorded a 2 hour podcast with my friend Dan Kaplan about some of my favorite non-metal albums of 2023, which you can listen to right here, or your favorite podcast streamer of choice (we’re the Nine Circles Audio Thing). I’m slightly embarrassed by it, not for the music choices but for my inability to really speak coherently about them – one of the things I’ve been experiencing over the last month or so is a heavy brain fog. I’ve been forgetting things, names and even albums (please hear (or not) my completely inability to name the latest Sufjan Stevens albums, which I loved). It hasn’t been uncommon for me to realize I have to do something, walk downstairs and then utterly forget why I went downstairs.

Getting old is fun, isn’t it?!

Anyway, you can read all about my favorite metal album in the links above. For the record, here is the list of non-metal albums I spoke about on the podcast to save you the pain of hearing me stumble around incoherently (links to Bandcamp where available):

• Group 1: Rock
  • Jeff Rosenstock – Hellmode
  • Osees – Intercepted Message
  • The Damned – Darkedelic
  • Uriah Heep – Chaos & Colour
• Group 2: Just Left of Rock
  • Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit – Weathervanes (this was my album of the year)
  • Sweeping Promises – Good Living is Coming for You
  • Paramore – This is Why
  • Mike Keneally – The Thing That Knowledge Can’t Eat
• Group 3: We’ve Moved Off the Rock Highway
  • Blonde Redhead – Sit Down for Dinner
  • Everything But the Girl – Fuse
  • Lana Del Ray – Did You Know There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd
  • Sufjan Stevens – Javalin
• Group 4: I’m Lost (Off the Rock Highway Part 2)
  • Sunwatchers – Music is Victory Over Time
  • The Reds, Pinks and Purples – The Town That Cursed Your Name
  • Parannoul – After the Magic
  • David Murray, Questlove & Ray Angry – Plumb

One thing none of my lists touched on was the vast amount of prog I listened to in 2023, so part of my plan/hope is to cover those albums here. I’m trying to help bolster the content over at Nine Circles so my more personal writing has been getting behind more and more. Hopefully I can change that a bit. There’s so many new albums, music discovered or re-discovered, that I want to not only share with you, but want to better understand for myself why I like it.

So thanks for bearing with me and this site if you happen to read or follow it. I hope music was there for you last year, and I hope it continues to be a source of comfort, amazement, and wonder in the future.