These days, composer and guitarist Michael Chorney is probably best known for his work with Anaïs Mitchell on her recent Broadway hit Hadestown, for which he won a Tony Award earlier this year (he plays in the band every night too). But a dive into his extensive discography wouldn’t uncover many other numbers meant for the stage. Half of his albums are ambient guitar instrumentals, and even the ones with “songs” tend toward the weird and woolly.

“Bewildered” comes from that latter group, a slippery composition played with his quartet Hollar General. A jazz combo playing folk music, the band takes a simple enough template and expands it in strange and sublime directions. It works beautifully to kick off their enigmatic and wonderful 2012 album Dispensation of the Ordinary. Just don’t expect to see it on the Great White Way anytime soon.

Check out more entries in our month-long series on The Best Songs of the 2010s.

The post The Best Songs of the 2010s: Michael Chorney and Hollar General, “Bewildered” appeared first on County Tracks.

When you hear “parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme,” you no doubt imagine the bucolic harmonies of “Scarborough Fair.” But Jason Cooley borrows the phrase in “Hit,” and he’s certainly no Simon or Garfunkel. The punk shouter roars the line at 11, just as he roars every line, hollering his voice hoarse in the span of a pretty short song (half of which is a guitar solo).

Channeling the rough-and-ready likes of Black Flag or OFF!, “Hit” makes no pretensions to being more than a very catchy, very loud rock song. The lyrics, such as they are, barely matter (the only reason he evokes that Simon & Garfunkel line in the first place is to rhyme with…”I got no rhyme”). The song is all energy, attitude, and volume. “I need a hit, not just a little bit,” goes the chorus. There is nothing “little bit” about this one.

Check out more entries in our month-long series on The Best Songs of the 2010s.

The post The Best Songs of the 2010s: Blue Button, “Hit” appeared first on County Tracks.

Though this band hailed from Vermont, you’d be forgiven for guessing they came out of Austin’s famous psych-rock scene. Loud and droney, they channel the likes of that city’s Black Angels or, from just north of their own state’s border, Montreal’s Besnard Lakes. “Head Out” caps out at 3:38, but one can imagine a song like this stretching to three or four times the length live.

Crater Lake only released a single EP in 2015 and appears to have left little other footprint (it took me ages to even track down their long-defunct Facebook page). Hopefully these four are still getting psychedelic somewhere.

Check out more entries in our month-long series on The Best Songs of the 2010s.

The post The Best Songs of the 2010s: Crater Lake, “Head Out” appeared first on County Tracks.

The song titled “I Don’t Want to Go to Heaven” comes off an album titled Bury Me Not. Sensing a theme here? A lot preemptive belligerence about their postmortem affairs, especially given that all Pariah Beat’s band members appeared to be in their 20s at the time.

But the thematic links run deeper than six feet under. All the quintet’s song titles sound like blues or country standards off some old Alan Lomax collection, and the fiddle-and-guitar music holds tradition just as close. “I Don’t Want to Go to Heaven” brings an old-time hootenanny feel to a newly-written song.

Perhaps their morbid attitude was prescient: eight years after this song, the band is indeed dead. But they found life after death, in a new offshoot, the equally honky-tonkin’ Western Terrestrials.

Check out more entries in our month-long series on The Best Songs of the 2010s.

The post The Best Songs of the 2010s: Pariah Beat, “I Don’t Want to Go to Heaven” appeared first on County Tracks.

On another great song of theirs, “Dead Summer,” the band Thompson Gunner incorporate a little bit of Hall & Oates. But that poppy, peppy duo couldn’t be much further from their own sound. Warren Zevon, after whom they borrowed their name, is closer, but still nowhere near gruff enough. Singer Caleb Thomas roars and growls like Lucero’s Ben Nichols, Americana-punk at his rawkiest.

“Rutland Song,” off the same 2012 album (the band’s only to date, though they’ve been dropping Facebook hints about a comeback), needs to be played loud. Sounding like Bob Seger on Skid Row, the lyrics desperately demand good music as a lifeline away from an otherwise hopeless future. If Bruce Springsteen had recorded Nebraska as loudly as possible, after gargling some Drano, it might sound like “Rutland Song.”

Check out more entries in our month-long series on The Best Songs of the 2010s.

The post The Best Songs of the 2010s: Thompson Gunner, “Rutland Song” appeared first on County Tracks.

What is the titular castle the characters in Lowell Thompson’s Americana gem “Castle” plan to meet at? A music video – which might be fan-made, his website doesn’t include it – takes the word literally, using old footage of a knight and princess dancing in front of a castle (albeit one only two feet taller than they are). I doubt that’s what Thompson had in mind.

His protagonist doesn’t exactly sound like royalty, for one, with a car that leaks gas all over the road. He’s more of a lovelorn romantic offering his would-be princess a rather limp pitch: “Do you think that you could let him go, and, if so, would you consider me?” That doesn’t exude courtly confidence. He even admits his un-wooed addressee thinks he’s “barely man enough.” He sounds less like a knight in shining armor and more like a fumbling Zach Braff character, which makes him all the more sympathetic.

Check out more entries in our month-long series on The Best Songs of the 2010s.

The post The Best Songs of the 2010s: Lowell Thompson, “Castle” appeared first on County Tracks.

As a former New York City resident, I can think of few neighborhoods I’d rather live in than the Upper West Side. Old money and overpriced, overprecious grocery stores every block – no thanks. But the Smittens’ gloriously catchy indiepop song almost makes the UWS appealing.

It’s not really about the Upper West Side, of course, but what it represents: ambition, upward mobility, making a change. To quote a famous family that went from the outer boroughs to the Upper East Side: movin’ on up. This charming paean to self improvement mixes all this in with silly nonsense phrases, and the occasional glimpse of darkness peeking through the pep (witness the chipper “I don’t want to live at all!” closing sing-along).

If the Smittens were based in New York, they probably would live somewhere young and trendy like Greenpoint or Bushwick. But they might still dream of living the good life on the Upper West Side.

Check out more entries in our month-long series on The Best Songs of the 2010s.

The post The Best Songs of the 2010s: The Smittens, “Upper West Side” appeared first on County Tracks.

In anyone else’s hands, the “bojotar” might be a pricey parlor trick. The inventor of this hybrid instrument, Vermont singer-songwriter Bow Thayer, combined a banjo, resonator guitar, and electric guitar into one axe. But this is a far cry from one of those one-man bands busking in the subway with some ramshackle contraption strapped to his back. The bojotar doesn’t look or sound particularly strange, but it gives Thayer a twangy slide/picking combo impossible to achieve with a traditional instrument.

He eventually got a guitar company to make them properly (they appear to be sold out now) and wrote “Lympus” on the company’s prototype. The song’s a spooky traveller’s tale steeped in folklore; it could be hundreds of years old if it didn’t make references to meth labs and King Arthur Flour. Bow worked with Levon Helm before his passing and that Band lineage comes through powerfully here. Someone get Robbie Robertson a bojotar.

Check out more entries in our month-long series on The Best Songs of the 2010s.

The post The Best Songs of the 2010s: Bow Thayer, “Lympus” appeared first on County Tracks.

Proper dental hygiene seems an odd inspiration for a garage-rock song. But from the recurring line that gave this song its title – “My teeeeth are nice and cleeeaaaannn” – “Teeth” veers into all sorts of oddball directions. It’s a love song for a minute, then a meta song about songwriting itself.

Musically, it never quite settles either. Any moshpit that gets going during that first, extremely mosh-ready minute will soon find itself flummoxed. The thrashing rock song periodically lurches into half-time, like yanking the emergency brake on a train hurtling down the tracks. Singer Ben Roy and his rough-and-tumble band ably handle the twists and turns on this strange rock gem.

Check out more entries in our month-long series on The Best Songs of the 2010s.

The post The Best Songs of the 2010s: Pistol Fist, “Teeth” appeared first on County Tracks.

“Foxy folk” was the genre tag Abbie Morin adopted on 2015 solo album Shadowproof. The catchy branding isn’t accurate anymore. Like bandmate Caroline Rose, Morin has recently changed sounds (band names too in this case; Morin now performs as Hammydown). But it wasn’t entirely accurate then either. “Foxy folk” doesn’t really capture a song like “Better Half.”

On record, it’s more like foxy indie-rock, upbeat and energetic and incredibly catchy. Even when using the cutesy genre tag, Morin clearly had ambitions broader than it. In a full-band radio session, the song incorporates a blaring sax solo (played by Taylor Smith, of actual folk group Cricket Blue). Even when performing the song on acoustic guitar – the folkiest instrument – Morin would often have electric-guitar wiz Tom Pearo adding avant-garde jazz accents. Foxy, maybe, but “Better Half” looks far beyond folk.

Check out more entries in our month-long series on The Best Songs of the 2010s.

The post The Best Songs of the 2010s: Abbie Morin, “Better Half” appeared first on County Tracks.