For one fleeting, iridescent spark of a moment, the Red Sox were back. And then they traded Rafael Devers.
That’s at least how it felt yesterday when, mere hours after sweeping the Yankees out of Fenway Park, Boston dealt its franchise cornerstone to San Francisco in a trade that sent shockwaves through the baseball universe and threatened to ruin Father’s Day for dads across New England.
Time flies, man. It’s hard to believe another year has come and gone. But it has, which means only one thing…another edition of America’s Favorite Year-End Music List! That’s right, we’re back for Year 4 of FTL’s Annual Playlist. This year, thanks to the sheer amount of blue-chip music releases (seriously, it felt like everyone put something out in 2024), The List™ is bigger and better than ever. Hold on to your butts and grab a nice pair of headphones. Time to dig into my favorite year of music since starting this list.
Two summers ago, after the Boston Celtics lost the 2022 NBA Finals to the Golden State Warriors, I wrote about the Championship Crucible, and the often fleeting nature of title contention windows. The core question at the heart of that post was simple: Had the C’s (or at least, this iteration of them) squandered their only shot at a championship? Would they get a second chance after wilting on NBA’s biggest stage?
As it turns out, the Celtics are getting another shot at a ring after all. And make no mistake, the team is treating it that way. Jayson Tatum said as much earlier this week:
Ah yes, the first Sunday after the Super Bowl. For 23 weeks straight, we’ve punched in at the content factory like clockwork for a few hours of mindless entertainment each weekend – whether we were watching actually good sports, celebrating our Italian (American) heritage, or enjoying the free word association beat-style poetry of Tony Romo.
But today, after finishing up our trips to the farmer’s market and walking our dogs, there is a Scott Hanson shaped hole in the middle of our afternoon. At least four long hours to fill, and the knowledge that there will be many more such Sundays to slog through in the months to come. (For The Love does not acknowledge the existence of the newly formed UFL).
This weekend, the other shoe finally drops. We’ve felt it coming for some time now. The first day back to work after Christmas and New Years is a shock to the system, yes, but at least playoff football is around the corner – hell, that is right in the middle of Bowl Season if you are into that kind of thing.
Welcome back for another edition of (surely) everyone’s favorite end-of-year music list! We’re officially on Year 3 of this exercise, in which I do my best to keep up with as much new music as humanly possible without feeling like Steve Buscemi wandering the halls of a high school.
Again, this list is a mostly subjective, mostly comprehendible selection of the music that made my year. Hopefully I included your favorite 2023 album, or mention your favorite song. If not…well there was a lot of great music this year, and there’s always room to listen to more! For what it’s worth, I have 2023 as not quite as good as last year, but better than 2021 (although I am open to hearing arguments to the contrary). Regardless, I loved everything mentioned here, and a few things that didn’t make the cut.
Without further ado, let’s kick this thing off with a brand new bonus category!
I regret to inform you, dear reader, that I have lied to you. Okay, maybe not a full-on fib, perhaps exaggeration is a better description? Granted this space has been prone to the occasional melodramatic post so that shouldn’t be too surprising, but I still feel like I should come clean: Last year, despite my insistences to the contrary, was not necessarily a great year for music. While there were certainly a bunch of excellent releases, in hindsight it wasn’t as good on the whole as I thought it was when I put 2021’s version of this list together.
The good news? 2022 was mostly killer, very little filler. At minimum, it certainly felt like there were more big time albums released by big time artists all year long. And, for whatever it’s worth, I had a much tougher time whittling down the 150+ albums I listened to this year into the tidy top 10(ish) list you have before you.
Xander Bogaerts is a San Diego Padre. What a strange sentence to write. But it’s true, all 11 years and $280 million of it. The Red Sox played a dangerous game of chicken for months, and this is the end result: San Diego swooped in with a buzzer beating blockbuster in the final moments of the Winter Meetings, Bogaerts is heading west for the next decade-plus, a day with two substantial Red Sox moves (signing All-Star closer Kenley Jansen and NPB star outfielder Masataka Yoshida) ended more bitter than sweet, and Red Sox Twitter self-immolated spectacularly in a way that only Sox fans scorned can. The reasonable take? Boston could have nipped this all in the bud last winter with a competitive offer. They didn’t, and opened the door for some team–in this case an all-jacked-up-on-Mountain-Dew AJ Preller and his Padres–to throw all of the money and years at Bogaerts and take things to a point where no sane person would be willing to go. Having said that, every sane person would agree that the Red Sox are a worse team today without Xander Bogaerts, and the Padres are a better team. The Red Sox, a team already in search of an identity, just lost a franchise cornerstone and incredible leadership figure. In many ways, it’s almost impossible to assign value to that.
I have been thinking a lot about the pre-2004 Red Sox this week, as the 2022 MLB regular season (and a particularly frustrating Red Sox campaign) came to a close. I don’t think any fan, especially those older than me with an even stronger relationship to the heartbreak wrought by the Curse of the Bambino, would say that they long for those days. And yet, there was something romantic about how 86 years forged an identity for not only a baseball team, but for a fanbase, city, and region. We knew the Red Sox would probably come up short in the end, but we loved them anyway. “There’s always next year” was equal parts coping mechanism and rallying cry. Sure, things might not have worked out this time, but the Sox would be back next April, and so would we.
It’s one of the most indelible images in NBA history: Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden standing courtside, with Sixth Man of the Year Harden’s arms draped over his two All-NBA teammates, looking on from the bench as the Heat wrapped up their gentlemen’s sweep of the Thunder in the 2012 NBA Finals. It was simultaneously a moment of acceptance and defiance—the Thunder were beaten, but seemed galvanized. After all, those three dudes would be unquestionably be back, and this was just part of the learning curve for the NBA’s next great team.
There’s a scene in The Departed where Billy Costigan (Leo DiCaprio’s character) is asked by his probation-mandated psychiatrist to describe how it feels to do what he does as an undercover cop working the Boston mob scene.
Costigan replies: “You sit there with a mass murderer. Your heart rate is jacked. And your hand? Steady. That’s one thing I figured out about myself in prison. My hand does not shake. Ever.“
There might be no better way to describe the 2021-22 Villanova Wildcats than that clip: Clear eyes, jacked hearts, steady hands. No matter how choppy the waters seem to get, these ‘Cats never get lost at sea.
Last year around this time, I wrote about Tom Brady and the internal conflict of rooting for someone who meant so much to me for two decades, even though that person no longer played for the team I care about. It was the first post in this blog’s history (a history that also includes a breakdown of Harry Potter’s Quidditch career and a dissertation of how Real Housewives of New York reflects the decline of American society for those interested), and a lot of words to basically say “I wish Tom Brady was still on the Patriots, and I wish him the best in Tampa, but I’m still like 30% salty about this whole thing”. I probably could have saved a lot of time and energy by just posting Doug and Jem’s fight from The Town and calling it a day:
I spent an arguably unhealthy amount of time listening to music this year. According to the data from Apple Music (yes, I’m one of those people), I listened for 1,023 hours in 2021, and that’s just from that streaming service. Naturally, absorbing that much music is going to lead to likes, dislikes, and opinions ranging from “pretty agreeable” to “this is an insane person”. With the year coming to a close, I figured it’d be a worthwhile exercise to give my top ten albums, plus a few honorable mentions, for this past year. Please note: this is a totally arbitrary list, meaning I’m not entirely sure if it’s the ten best albums I listened to over the last 365-ish days, or my ten favorite, or just the ten I happen to be thinking about at the moment. Either way, here’s my year-end list for 2021. Hopefully you, my dear reader, will find something new that you might have missed, or be reminded of a great album from earlier this year that’s worth revisiting. On to the good stuff!
There’s something special about an album that, upon listening, recalls an extraordinarily specific time and place. The first few seconds of the first track blare over your headphones, speakers, or whatever listening apparatus is handy, and suddenly you’re instantly transported from wherever you are right now to wherever you were when you initially heard that collection of songs.
Baseball, more than any other sport, is truly Shakespearean. Everything happens so gradually, so deliberately, it’s almost impossible to actually be surprised. Even the best plot twists have been foreshadowed ad nauseam, and are less twists than the culmination of an entire play’s worth of intentional choices and actions. We’re not supposed to be shocked by Hamlet’s death, nor Romeo and Juliet’s death, or the end of Richard III’s reign. We’re supposed to reflect on all of the little moments that led to that grand, tragic finale. Baseball is no different. A 162 game season, containing three-and-half-hour marathons with hundreds of pitches and no game clock, leads to end results that may not have been expected in April, but by the time October rolls around are logical conclusions deduced from dozens of key moments over the course of a long campaign.
Last spring, during the height of the pandemic in New York City, I binged Watchmen, both the original comic by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and the HBO miniseries sequel from Damon Lindelof. For the uninitiated, the stories take place in an alternate history in which masked vigilantes are real and the norm. It’s a rich world with incredibly complex characters, and isn’t afraid to tackle huge moral, philosophical, and psychological questions.
There’s a case to be made that “College”, the fifth episode of The Sopranos‘ first season, is the most important television episode of the last 25 years. For those who need a refresher, it’s the episode where Tony takes Meadow on a few college tours in Maine, while Carmela stays home and has an almost-dalliance with Father Phil during a thunderstorm. While in Maine, Tony spots a former rat of his mob Family at a gas station, and, because this is what the mafia does, the trip turns from a fun father-daughter bonding weekend into a vengeance mission that ultimately concludes with Tony strangling the rat (named Febby Petrulio) in Petrulio’s own witness-protection-gifted backyard.
Julian Edelman’s retirement earlier this week was far from a surprise. If anything the writing was on the wall last week, when Patriots beat writer Karen Guregian reported that Edelman was unlikely to be able to play the entirety of the upcoming 2021 season due to the “chronic” knee issues that plagued him last year. So, on Monday when news broke that the Patriots were terminating their star wideout’s contract, I didn’t bat an eye (okay fine, maybe it was a half wink situation). I knew what was coming next.
How awesome is it having March Madness back?
That’s obviously a rhetorical question, for two reasons. First, the ol’ blog post format doesn’t exactly allow for much back and forth discourse. More importantly, though, there’s no need to give a real answer here because the only response should be self-evident:
It’s truly, deeply, intrinsically, exceptionally, fucking awesome.
Christy Moore is a living legend. For five decades now, Christy has been a leading voice in the Irish Folk scene, guiding the genre through a renaissance and reinvention. In 2007, he was named the Greatest Living Musician by RTE, and since then he has put out five new albums. An indefatigable legend at that.
So, during this special time of year, as people across the country are scrambling to put on some Real Irish MusicTM during their pre-games and pub crawls, I think it’s a good time to talk about Christy and his music. But, before we get there, we’ll have to talk about the proverbial green elephant in the room: the Irish.
Over the last few years, there’s been a growing interest in “Dead Malls.” These abandoned shopping centers have become immensely popular in some corners of the internet. There’s something about the photos and videos of these places – something slightly off-putting, but also evocative and nostalgic. But a Dead Mall is more than just some empty stores; it’s a physical manifestation of a past way of life, a past way of thinking, past hopes, dreams, and aspirations.
Dead Malls require us to confront a change in perspective – our change of perspective. In a Dead Mall, the glitzy, exciting, “anything is possible” attitude of the 80s seems a lifetime away. These places hold no promise now. The building may be mostly the same. But something has changed. We have changed.
At 8:10 p.m. on Wednesday, February 24th, I was convinced the Boston Celtics would never win another basketball game again. I’m not talking about this winter, or this season. I was thinking about the rest of eternity, and that the C’s were on the cusp of ceasing to exist, like the Kentucky Colonels or an unsuspecting large Dunkin’ iced around Ben Affleck. These are the thoughts one has when Danilo Gallinari turns into a human three-point tsunami in the midst of a blowout loss to the Hawks.
We are truly living through the golden age of sad music.
Ever since Bon Iver made crying in a cabin sexy again, young artists have been tripping over themselves to bare their hearts and spread the Big Sad™ to listeners worldwide. The last decade and a half has seen the woe-is-me musical movement pop up all over, with artists like Drake and Billie Eilish flexing their Feelings all the way to the top of the charts. But the biggest scene for saddies has always been the indie scene.
And no indie musician has been better at making people sadder than Julien Baker.
It was the autumn of 1991. George H.W. Bush was president of the United States, The Jerry Springer Show had just made its television debut, and Nirvana’s Nevermind was setting the music world on fire. And, in an undisclosed location in the highlands of Scotland, The Boy Who Lived began attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
I am an unabashed supporter of Groundhog Day. I’m a Punxsutawney truther; I would follow that furry little hog to hell and back if his shadow told me to. So as a lover of all things Groundhog Day, it’s no surprise that I would take some time to wax poetic with you, dear reader, about 1993 classic film Groundhog Day, as well as the recent reimagining of the classic infinite time loop situation, Palm Springs.
I had a friend text me a few weeks back asking “Pete, what do you think of Sea Shanty TikTok?” As a longtime lover of the shanty, the question was well warranted. I’ve gotten some version of this meme sent to me, unironically, every year for four years straight during Spotify Wrapped season. So what happens when your niche interests explode into internet superstardom? Let’s explore the journey of the humble shanty.
If nothing else (and I mean absolutely nothing else), 2020’s dire conditions have led to some pretty damn good music. Langhorne Slim’s new record, Strawberry Mansion, is the latest entry into this COVID album canon, and a worthy one at that.
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but a lot of people think that Citizen Kane is a good movie. Hailed by critics as one of the best movies of all time, Citizen Kane has held a pretty comfortable spot at the head of the film canon for quite some time now. But, unlike some of the truly masterful films of our times like Hot Rod, I had never actually seen, nor even met someone who had seen, this lauded film. So I decided to do some digging and see what all this fuss was about.
Waiting is hard.
You’d think Red Sox fans would be used to waiting, having spent 86 years doing exactly that. Four World Series rings in 17 seasons tends to erase a lot of bad memories though, and winning at that rate can shorten the fuse of even the most patient fanbase. Nobody wants to go back to losing once you get that first real taste of glory, and the Fenway Faithful are no exception.
My first favorite New England Patriot was Drew Bledsoe. From the earliest moment I can remember, that was my guy. So, naturally, when Bledsoe was injured on that fateful day in late September of 2001, I was distraught. When Bill Belichick, in a then shocking move decided to stick with the hot hand (some second year QB named Tom Brady) over re-inserting Bledsoe into the starting lineup later that season, I was furious. I had my moment of triumph when Bledsoe saved the day in the AFC Championship Game against the Steelers in January, and couldn’t fathom why Belichick wouldn’t give the only QB I had ever known the chance to lead the underdog Pats against the heavily favored Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI.
For The Love 