My Annual Top 10(ish) songs of the year

6 min readDec 31, 2022

Goodbye 2022. You were mostly not too bad!

Sure, you let Elon Musk buy Twitter for an absolutely stupid amount of money and Ticketmaster charge a similar price for basically every concert ticket for next year. And Taylor Hawkins died. Other than that, you were pretty alright year.

Briefly, how do I come up with this list? It’s insanely simple, I just keep a note on my phone of new songs that I like throughout the year. Then I try to winnow that list down to close to 10. Without further ado, these are my favorite songs of the year:

10.) Noah Kahan “Stick Season” & Theo Kandel “Me And All My Friends Have Got The Blues”

Very sad and emotional folk music made its way to my TikTok for you page throughout the year. Kahan’s Stick Season just sounds like what bleak New England pre-winter feels like when you’re living at home and your friends haven’t returned for the holidays yet. Also, the full Stick Season album has some serious Counting Crows vibes.

Theo Kandel may have written the most heartbreaking tune I heard all year. His future is insanely bright. He’s already writing songs that answers the question of what John Prine would sound like if he was currently in his twenties. There’s a sweet melancholy in that time period that Kandel captures perfectly.

9.) Ben Quad “Blood for the Blood God”

Fun fact about TikTok: You might find songs you like on a video showcasing a guitar pedal that changes tone based on liquid you put inside it. I don’t know quite what elixir makes this insane guitar tone (the video has since been deleted) but what an awesomely weird way to find a great tune.

8.) Jimmy Eat World “Something Loud”

I once said to a friend of mine that Jimmy Eat World is probably my generation’s Cheap Trick. I think that they’d take that as a compliment. Something Loud is one of two singles the venerable Arizona band released this year and its their most Paul Westerberg by way of Rick Nielsen tune to date. This is reserved for summer nights on the road where you race the setting sun to your destination. Who cares who wins as long as you have a soundtrack that’s this good?

7.) Maggie Rogers “That’s Where I Am”

Fellow Cantabrigian (yes, that’s the actual word for someone from Cambridge) Maggie Rogers released one of my favorite pop albums of the year. Not only that but she did get a graduate degree at that big prestigious school in town too while she was at it. This tune is such a catchy earworm from beginning to end.

6.) A Day To Remember feat. Mark Hoppus “Re-Entry”

So, there’s this phenomenon with professional golf that I really like. Basically, it boils down thusly: the really good younger players in tour aren’t afraid to ask questions of the game’s biggest legend, Tiger Woods. He welcomes it, even.

I envision Mark Hoppus getting calls from younger bands in the pop punk/Emo scene asking for songwriting advice in the same way. (He also helped out on a song from a band you’ll find later on in this list.) Re-Entry’s a song that always needed something. Hoppus provides it in the second verse. Sometimes a veteran hand and listening ear makes a big difference.

5.) Bartees Strange “Heavy Heart”

Bartees just rules, man.

He makes some of the best records around and they’re a perfect cocktail of rock, punk, hip-hop, and soul reference packaged into just incredible complex flavors of musical goodness. Farm to Table was one of my favorite albums of the year and “Heavy Heart” was such an awesome introduction to where the rest of the album was going. Here’s hoping that one of those strong influences, The National, picks him up and brings him on tour to a city near you and me.

4.) Harry Styles “As It Was”

Harry’s House was an album you simply couldn’t avoid. Good thing too, because like Bartees Strange above, Harry wears his influences on his sleeve, like millennial middle schoolers wrote theirs on textbook covers, trapper keepers, and with iron on patches adorning their Jansports.

For a first single, this one certainly made its mark. Is it about Olivia Wilde? Is it about something darker afoot? Why the hell is this song this goddamn dancey, too? I’ve learned not to question Harry Styles and his songs. It’s better to just dance like our pop music purveyors have intended.

3.) The 1975 “I’m in Love With You

Sugary sweet pop is normally not Matty Healy’s game. It may sound like it, but I can assure you that it’s not.

This is the first song from the 1975 that’s an outwardly in love song. That’s also not normally Healy’s game. On an album produced expertly by Bleachers frontman and pop purveyor extraordinaire Jack Antonoff, The 1975 are now a lean, less mean pop powerhouse making great records. This band needed an executive editor and who better than the guy who’s produced almost every great pop hit of the last decade.

2.) The Wonder Years “You’re the Reason I Don’t Want the World to End”

I connected with this album in a way I really didn’t expect. I’m not a dad, I’m not even a husband (yet; that’s in the fall, fam). But man, an album so beautifully written by Dan Campbell and company was maybe the one that punched me in the heart the most.

If we’ve learned anything in our world since COVID entered our lives, it’s that we have an important responsibility protect the people, places, and things we hold the closest. For Campbell, it’s his two sons. For the rest of us, it can be any number of things. The world has made us take a pretty stark inventory in what’s important. I think this song’s mantra is one that maybe we should put in that inventory.

Put the work in. Plant a garden. Try to stay afloat.

1.) Gang of Youths “Hand of God/Goal of the Century”

Look, I’m not going to lie to you, reader, who has taken the time to read this list cast amongst thousands of other you’ve seen, read, and subscribed to at this time of the year. Gang of Youths is my favorite band currently doing their thing and they released my favorite record of the year, “angel in real-time.” This album ends with two songs that fit hand in glove that one without the other would be like a mitten lost amongst the newly fallen snow.

Seeing this band live is amongst life’s great pleasures. Seeing them end a set by playing this song, while you’re there with your fiancée a few short months after you’ve popped the question is otherworldly. The world is a complicated place with a brain filled with sports references and questions of what you should or shouldn’t do and who the people you come from are the way that they way are. Introspection is hard to really perfect, but this song does a pretty damn good job trying to get there. Life is a long road filled with many things. Some nights you lie awake while the rain beats across the windows and you think about the person next to you fast asleep or the work assignment you need to do because you got distracted because as John Lennon once said “life is what happens when we’re busy doing other things.”

The point is this: no song maybe made me feel more than hand of god/goal of the century. It’s a pop symphony that’s worth your time.

My Annual Top 10(ish) songs of the year

Written by Greg Cameron