Dear listeners,
As we look back at 2024, it’s important to honor the many great musicians we lost this year. Over the past 12 months, we’ve said goodbye to some towering legends of American song (Quincy Jones, Kris Kristofferson), beloved cult heroes of underground music (Steve Albini, Can vocalist Damo Suzuki), and pop idols of different cultures and generations (the Shangri-Las’ Mary Weiss, One Direction’s Liam Payne, and the French icon Françoise Hardy, to name just a few). On today’s playlist, all of their disparate sounds and styles will mingle as one long, eclectic musical memorial.
Since this is also the final Amplifier of 2024, I’d like to thank each and every one of you for reading, listening and sending me feedback about this newsletter. I’m so appreciative of this community of music enthusiasts we have all created together.
And on that note, there’s still time for you to fill out this submission form and tell me all about your favorite song you discovered in 2024. I may use your recommendation to assemble a reader-suggested playlist early next year.
See you in 2025.
Such a long, long time to be gone, and a short time to be there,
Lindsay
Listen along while you read.
1. Melanie: “Ruby Tuesday”
The Queens-born folk singer-songwriter Melanie Safka, who died in January at 76, was best known for her winsome 1971 ode to roller-skating, “Brand New Key.” As fun as that tune is, it doesn’t show off the full gale force of Melanie’s voice. Her powerful 1970 cover of this Rolling Stones classic, though, certainly does.
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2. The Shangri-Las: “Remember (Walkin’ in the Sand)”
Mary Weiss, the lead singer of the Shangri-Las, was just 15 when several of her group’s biggest hits were released, including “Leader of the Pack” and this gloriously melodramatic ballad. On her deeply felt adolescent symphonies, Weiss could oscillate between an impassioned wail and tough-talking spoken word — a distinctive approach that proved hugely influential. She died in January at 75.
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3. Duane Eddy: “Rebel Rouser”
In the late 1950s, Duane Eddy found success with his flashy, innovative style of guitar playing, full of resonant echo, vibrato and bass-heavy staccato notes. John Fogerty once called Eddy, who died in April at 86, “the first rock ’n’ roll guitar god.” This timelessly cool instrumental hit from 1958 explains why.
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4. Cissy Houston: “Think It Over”
Cissy Houston was known as an accomplished gospel singer and member of the in-demand backing vocal group the Sweet Inspirations (not to mention, of course, being Whitney’s mother), but her long recording career encompassed a wide variety of genres. In 1978, for example, she had a hit with this flashy, fiery disco tune. She died in October at 91.
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5. The Contortions: “Contort Yourself”
The singer, songwriter and saxophonist James Chance, who died in April at 71, was a central figure in New York’s no wave scene, in which he specialized in a unique fusion of free jazz and punk rock. “He could lure you in with being so cute and so jerky, with the whole downtown thing,” his occasional collaborator Debbie Harry once said. “But then he would do things that were really very advanced musically.” This blurting, angular track, from his band the Contortions’ 1979 debut, “Buy,” is a quintessential taste of Chance’s signature style.
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6. Big Black: “Kerosene”
Underground rock suddenly lost one of its most beloved and principled curmudgeons in May, when the musician and prolific audio engineer Steve Albini died at 61. The list of Albini’s production credits is long and legendary, including Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa” and Nirvana’s “In Utero,” among many others. But as a member of bands like Big Black and Shellac, Albini also pushed sonic boundaries on his own albums. This corrosive and strangely incantatory track from Big Black’s great 1986 LP “Atomizer” is a clear highlight in his storied discography.
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7. Can: “Paperhouse”
In 1970, the members of the German experimental band Can were looking for a new lead singer and found the perfect fit in a young Japanese artist named Damo Suzuki. Though Suzuki, who died in February at 74, was part of Can for only three years, it was an indelible era during which the band produced its 1971 masterpiece “Tago Mago” (the drifting “Paperhouse” is its leadoff track) and scored an unexpected hit with the atmospheric “Spoon.” Suzuki’s improvisational, often indecipherable vocals mirrored the freewheeling energy of Can’s idiosyncratic take on psychedelia.
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8. Shakti with John McLaughlin: “Mind Ecology”
Just a few days ago, on Dec. 15, the peerless tabla musician Zakir Hussain died at 73. “Throughout the years,” wrote Jon Pareles, Hussain “appeared on hundreds of albums, equally at home with Indian classical traditions and fresh multicultural hybrids.” This opening track from “Natural Elements,” his group Shakti’s 1977 album with the guitarist John McLaughlin, is an enthralling display of Hussain’s percussive virtuosity.
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9. The Allman Brothers Band: “Ramblin’ Man”
Following the untimely death of Duane Allman in 1971, Dickey Betts stepped to the forefront of the Allman Brothers Band, becoming the group’s lead guitarist and occasional vocalist and songwriter. Betts, who died in April at 80, handles all three of those duties on this warm, wistful rocker — the group’s highest charting hit — from the 1973 album “Brothers and Sisters.”
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10. Grateful Dead: “Box of Rain”
“His tone was rounded and unassertive while he eased his way into the counterpoint,” Jon Pareles wrote in a beautiful appraisal of the Grateful Dead’s singular bassist, Phil Lesh, “almost as if he were thinking aloud.” Never content to simply stand in the background and hold down the rhythm, Lesh embroidered the Dead’s songs with adventurous, melodic bass melodies and occasionally took on songwriting and vocal duties, as he did on the warm, ruminative 1970 track “Box of Rain.” Lesh died at 84 in October.
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11. Toby Keith: “How Do You Like Me Now?!”
Toby Keith was one of country’s pre-eminent hitmakers of the late 1990s and 2000s, but through his most combative songs, like “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (An Angry American),” came to be known as a divisive bard of American exceptionalism. As Jon Caramanica wrote in a sharp appraisal of Keith, who died in February at 62, this made his career “an object lesson in how one incandescent and hard-to-ignore moment can shine so brightly that it obscures more nuanced truths below.” This title track from his hit 1999 album better showcases the side of Keith that was, as Caramanica puts it, “a sly humorist, a good-natured blowhard, a chronicler of what really happens below thick skin.”
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12. One Direction: “Fireproof”
The boy band One Direction fractured irrevocably on Oct. 16, when one of its members, Liam Payne, died at the tragically young age of 31. His angelic high harmonies make this soft-rock track from the group’s 2014 album “Four” a standout that shows off the seamless blend of One Direction’s five-part harmonies.
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13. Françoise Hardy: “Le Temps de l’Amour”
The French musician Françoise Hardy, who died in June at age 80, embodied youthful Parisian cool when she released her debut album “Tous les Garçons et les Filles” in 1962. Though she’s most famous for the yé-yé pop sound exemplified by this track, Hardy continued to evolve throughout her long career, reinventing her sound and style with the restlessness of a true artist.
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14. Barbara Dane: “Nine Hundred Miles”
Barbara Dane, who died in October at 97, was an activist and a blues singer with a rich, resonant voice and an uncompromising commitment to her politics. Her 1959 recording of the folk standard “Nine Hundred Miles” demonstrates the extraordinary depth she could bring to a performance. As Louis Armstrong once said of Dane in Time magazine, “Did you get that chick? She’s a gasser.”
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15. Kris Kristofferson: “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)”
We lost a great American songwriter in September, when Kris Kristofferson died at 88. Though plenty of other artists made his songs their own, his wry, conversational singing voice had an incomparable charm, heard here on a heartbreakingly romantic single from his 1971 album “The Silver Tongued Devil and I.”
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16. Quincy Jones: “Killer Joe”
Finally, it’s impossible to encompass the talent and vast impact of Quincy Jones, who died in November at 91, in a single track: As a producer, bandleader, arranger, composer and solo artist, he single-handedly helped define the sound of American music in the second half of the 20th century. Ben Sisario put together a 14-track playlist that just begins to scratch the surface of Jones’s output, and here’s one more, from his 1969 album “Walking in Space.” As Wesley Morris put it in a remembrance of Jones, “What you hear in all of that music is a little bit of everything — African percussion and R&B rhythm ideas, percolating alongside fur-coat string arrangements and trans-Atlantic flights of falsetto. It sounds like whatever America is supposed to mean.”
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The Amplifier Playlist
“In Memoriam: Musicians We Lost in 2024” track list
Track 1: Melanie, “Ruby Tuesday”
Track 2: The Shangri-Las, “Remember (Walkin’ in the Sand)”
Track 3: Duane Eddy, “Rebel Rouser”
Track 4: Cissy Houston, “Think It Over”
Track 5: The Contortions, “Contort Yourself”
Track 6: Big Black, “Kerosene”
Track 7: Can, “Paperhouse”
Track 8: Shakti with John McLaughlin, “Mind Ecology”
Track 9: The Allman Brothers Band, “Ramblin’ Man”
Track 10: Grateful Dead, “Box of Rain”
Track 11: Toby Keith, “How Do You Like Me Now?!”
Track 12: One Direction, “Fireproof”
Track 13: Françoise Hardy, “Le Temps de L’Amour”
Track 14: Barbara Dane, “Nine Hundred Miles”
Track 15: Kris Kristofferson, “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)”
Track 16: Quincy Jones, “Killer Joe”
Bonus Tracks
Looking for some festive music over the holidays? We’ve got you covered: Here’s a playlist full of brand-new Christmas tunes, selected by our critics, featuring tracks from Kelly Clarkson, Orville Peck, Saweetie and more. We also have some recommended new or rereleased holiday albums, featuring Jennifer Hudson, Megan Moroney, Jacob Collier and plenty of others. May your listening be merry and bright!
The post In Memoriam: the Musicians We Lost in 2024 appeared first on New York Times.
