Middle Eight’s best of 2019 in music: albums, songs and festivals

In the spirit of looking back at the year in music, here are a few words on the best of what I heard and experienced in 2019.

Midnight Oil at the Big Red Bash festival at the base of the Big Red sand dune west of Birdsville, Queensland. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

In the spirit of looking back at the year in music, here are a few words on the best of what I heard and experienced in 2019.

Best album: ZUU by Denzel Curry. The US rapper’s fourth release is a fresh, compelling and propulsive document of his hometown of Carol City, Miami, with innovative Australian beat-making duo FNZ in charge of production. (Runners up: Triumph & Disaster by We Lost The Sea, Slaves of Fear by HEALTH, and Ghosteen by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds.)

Best song: Birdz by Denzel Curry. My favourite track from ZUU, built on an obscenely huge FNZ beat that continues to blow my mind every time I hear it. (Runners up: 7empest by Tool, Old Man by Stella Donnelly, and Noses in Roses, Forever by Desert Sessions.)

Best debut: Tones and I, the singer-songwriter who rewrote the pop history books with her global smash hit, Dance Monkey. What might 2020 have in store for the artist born Toni Watson?

Best concert: Midnight Oil at the Big Red Bash festival, in the desert near Birdsville. That band and those songs in that location? A once-in-a-lifetime event that I’m so glad to have witnessed.

Best festival: Dark Mofo in Hobart, which also happened to be the locale for a pair of best concert runners-up in instrumental trio Dirty Three and electronic musician Nicolas Jaar.

Best awards night: The Australian Women in Music Awards in Brisbane, where the acceptance speeches were each thoughtful, insightful and inspiring, and where 89-year-old country singer-songwriter Joy McKean charmed the socks off everyone in attendance while accepting her lifetime achievement award.

Best film: S&M2 by Metallica. A staggeringly powerful document of the US heavy metal band performing with the San Francisco Symphony, 20 years after that pairing first occurred.

Best book: Tell Me Why by Archie Roach, a beautifully written autobiography that captures one of the most remarkable lives in Australian music. (Runners up: Grant & I by Robert Forster, and The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer — both of which were published some years ago, but which I only read this year.)

Best interview: Paul McCartney, published in these pages last week, for the simple and selfish reason that the chance to speak with the world’s greatest living songwriter — ostensibly about his new children’s picture book — immediately shot to No 1 on my list of career highlights. Thank you, Sir Paul.

Best delivery room soundtrack: The original score to the HBO television series The Leftovers, by composer Max Richter, for that is what my wife and I chose to play while we welcomed our son, Hunter, into the world. Richter’s score is by turns emotional, uplifting and terrifying, which also happens to be an apt summary of my experience of parenthood, eight months in.