Skeleton at the Feast 2023
Hey all. A full report from Dew Point Farm will be coming your way soon, but before the giving season completely slips away, I wanted to share with y’all our annual playlist of songs of the year — which harks back to a simple-living tradition we started more than 12 years ago, as a way to give thoughtful, low-impact gifts to our best friends.
It’s called Skeleton at the Feast, which has always felt like a nice gut check as we wade through family buffets and holiday treats, always weighing if that piece of pie is, as Prue Leith might say, worth the calories. The Skeleton list has migrated from physical CDs, to MP3 downloads, to Spotify playlists. (The old 88-minute time limit foisted on us by the compact disc still remains, though, and I still make cover art.)
I’ll go ahead and drop the playlist here, so you can press play whilst you’re reading.
I still make a physical disc for our household, and that’s what I consider the master list. Not to brag, but it’s better than Spotify for a few reasons:
It has liner notes you can hold in your hands and read. And bigger cover art.1
It usually features a few funny soundbites from TV shows or podcasts we’ve enjoyed throughout the year (This year there are clips from the “Poker Face” episode “Exit Stage Death,” which parodies theater with a production of a play called “Ghosts of Pensacola,” which seemed fitting for this old Pensacola boy).
It sometimes has songs that aren’t available on Spotify, including, this year, Ted Leo’s fantastic “The Clearing of the Land.” It was recorded to benefit Ukraine and is available for a buck on Bandcamp. Call this a bonus track for you guys…
So, I probably should’ve said this before telling you to play the mix: it’s for mature audiences. Not only is there a sprinkling of F-bombs — oops! — but the listener needs to understand, for instance, that when Blondshell sings, “Look what you did, you make a killer of a Jewish girl,” she’s talking about American stereotypes, not Gaza.
In fact, if there’s a theme to this year’s songs, Blondshell’s “Salad” epitomizes it well. Jenn likes to say she’s fond of “pretty things that can kill you.” It’s in reference to nature. Usually.2 But women make a particularly prominent impact on the list. Among the hardest rockers are Black Honey, an English band fronted by Izzy Baxter, whose voice is pretty and clear as fine crystal. Among the punkiest punksters are The Bobby Lees, whose singer, Sam Quartin, lets out psychotic cackles that make you wonder if she was led to the studio still in her straitjacket. Gina Birch’s triumphant post-Raincoats return3 has a Brill Building sound thick enough to make Phil Spector weep from the grave (which, I mean, good). I wrestled with, literally, five tracks from Susanne Sundfør’s marvelous “Blómi” album before landing on one of the more quirky tracks. And Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker climbs from sleepy verses to impassioned wail in what may be the single-best song here.
You go, girls.
We’ll talk farming soon. Happy New Year!
About this year’s cover: it depicts the figure of Death, riding a skeletal horse, firing arrows through feast-goers. It is adapted from "The Triumph of Death," a fresco in the Sicilian city of Palermo (my grandfather’s home), created circa 1400. It is possibly, but not assuredly, by Guillaume Spicre.
Such as harpy eagles, coral snakes, dyeing dart frogs, and our pit-mix rescue, Lula.
Speaking of triumphant returns, hats off to the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies. Their selection on the list is not only about my stomping ground of Columbus, Georgia — the northernmost navigable point on the Chattahoochee River — but actually name drops my Bibb City hood and blues legend Ma Rainey.