best of 2015: songs

By Ryan Byrd

music you should know, popular culture, culture, music, lists, mixtape, reviews, favorites, recommendations
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yesterday, i kicked off a week’s worth of my best-of-2015 lists. both the list of new music discoveries and cover songs were stellar and the songs list is no different. here’s the lineup for the week:

yesterday: new music discoveries
yesterday: cover songs
today: songs
tomorrow (wednesday): albums
(thursday: the year’s final two in review)

generally speaking, i’m more of an albums person than a song person. while i’ll post my best albums list tomorrow, i think this songs list might be stronger from front to back. as usual, it tracks relatively closely to the albums list, but i think pound-for-pound, a lot of these hold up better than the album they represent. there’s not a lot of terribly surprising entries on this list. frankly, at the outset of the year, i could’ve predicted a number of these artists would’ve been represented, but nevertheless, there’s some that jockeyed to higher positions that i would’ve assumed. there’s a little bit of everything here, which makes for a strong list of songs.

so, let’s get to it. here’s my top 40 songs of 2015:

40. leon bridges: river

39. jr jr: in the middle

38. ezra furman: ordinary life

37. elbow: lost worker bee

36. ryn weaver: octahate

35. macklemore & ryan lewis: downtown

34. julia nunes: that was us

33. duran duran: pressure off (ft. janelle monae)

32. lianne la havas: what you don’t do

31. major lazer: powerful (ft. ellie goulding)

30. big grams: drum machine