I Woke up to a Decade of Great Music in 2012

6 spectacular albums that helped me start a new life

If you rescued sleeping beauty after a decade of slumber, which albums would you sit down and play for her? Where would you even start to get her caught up on what has changed in the industry or surprised and delighted you personally?

In 2012, I left my husband. He was a control freak and never let me listen to my own music: we “shared” stacks of vinyl carefully vetted by him. We had an incredible music collection — much of which I adored — but 95% of it was pre-1979.

Don’t get me wrong — I love listening to the scratch and screech and wobble of an original press of Bob Dylan. I never tire of David Bowie’s outrageous variety. I could immerse myself in Ella, Count Basie, or Pink Floyd for days on end, interrupted only by the need to flip the record and occasionally sleep.

But I resented not being able to listen to whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I missed Radiohead like a phantom limb. I spent sleepless nights remembering epic Tea Party concerts that utterly undid me.

One of the first things I did after I left — literally within hours — was dig up all my CDs and play them as loud as I dared in my condo. After a couple delightful weeks of this musical orgy, I asked my music-loving cousin what I’d missed over the past decade. He told me to make a Dropbox account and promptly began depositing a curated selection of the best music across various genres.

Listening to these albums was like that moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy walks out the door and into a riot of colour — only this was sound. Sounds I’d only caught in distorted snippets while I walked through a store. I’ve always been a lover of great albums — not just singles — and I was in paradise.

The Black Keys

The first album I played was Brothers from The Black Keys. Okay, okay, so everyone on this planet but me discovered this album in 2009. You were probably sick of it by 2012. But the gritty, bluesy simplicity of this album set the tone for that year of post-relationship blues perfectly.

I’m no music expert, and I won’t pretend to be. But strutting around the tiny bachelor I moved into post-relationship with a double pour of Black Russian while listening to “Sinister Kid” was satisfying on a level I can’t even begin to describe.

And then I met the first post-break-up boy, and “Howling for You” became my anthem. It got me out of bed on those mornings after I’d had too many martinis. Travelling between classes, the music lent my steps a purpose and a punch I could never have mustered on my own.

Chet Faker

The next album lovingly deposited into my Dropbox folder was Chet Faker’s glorious Thinking in Textures, newly released that year. I’d been a pretty big fan of Daft Punk’s Homework, so I was eager to see how electronica had changed since. If Brothers is grungy-blues, Faker’s album is sultry, jazzy, hip-hop electronica. It’s like getting on a spaceship and sailing to Venus.

His cover of “No Diggity” is the most famous on the album, but it’s “Cigarettes and Chocolate” that I listened to while soaking up the sun in the backyard, marking papers and dreaming of an open horizon. Freshly unencumbered, I could go anywhere. I could become anyone.

This kind of sweet, instrumental EDM has changed how I feel my body; going out and dancing to it helped heal my wounded soul. It went hand-in-hand with a daily practice of yoga that remade me from the inside out. It peeled the scales from my eyes and chipped away a layer of despair that had built up like plaque on my bones.

Beirut

For Beirut’s first album, Gulag Orkestar, one incredibly talented Zach Condon recorded not only the vocals but “trumpet, flugelhorn, ukulele, percussion, mandolin, accordion, organ, and piano,” according to the internet. An accordion! I don’t know how to describe this quirky, distinctive, and phenomenal album, so I’ll tell a related story instead.

It was spring, and I was rebuilding my life. Feeling coltish, I’d exchanged many significant looks and flirtatious banter with one of my new neighbours. One afternoon I made a generous batch of cookies and decided I’d like to share. I knocked on his door, and he invited me inside. Gulag was playing; he asked me on a date. We even loved the same music?? I thought. How could I refuse?

The lesson I learned that night was a shared taste in music is in no way a good indicator of compatibility. We went out dancing, and he promptly attempted to dry hump my leg all night despite the way I was forever angling other bodies in between ours. Despite his lack of manners, I had a terrific time with the other dancers out on the floor. Still, I cut the evening short with a very awkward goodbye in our shared backyard.

The strangeness of the night in no way diminished my love for Beirut and I’ve faithfully bought every album they’ve put out since.

Bon Iver

My cousin must have been trying to break my heart open because he also shared Bon Iver’s self-titled album, the indie-folk band’s third. I have trouble expressing how or why, but this music undresses me — in the best possible way.

I put it on just now to write, and I’m already crying, only a few bars in. Maybe it’s muscle memory, from all the crying I did those first months after my marriage broke. Maybe it’s the haunting sounds, echoey but vivid.

Whenever I want to be cast adrift, to feel everything crash around me like a wave and drag me under, this is the album that begs me to press play.

Bonobo

Another electronic album, Black Sands is mainly instrumental. Every album this techno-wizard puts out is shockingly unique yet somehow familiar, as though he’s put sound to a dream you thought you’d forgotten. I’ve bought them all, and I’ve also dug up every random track I could hut down in the darkest corners of the internet.

None of his songs are dance music, yet each one seizes my body and shakes it like a leaf. Trip-hoppy and magical, this album was the perfect accompaniment to late evenings spent marking stacks of English papers, reading comic books, or talking long past midnight with the new friends I suddenly had the time to connect with and savour.

José González

Veneer was almost a decade old already by the time I got to it. That’s okay — this album will never not be breathtaking. It’s short at only 31 minutes, but that just means you can listen to it over and over and over again.

José has gone on to do some big things since, including songs for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which is probably my favourite Ben Stiller film. But his first album is great because it feels like it’s just you and him and his guitar. And maybe a nice bottle of chianti sipped slowly.

Looking at the number of plays on Spotify, I can see that “Heartbeats” is the runaway hit, and I can’t disagree. The whole album deserves your time, though, and your undivided attention.

My favourite thing was putting it on late in the evening under the stars and let him croon me back into believing in love. I’d almost given up hope, but José persuaded me otherwise — not with his words despite their poetry, but with his gentle and persistent fingers, relentlessly teaching the strings to sing.

I can’t imagine that period, or the intervening years, without these albums. They defined that awkward stage of reimagining, recreating my life; they carried me into and through the tumult of emotions and new relationships.

They changed my taste in music, like suddenly learning to savour olives or cilantro. Each one lets me drift back in time and remember that vertiginous and intoxicating feeling of freedom, found and claimed.

Divorce is inevitably a watershed in time; these stellar artists loaded the boat and filled my sails. They transported me safely to a wide-open sea.

What are your favourite albums released between 2002 and 2012? What would you add to this list?