I started reading a few very different musician biographies a bit for the first time this year. I've never been so interested in the "story behind the music"—how the biographical content relates to specific songs—but I do like learning about how people come to develop their music and take it seriously, whether they have the confidence or not, and whether it’s respected or not. frequently there is this internal battle for a musician, or an artist in general ("Why am I doing this? Who cares?") and somehow reading about other people doing it helps, though it never answers the question.

One of my favorite things to hear this year was a recording of Robert Wyatt singing "Experiences No. 2" by John Cage (lyrics by e. e. cummings), which a friend had showed to me a while back, but I hadn't really listened to fully until reading about it in the recent Robert Wyatt biography by Marcus O'Dair. To me, it captures John Cage's music in a way it could be captured more often. With a distinctive voice like Wyatt's, what comes out is a beautiful thing of conviction that is steered away a bit from the place to which it usually goes, and doesn't feel polite or restrained, as it can sometimes when more classical music-minded people perform it. The recording has this powerful yearning quality, with Wyatt's ageless and pure voice, and feels infinite, it could just go on and on, an endless loving ode.