Best songs of 2014

This is no music critic's list, no higher thought allotted into the making of it. I picked the songs I liked best, the ones I played more than others. You might find some embarrassing (Yes, Coldplay and Nick Jonas), but when I look back on this year, this will be what I played and played. Some are stand-ins for others (Like I nearly always listened to Taylor Swift, Too Many Zooz, St. Paul & The Broken Bones, Sinkane, Beyonce as albums. And some have deplorable lyrics ("Try Me"), but this is what was in my headphones as I rode the bus home.


1. Spoon - "Inside Out"

2. I LOVE MAKONNEN f/ Drake - "Tuesday"

3. Beyoncé - "Drunk In Love" (See: nearly any other song on this album. This was just the most ubiquitous)

4. Coldplay - "Magic"

5. FKA Twigs - "Two Weeks"

6. Future Islands - "Seasons (Waiting on You)"

7. The War on Drugs - "Red Eyes"

8. Sharon Van Etten - "Your Love is Killing Me"

9. Taylor Swift - "Out of the Woods"

10. Sinkane - "Mean Love"

11. Too Many Zooz - "To The Top" / "F.W.S."

12. Rae Sremmurd - "No Flex Zone"

13. Todd Terje f/ Bryan Ferry - "Johnny and Mary"

14. Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment - "Sunday Candy"

15. Vic Mensa - "Down On My Luck"

16. Jamie XX - "Sleep Sound"

17. Rick Ross - "Sanctified"

18. White Sea - "They Don't Know"

19. Beyoncé - "Mine"

20. Boots f/ Beyonce - "Dreams"

21. Sinkane - "Young Trouble"

22. Rae Sremmurd - "No Type"

23. Beck - "Blue Moon"

24. Bleachers f/ Grimes - "Take Me Away"

25. How to Dress Well - "Words I Don't Remember"

26. JJ - "All White Everything"

27. Ages and Ages - "Calamity is Overrated"

28. Ought - "Today More Than Any Other Day"

29. Party Next Door - "West District"

30. Dej Loaf - "Try Me"

31. Mac DeMarco - "Brother"

32. J. Cole - "G.O.M.D."

33. Darkside - "Gone Too Soon"

34. Angel Olsen - "Hi-Five"

35. Childish Gambino - "Sober"

36. Grimes - "Go"

37. Nick Jonas - "Jealous"

38. St. Paul & The Broken Bones - "I'm Torn Up"

39. Milosh - "Right Never Comes"

40. P. Reign f/ Drake - "DnF"

Best albums 2014

1. BEYONCÉ - BEYONCÉ

I am cheating because this is my barely-updated blog, and I make the rules here. No, Beyonce's album didn't come out in 2014. It slipped in too close to the end of 2013 to be counted then, but I can't let it go unnoted. It defined my year. We did the "Drunk in Love" dance. We mimicked the way she said "surfbort." We pretended to rollerskate, careening along as she sang "Blow."

The older I get, the less abashed I feel. I love pop music. However manufactured it was, Beyonce's album always felt new and rule-breaking. The songs (particularly "Partition," "Mine" and "***Flawless") broke down and reassembled in new configurations. But they weren't disjointed. Like the Madonna and Michael Jackson records of the 1980s, these were pop hits that weren't just singles but part of a bigger album narrative.

These songs were the soundtrack to the few nights I stayed up past 11 p.m., and they were the sounds that anchored me back to some version of myself that felt young. 2013 was a year of big let-downs and big decisions -- all of which left me feeling rooted and regulated. "BEYONCÉ" was all bounce and thud, cusswords and catchphrases (I woke up like this!), and when we danced around this tiny house together, I felt back on the brink of a limitless future.


2. TOO MANY ZOOZ - F NOTE

Years ago, a friend and I danced dizzy around his Missouri home to old jazz records. We did the Peanuts. We did some version of the swing. We were a decade younger than everyone around us, and we drank enough beer to prove it. But our movements dissolved in the dramas of being 23 and on to the next thing. We reconnected this year, and he sent me this video near the beginning of our talking. This wasn't the jazz we listened to in Missouri. But it felt familiar. We wrote and listened, trying to close the gaps years leave. These bursts of brass were the perfect notes for regaining a friendship. I listened to these songs exclusively for weeks, thinking nothing is lost. In our 30s we can get back what we had.

As with the Beyonce album, I can't disconnect this one from the visuals -- a young baritone sax player grinding his way through the scales. By the time I saw that sax player grooving on a Portland stage this fall, the old friend had already retreated away again. The songs were so good I didn't even notice - I was dancing alone this time.


3. TAYLOR SWIFT - 1989

The post-30 metabolism is slow and droning. I can't eat ice cream the way I once could. I took up running this year, hoping to edge my way back down the scale. It's a miserable venture at first. My lungs hurt. My legs hurt. And worst of all: I was bored. That changed when "Serial" and this Taylor Swift album came out. I could stay on the treadmill for 45 minutes, listening to the murder mystery unwind or Taylor tell the story of the boy she lost. The drums and choruses here have the right kind of rhythm for powering through the miles.

Swift repeats themes, too. Her elusive boy is always driving reckless, crashing or recovering. She is wearing red lipstick, hoping he won't forget. The repetitions stick out because Swift is so good at painting a scene. Every song paints a tidy little portrait. Here they are moving the furniture to dance. Here they are somewhere before or after a breakup, terrified of monsters that turn out to be trees. They lyrics are all so specific yet universal enough that you can fill in your own stories. (I've got a blank space baby, and I'll write your name).

Best of all: This is an album made my someone super self aware of every criticism that has ever been lobbed her way. (Shake it off!) And she owns them all here. It's the kind of confidence you need to hear when taking up running for the first time at 31.


4. Sinkane - Mean Love

5. The War on Drugs - Lost in the Dream

6. Spoon - They Want My Soul

7. Ages and Ages - Divisionary

8. Mac DeMarco - Salad Days

9. CunninLynguists - Strange Journey Vol. 3

10. J. Cole - 2014 Forest Hills Drive

11. St. Paul & The Broken Bones - Half the City

12. Hundred Waters - Morning Rang Like a Bell

13. Kindness - Otherness

14. Angel Olsen - Burn Your Fire For No Witness

15. Beck - Morning Phase


* I'm not including D'Angelo here, even though it is the perfect album I have waited all of the 2000s for, because it didn't come out until so late in the year. I reserve the right to name it the best album of 2015.

December and everything after

Michelle Garfias left Lewis & Clark College last December assuming she'd be back.

She packed one suitcase. She deep-cleaned her dorm room so it would look nice when she returned. Then she headed home for a Southern California Christmas.

She knew as soon as she saw her father that something wasn't right. Juventino Garfias' muscular frame had withered to that of a featherweight. His skin had gone yellow.

Doctors said it was kidney failure, eerily reminiscent of the kidney infection that had killed Garfias' mother a few years earlier. Her father would live, the doctor said, but he would need years of dialysis. He wouldn't be able to work or watch after Garfias' 13-year-old brother Cesar.

Someone needed to earn money for the family. Someone needed to cook dinners and take Cesar to school. That someone, Garfias thought, had to be her.

So Garfias had a choice: Go back to college and finish her degree, or stay and take care of her father. Friends told her a college degree would change her life forever. But what if her family needed her now?

READ THE REST ON OREGONLIVE.

always treated my city like some shoulder pads

two new good legs on a breeze -bent limb

I'm following around a group of Somali teens for the next month or so as they work to get their basketball team off the ground. They held an invitational for their parents last weekend.

Today, more than any other day

Because stories begat stories ...

I've been working on a news piece about the local ice skating rink. Dallas developers are remodeling the model and sizing down the rink in the process. It's a fun story -- every one I have met has a Tonya Harding story -- but I found an even better one while watching the ice one day. This is Alex, age 13. I'll be following him over the next three months or so.

There's intense gravity. I'm just your satellite.

I've spent the past two years following two Tongan best friends in their last year of high school. "The Pact" ran in Sunday's Oregonian. Semise Kofe and Sione Taumoe'anga thought faith, football and friendship could lead them out of poverty. But what would they sacrifice along the way?

The first thing Semise Kofe and Sione Taumoe'anga did together was fight.

It was a Sunday afternoon in 2007, just after services at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' Rose City 1st Ward. The 11-year-old boys knew of each other. Both their families had come to Portland from Tonga, a tiny Polynesian archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. They lived in the same neighborhood of ranch houses at the city's edge. They both had something to prove.

Later, neither could remember why they fought that day. Boys growing up on the blocks just off North Columbia Boulevard, an especially poor, rough part of eternally downtrodden North Portland, didn't need a reason. They earned power and respect just for swinging.

Taumoe'anga, lanky with the first shade of a mustache, punched Kofe in the mouth. Kofe, neckless and wide, grabbed Taumoe'anga and slammed him against a car.

Other boys from the neighborhood were joining the Crips. Kofe and Taumoe'anga had already lost a few friends to juvenile detention centers. As onlookers pulled the boys apart that morning, Kofe and Taumoe'anga shared the same scary thought: We could be next.

"We gotta do something different, bro," Kofe remembers saying.

A friendship was formed. A deal was made.

Taumoe'anga's uncle ran a makeshift gym in a detached garage near Pier Park. Maybe, Taumoe'anga suggested, he could train them for something more productive. For football.

They showed up for the first session wearing school uniforms and no shoes. Both their fathers worked in concrete, an industry that slowed to a near-halt during Portland's wet winters. They had dress shoes for school, but no sneakers.

Kofe suggested they steal a pair. Taumoe'anga had a better idea: "What about the wires?"

People often threw perfectly fine sneakers -- the laces knotted together -- over telephone pole wires. Several pairs hung in the sky near their homes. They knocked a few sets down before finding a pair of baby blue size 9 knockoffs, then took turns wearing them. Kofe ran laps around the park while Taumoe'anga stood barefoot on the sidewalk. Then Taumoe'anga ran while Kofe waited and watched.

"We're gonna get this done," Taumoe'anga said between laps. "Get better. Prove everybody wrong."

They slapped hands and prayed: "Heavenly father, help us get out of here."

It was a contract made by boys, no more binding than a spit-shake. Later, they took to calling it their pact.

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