RIFF's 108 Best Albums of 2021

Marfa, Texas, has played host to countless artists over the years, musical and otherwise. The storied West Texas town is known as much for its vast collection of fine arts as its famed Marfa lights, making it a popular destination for anyone in need of a bit of cosmic inspiration. For Miranda Lambert, Jack Ingram, and Jon Randall, Marfa offered the perfect setting for songwriting retreats, so much so that the trio returned for repeat visits over the last few years. “Jon had been preaching Marfa to us for a long time and telling us how magical it was,” Lambert tells Apple Music. “We\'re all from Texas, but that\'s like a whole other state in itself over there in that area. That was the first time we\'d ever written as a trio even though we had been friends forever. It was instant chemistry, for sure.” *The Marfa Tapes* captures the magic the trio found across 15 tracks, recorded in just five days using one acoustic guitar and two microphones. Accordingly, the desert itself plays a prominent sonic role in the project, with the occasional breeze or crackle of firewood adding the kind of intimacy that can’t be created in a recording studio. In addition to a number of new and unreleased songs, the collection includes an emotional, stripped-down version of Lambert’s beloved *The Weight of These Wings* song “Tin Man” as well as an acoustic take on *Wildcard*’s “Tequila Does.” Below, the trio offers insight into two of the highlights on *The Marfa Tapes*. **“Ghost”** **Lambert:** “That was one of those moments where I was actually venting. I was telling them two things I had done recently to make myself feel better. Some of that involves burning some clothes that weren\'t mine. That\'s how the ball started rolling.” **Randall:** “We were stuck. We were sitting around a fire, and we were playing the song over and over. It never had that thing, whether it\'s a hook or just someone to make it real. That\'s when she goes, ‘And heaven knows I ain\'t afraid of ghosts.’ I started freaking out. \[Jack\] got up and danced around.” **“Amazing Grace (West Texas)”** **Lambert:** “That was all Jon Randall.” **Ingram:** “Around the mountains, you can see for a hundred miles. We saw this cloud and the storm coming in. You could see it raining and how it just looks gray all the way to the ground. It rolled into the ranch where we stayed, the bunk house. It was just beautiful. That song was just like a soundtrack to what we were seeing and the landscape, just the people and the towns and the cows. It\'s like a soundtrack to our trip.” **Randall:** “I can remember how it felt to be at that table outside writing the song. You become part of your own picture.”

With their fifth album *Kvitravn*, or White Raven, Norwegian folk troupe Wardruna weaves tales of sorcery, spirit animals, and ancient mythology. This time, Wardruna founder Einar Selvik is joined by a group of traditional singers led by Kirsten Bråten Berg, who is regarded as one of the leading custodians of Norwegian traditional song. Incorporating a wide range of traditional and historical instruments like soot-harp, lyre, bronze lur, and goat-horn, Selvik creates the kind of stirring and richly atmospheric songs that have landed Wardruna more than 60 placements on the History Channel’s hit series *Vikings*. “The album is very much about animism, our relation to nature and to something bigger than yourself,” Selvik tells Apple Music. “And of course, as the title suggests, the white raven is a recurring theme throughout the album because it’s a central and important animal within the Norse tradition.” Below, he tells us the stories behind each song. **Synkverv** “This translates to ‘Turn-Sight.’ The song goes very much into Nordic folk beliefs about luring forces of nature that either by use of song or other things lure you into the mountains and places like that. The tonality of the song is very traditional and quite closely inspired by the tonality of Norwegian folk music or traditional music, with the main instrument being the lyre.” **Kvitravn** “This is the White Raven, and it’s about the tradition of spirit guides or animal guides that have been in animistic traditions as messengers or bridges between worlds. This animal guide is connected to another recurring theme on the album, which is the *skugge*, which means shadow or follower. It’s primarily related to death warnings and so on. But it also dives into this idea that when seeking knowledge outside yourself, you sort of reflect inwards at the same time.” **Skugge** “It’s basically a song that tells the story of a conversation between a man and his shadow. It kind of questions our modern Western ideas that knowledge and confirmation is something predominantly acquired externally instead of internally. The story is basically: A man is asking his shadow a question and gets no answer. Then the sun goes down and of course his shadow disappears—into, in this case, a mountain. And then the man starts shouting at the mountain and the shadow replies in echoes with his own words. So the answers are within.” **Grá** “The title means ‘Gray’ and this song reflects on how our relation to wolves and predators in general has developed through time. And it doesn’t paint a pretty picture to romanticize this issue. I know a lot of countries are struggling with these conflicts between farmers and wildlife—predators in the wild, basically—and I understand that these issues are complicated, but the song acknowledges that the cost of having predators around has a value. And anything of true value in this world has costs. I don’t think killing a species or destroying an entire ecosystem is the right answer.” **Fylgjutal** “The literal translation is ‘Companion,’ but it also means ‘Speech of the Fetch.’ This goes more in depth with the tradition of followers from the song ‘Kvitravn.’ Sometimes these followers are ancestral figures that sort of warn you or tell you when you arrive somewhere. They can be in animal shape, and they often reflect your personality as well. But I like to keep my lyrics very open-ended, so this is more in the form of asking questions, not preaching truth.” **Munin** “This is another song about the raven—in this case, the ravens of Odin. He has two: Hugin, which means ‘thought’ or ‘mind,’ and Munin, which means ‘memory.’ They roam the world every day, and Odin expresses fear that Hugin will not return, but even more he fears for Munin. So this song questions, why does he fear most for losing Munin, or memory? Of course, it’s impossible to think without memory—man has a consciousness, which always bears the past within it. We think and speak with historical references, and our culture is basically a memory. So I’m trying to decipher what this myth tries to tell us.” **Kvit hjort** “This is the song of the ‘White Deer’ or ‘White Stag.’ It is of course partly applicable to the ‘White Raven’ song because it goes into how these traditional white animals we see are almost a global phenomenon. In many cultures around the world, we have these mythical, prophetic white animals. It doesn’t have to be ravens or deer—it can be an elephant, a moose, a serpent, et cetera. They very often represent being a bringer of change, of something new.” **Viseveiding** “It means ‘Hunting for Songs.’ This goes back also to animistic ideas that every chatter, sound, or frequency has a song connected to it. The concept is that there is a potential to learn these songs. For instance, in the folk medicine or healing traditions, if you wanted to cure snakebites, you would need to learn the song of the snake. This goes on and on: Each mountain has its own song, each river has its own song, et cetera. This is a concept that I implement in my own creative work as well—there’s this idea of trying to sense frequency, to ask for these kinds of songs.” **Ni** “This means ‘Nine,’ and it is the ninth song of the album. In Norse tradition—and many traditions—nine is a sacred number that very often recurs in different myths and esoteric practice, whether it’s sorcery or healing or anything like that. And I would call this a medicine song. It goes into specific traditions of using a nine within folk medicine, and the core purpose of the song is to sort of guide you through this old tradition.” **Vindavlarljod** “This word is a mouthful, but it basically means ‘Song of the Wind-Bred,’ like born out of the wind. It’s very much a song about sorcery and kind of reflects all these nerdy details about the two different ways one becomes a sorcerer. This is actually a very old song, and I have been performing it acoustically with just one instrument for many years in my solo concerts. A slightly different type of it was released on the *Skald* album as well, but here it’s more elaborately produced.” **Andvevarljod** “This is the ‘Song of the Spirit Weavers.’ It goes into how certain parts of our species is connected to wind, and this whole idea that a person could conjure up the wind that was blowing the day you were born. So it’s also a song about birth. There’s a part of the song about the mythical beings that spin a person’s life thread. It’s also very much connected to this tradition regarding the wind in the previous song.”

While 2020\'s solo debut *Petals for Armor* indulged in R&B, funk, and pop, the Paramore singer\'s latest collection deconstructs her loneliest and darkest feelings with a heavy dose of acoustic compositions, melancholy piano melodies, and well-placed electric guitar flourishes. Williams wrote and performed the entirety of *FLOWERS for VASES / descansos* and recorded it in her Nashville home, and it serves as an ode to the suffering that precluded *Petals for Armor*\'s arc of self-discovery. Williams\' voice once again takes center stage, intertwined within the record\'s pensive compositions, varying from barely a whisper (\"First Thing to Go\") to a simmering rage (\"Trigger\"). \"My Limb\" dabbles in the macabre (\"If you gotta amputate/Don\'t give me the tourniquet\"), the delicate \"Asystole\" compares a past relationship to the most fatal form of cardiac arrest, and the folk-tinged \"Good Grief\" focuses on how love slowly dissolves. This 14-track postmortem adds another chapter of honest reflection to Williams\' ever-growing repertoire, laying her past demons to rest.

When she debuted in 1993 with the seminal *Exile in Guyville*, Liz Phair planted her flag as indie rock’s resident acid-tongued queen. The Chicago singer-songwriter, who recorded the project as an alleged track-by-track response to The Rolling Stones’ *Exile on Main St.*, challenged the machismo of the scene with a deadpan frankness that was just as evocative as it was shocking. In the years since, Phair has lived nine lives in the music biz: She released two follow-ups (’94’s *Whip-Smart* and ’98’s *Whitechocolatespacegg*) before unleashing 2003’s self-titled LP—a step into the mainstream that many critics interpreted as an anodyne attempt at radio success and, more importantly, a betrayal of her brusque beginnings. In classic Phair fashion, of course, she had the last laugh—it was her highest-charting album to date—and what followed was a pair of records that pushed the envelope even further. It’s been 10 years since Phair released *Funstyle*, a see-what-sticks sort of adventure in experimentalism that traversed everything from Bollywood to hip-hop. In that time, she focused on raising her son while juggling live performances and scoring TV shows—until quarantine, when she felt inspired to pick up where she left. “I cannot \[emphasize\] how weird it was to work on a record in a pandemic,” she tells Apple Music. “There were so many reasons why that ended up being stranger than anyone could have possibly imagined. And in fact, it’s the same as always.” The resulting album speaks to that sentiment, marking a reunion with *Guyville* producer Brad Wood, who brings a pop sheen to a collection of songs rooted in Phair’s DIY beginnings. It’s a record that examines how relationships work, and how distance can manipulate your perceptions of longing and intimacy. Below, Phair walks us through how each song on *Soberish* conveys her view of the world today. **Spanish Doors** “Anyone who’s a fan of my music knows that I’m fascinated by ordinary moments in conversations that somehow take on greater significance in the larger scope of a person’s life—how simply one piece of information can rock your world. And I really resonated with the idea that \[my friend, whose divorce inspired the song\], was in a public place when she found out that she was no longer going to be living the life that she was accustomed to. And how jumbled your internal landscape can be when you’re dealing with denial—‘I don’t want to face this.’ Bargaining, maybe there’s a way out of this. Devastation, in the sense that everything’s going to change and there’s nothing you can do about it. The stages of grief. How can you put that into a pop song? That’s the tricky challenge.” **The Game** “I think most of my romance these days is amped up. It’s not day-to-day, it’s overly large. And sometimes I think ‘The Game’ is really talking about how much you need ordinariness and day-to-dayness in a love relationship. And as exciting as it is to have a kind of a dramatic affair, it gets old, you get tired. You don’t want to keep resurrecting it—you want it to evolve into something more subtle. I think that surprises me.” **Hey Lou** “\[Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson\] are icons to me. Independent of each other, they were huge influences early on in my life. I just loved both of their music when I was a teenager. Both were making groundbreaking, compelling art. And then, when they got together as a couple, it just seemed impossible: How can these two titans coexist in an ordinary life? And it was really an accidental inspiration that turned into a real sort of love letter to two challenging, difficult artists who, by all accounts, had a very peaceful, loving relationship. So, I’m fascinated.” **In There** “It’s like you’ve been saying no to someone for a while and when they start to lose interest because they’ve been rejected a number of times, you’re like, ‘Goddamn it. I miss them.’ And then, you have to break in with your own inability to commit or your own inability to open yourself up to someone. Because for the longest time you could just say no, and you felt like they’d keep coming. And now you are realizing that you’ve said no, and it might be you that has the problem.” **Good Side** “‘Good Side’ is my mature ‘F\*\*k and Run.’ Instead of being in a pithy funk about my hookup, I can just kind of say to myself, ‘Well, he got a pretty good impression of me. So, no harm, no foul.’” **Sheridan Road** “That inspiration came from a longtime partner that also grew up in the same area \[in Chicago\] that I did. And there’s this particular road in it, Sheridan Road, that is the main artery connecting the suburbs to downtown. And every time you want to go home or any time you want to go out, you travel on this road. So, our being together on this road in the song brings up all the different life experiences that we’ve had. And yet, we’ve walked the same walk all our lives, but his life is totally different from mine. He’s got special places and I’ve got special places. How could we have been growing up in the same place the whole time and not have been aware of each other?” **Ba Ba Ba** “I’m hooking up with someone, it’s a new romance, I’m very excited about it. And in the space of a single song, it starts and is already over before it even began. I think of it as a boomerang song, because where you think it’s going and the person you think I am at the beginning of the song is sort of my ambassador self, the more appealing broadly to mainstream people, like, ‘I’m happy. Yay. Woo.’ And then, by the end of the song, I’m back to my usual self and the relationship is already over.” **Soberish** “I feel like we’re all doing the best we can right now. I feel like we, as a country, have gone through a time period that was very dark and difficult and an existential threat, so to speak. So, a lot of people felt the need to stay connected with reality without actually being entirely sober. How much of reality can I stand to absorb and how much do I need to push away from me and keep myself insulated from? ‘Soberish’ is just a more romantic and innocent way to look at that. I used to be the kind of person that could do this sober, but right now I need a shot.” **Soul Sucker** “You know when, if on a certain night, you have a hookup with someone and you like that person and it was perfectly fine, but it was just, like, that night. And then you keep running into them in your real world, and maybe they weren’t the person that you would be most excited for people to see that you hooked up with. You’re in your more elegant persona, and then here comes your hookup from back in the day. And you’re like, ‘I don’t know who this is. I don’t know.’ Like that.” **Lonely Street** “That is a very modern love song, because it sort of speaks to, yes, we can be connected by a screen, but what I really need is for you to be lying next to me, whispering in my ear. And there’s a sense of sadness in the relationship, but also a sense of isolation that we get by in our modern world with a substitute for what we really need, which is actual intimacy.” **Dosage** “I think of it as a modern-day ‘Polyester Bride’ in that I wrote it with the idea of going back to that bar, where Henry the bartender gave me all that good advice when I was young, and coming back as an older woman and seeing a young woman who is basically in the position I used to be in. So, I’m now looking at myself in the younger person who’s wasted, giving her advice, but also saying, ‘By the way, you’re doing fine. Nobody has it all together. Even now, at my age, none of those decisions were even the impactful ones.’” **Bad Kitty** “‘Bad Kitty’ is just embracing the mess that is my life. It’s an ongoing theme I have that I will always be out of place no matter where I go or who I try to be. And the manifestos that people think that I have, or that I have the answers, I really don’t. At the end, it’s the poem of just no helmet, no brake, no net, no rope, no more cocaine. You don’t really believe that I’m never going to do those things, do you? That’s really a kind of a throwing your hands up: I am a bad kitty. To this world, that’s how I am perceived. That’s how I identify myself as. It’s not such a bad thing, really—I get nine more lives. But at the same time, it doesn’t all make sense. It’s my emotional state and that’s how I make art. And it doesn’t always have to make sense. One thing does not have to be like, ‘Now I will never do this, and now I will do this.’” **Rain Scene** “I was here in my house, and I had bought a 3D microphone thing that I can put on my ears that will record surround sound of whatever space I’m in. And I knew I wanted the approaching storm of ‘Sheridan Road’ to break. I wanted the storm to actually release at the end of the album. So, this unexpected rain happened here in Southern California, and I just practically threw clothes on and threw this thing on. And I was, like, yelling to my son, ‘I’m going out in the rain! I’m going to record the rain!’ And I just stomped up and down the street around my house, recording puddles and me splashing in puddles. And I had Brad edit it in such a way that it took on a flavor of synthesizer of manipulated sounds at the end, and then I wrote a little song about it.”

When Morgan Wallen burst onto the scene in 2018 with his debut album *If I Know Me*, fans were instantly charmed by the young country artist\'s clever songwriting, star-worthy vocal chops, and knack for crafting an infectious melody. His outsized public persona—including a couple minor run-ins with the law and a penchant for sleeveless shirts—only upped his star status, setting him apart from the scores of other male country artists vying for the genre\'s attention. Buoyed by a 2014 stint on *The Voice*, Wallen quickly struck country gold, scoring three No. 1 hits off *If I Know Me* and announcing himself as an artist to watch. It\'s no surprise, then, that Wallen\'s sophomore effort would be an ambitious one. Weighing in at a hefty 30 tracks, the double LP is a wide-ranging showcase of what country fans initially loved about Wallen and a document of how he has grown as an artist. His songwriting, which veers between tender and tongue-in-cheek, has grown more confident. The album length alone shows his willingness to buck conventional genre trends, with influences from artists as wildly different as Jason Isbell and Diplo proving Wallen to be as adventurous in his listening as he is in his bar escapades. And he clearly honed his vocal chops out on the road, with his performances on *Dangerous* spanning gritty twang, brassy rock, and soulful crooning, often within a single track. Among its 30 songs, *Dangerous* includes massive singles like \"More Than My Hometown\" and \"7 Summers,\" as well as Wallen\'s popular cover of Isbell\'s *Southeastern* track \"Cover Me Up\" and an album version of the Diplo collaboration \"Heartless.\" Chris Stapleton guests on standout cut \"Only Thing That\'s Gone,\" with Stapleton\'s barrel-aged vocal pairing well with Wallen\'s younger vintage. Closing track \"Quittin\' Time\" is an Eric Church co-write, linking Wallen to another country act known for eschewing conventions in favor of artistry. Opener \"Sand in My Boots\" shows that Wallen can put his own spin on a hometown song without veering into lyrical cliché. Producer Joey Moi\'s fingerprints are all over *Dangerous*, but Moi—known for work with acts like Florida Georgia Line and Jake Owen—treads more lightly on these tracks than is typical of his work behind the boards, making for an album focused more on letting each song shine than producing radio hits.

Eric Church’s *Heart & Soul* was the most ambitious work of the country star’s career—a triple album showing off his depth, versatility, and chameleonic nature as an artist. Originally a fan club exclusive, the six songs making up *&* complete the trilogy, rounding out what was already an impressive showing from the Chief. *&* opens with “Through My Ray-Bans,” an emotive, image-rich illustration of how Church sees the world. “Do Side” is a slinky, stuttering jam session, sure to become a staple of Church’s fiery live shows. “Mad Man” is a breakup song as only Church could write one, with lines like “His thumbs-up has been grounded/Now it’s that bird he loves to fly.” Closer “Lone Wolf” caps off the record in grand fashion, complete with a gospel choir and one of Church’s finest vocal performances.

“I\'ve always believed that the moment a song is born is the most important moment of that song\'s life,” Eric Church tells Apple Music. “And what normally happens, at least in Nashville, is a song is born, and we write the song, and we go home and we make a demo. And six months later, we figure out if we\'re going to go into a studio and cut that song. But there\'s so much time that the magic just starts to die away.” That *isn\'t* what happened with *Heart & Soul*, a trio of new albums Church wrote and recorded with his band and team of co-writers over the course of a single month at a shuttered-for-the-season restaurant in North Carolina\'s Blue Ridge Mountains. “I remember having a conversation with my bass player, and I said, ‘Listen, I\'m going to bring in some different players on this album,’” he recalls. “And he goes, \'Man, we\'re kicking ass. If it\'s not broke—\' And I stopped him, I said, \'You break it. We have to mess this up.\'” It was then that he and his producer, Jay Joyce, decided to follow that instinct. “Let\'s write the song that day,” he says, thinking back to their first conversations about *Heart & Soul*. “Let\'s record the song that day. And let\'s commit everything we have to that moment, to that song, and let it be. This is my favorite project for that reason, because I\'ve never really put it all out there like we\'ve done on this one.” Though they’re three separate albums, Church views the 24 total tracks as a cohesive body of work, all written and recorded in the same place. “Every night, I would stay up most of the night writing songs,” he says. “We’d finish them by two or three o\'clock in the afternoon, and then we\'d go in the studio and we\'d record them. And it also put pressure on me: I\'m not going to walk in there with anything that I\'m not proud of. I wanted to make sure I walked in with a stud of a song and I would work harder.” Soon, Church was writing songs in his sleep and letting the inspiration take him and his collaborators where the music flowed. “I got to where I could not turn it off,” he says. “Everything was a song to me. I mean, anybody that talked to me, I would go, ‘I can make that a song.’ I don\'t know if that\'s good or bad; I got quite manic, but it worked. At the end of it, it took me a while to shut it down.” Fans will recognize the Chief’s intensity throughout *Heart & Soul*, but one single stands out as a telltale track. “Stick That in Your Country Song” is a snarling and somber look at modern American life and the conflicts it entails, one that follows a pattern Church says has followed him from his early days as a recording artist. “If you look at our career, it\'s pretty easy to see our first single off of every album has been aggressive,” he says. “\'Stick That in Your Country Song,\' that\'s aggressive, but the next one\'s normally a pretty big hit. I know that\'s my best chance.”