The 30 Best Singles of 2013 (#15-1)

The list continues with the numbers 15 through 1 below. Click here to return to #30 – 16.

15. Phillip Phillips – “Gone, Gone, Gone”

Phillips’s debut album continues to show far more maturity than the average “Idol” champ’s first outing. His organic delivery feels honest and sincere as he sings about deep-rooted dedication in love. The song is wonderfully stomp-y, appropriate for a lyric that repeatedly chants “like a drum, baby, don’t stop beating.” Armed with an enormous chorus of vocal support and bursts of brass, this is much more than the guys-with-guitars filler occupying much of the “alternative” space in today’s mainstream music scene.

14. fun. – “All Alone”

“All Alone” sounds like the soundtrack to a really fun video game about loneliness. An electronic music box prelude gives way to slick pop laid over a heavy hip hop beat. With thoughtful introspection, plenty of rock guitar, and ample bass, it’s the indie-pop version of a Kid Cudi song. While the band made reference to it as Some Night‘s fifth single and various outlets cite it as such, it never went anywhere. That’s a shame.

13. Arctic Monkeys – “Do I Wanna Know?“

“Do I Wanna Know?” is supremely constructed, multi-layered, beat-conscious progressive garage rock, reminiscent at times of The White Stripes, Pink Floyd, and Queen. The riffs and reverb are to die for. It’s a song about insecurity in unrequited love, with mouthful wording that holds its own among the band’s best: “Baby we both know that the nights are mainly made for saying things that you can’t say tomorrow day.”

12. Daft Punk, feat. Pharrell Williams – “Get Lucky”

Less “electronic music” and more pop music that happens to be electronic, “Get Lucky” is the perfect marriage of past, present, and future. The groovy guitar and easy-gliding melody are modeled after ’70s disco-funk, but the dance beat is very 2013-radio-friendly. Meanwhile, the electronic blips and robot voices sound positively sci-fi. Pharrell Williams is an unlikely crooner for a song like this, but he elevates himself here. It’s maybe a better song than he’s earned, but I guess he got lucky.

11. Panic! at the Disco, feat. LOLO – “Miss Jackson”

“Miss Jackson, Miss Jackson, Miss Jackson, are you nasty?” Panic’s clever allusion to pop past isn’t addressed to Janet herself, but its repurposing of an iconic feminist anthem lends the song deeper meaning. In it, lead signer Brandon Urie struggles with his romantic feelings for a woman who cheats on him — something he’s confessed to being guilty of himself. In a sense, it’s a counterargument to Janet’s Control-era ethos of “Get what I want… I want a lot” female empowerment. Here, he’s saying that he doesn’t like how he feels when women act like men. But at the same time, he’s condemning his own mistreatment of women as a man. However you look at it, though, “Miss Jackson” is savory punk-pop ear candy from beginning to end.

10. Justin Timberlake – “Mirrors”

In a song that easily earns its more than eight minutes (!), Timberlake reminds us why he’s one of the best things pop has going for it — even if both 20/20 chapters were uneven. Stripping away his vocals, it’s easier to appreciate the musical journey this song takes, evolving from an electric-guitar burner to a Timbaland-FutureSex hiccup number in just the first minute, and experimenting in the next seven with EDM, house music, symphony orchestration, synth-pop, piano balladry, Coldplay-ish guitar scaling, NSYNC-style boy-bandom, R&B interluding, and good old-fashioned pop breakdowns. And all of that’s punctuated with catchy handclap percussion and then glazed with a deliciously retro vibe. It’s powerhouse production that runs the musical gamut and truly astounds. Add J-Tim’s voice into the mix and you realize that not only is he one of pop’s slickest and most gifted vocalists but he’s also smart: in a song that contemplates reflection, his own vocal track is layered back over itself again and again, reverberating like his own image in a never-ending series of mirrors. Brilliant.

9. Mariah Carey, feat. Miguel – “#Beautiful”

Superfluous hashtag notwithstanding, “#Beautiful” is a marvel of a pop song. With minimalist production, a predominating guitar line, and a full minute with little more than a giggle out of Mariah, it’s also an utter anomaly in the Carey oeuvre. Miguel matches her controlled vocal with a beautifully amber-toned performance that suits the song’s silky groove. Yet another of this year’s throwback jams, the song failed to make its way past #15 on the Billboard Hot 100 — a real surprise for what many (myself included) expected to be her 19th #1.

8. P!nk, feat. Nate Ruess – “Just Give Me a Reason”

I nearly included this on last year’s list because, even though it wasn’t yet a single, digital sales were going through the roof. RCA wised up to that fact and gave it an official release in 2013, making it one of the biggest hits of the year. A midtempo ballad typical of P!nk’s d!scography, the song gets an upgrade at the hands of fun.’s Some Nights producer, whose understated approach here emphasizes piano, percussion, and performance. As in her earlier collaboration with Steven Tyler, P!nk harmonizes beautifully with Ruess, musically and emotionally meeting him at every note on their considerable scale. Lyrically, it’s astoundingly similar to A Great Big World & Christina Aguilera’s “Say Something” (not to mention Tracy Chapman’s “Give Me One Reason”), but this one’s arena-sized scope makes a bigger statement, as we might expect from artists who spell their names with punctuation.

7. Vampire Weekend – “Diane Young”

A rollicking surf-rock song about life in the fast lane, “Diane Young” spends most of its time in overdrive. In point of fact, there’s a motorist motif that runs throughout the song, paving the way toward this morbidly hilarious line: “You got the lucky of a Kennedy, so grab the wheel and keep holding it tight.” Actually, morbidity is a central theme here — the song’s homophonic title (Diane Young/dying young) asks whether disregarding consequence means you deserve what’s coming to you. (“If dying young won’t change your mind… baby, [you’re] right on time.”) I’m not sure they ever really answer that, though, preferring to thrust full-speed ahead into a sea of aural distortion, ultimately concluding on a note of resignation: “Nobody knows what the future holds / You know I love the past ’cause I hate suspense.” Sounds like they haven’t figured it out yet. That’s okay because they’re young… or is it? Therein lies the song’s paradox, but rather than resolving that, it just ends… “right on time.”

6. Amy Grant – “If I Could See (What the Angels See)”

While this is, on its surface, a song about angels, “If I Could See” is really about perspective. In one of Grant’s earliest songs — as a sixteen-year-old way back in 1977 — she imagined what it would be like to talk to God on a mountain top. Now, at the age of 52, she sets her sights even higher, trying to look down on our lives from the perspective of angels. How might we see our own loss, sadness, doubt, or even death if we could also — simultaneously — see the resolution for those things? If we could always see the what in the context of the why? And, more to the point, how would that kind of understanding alter the way we approach ourselves and others on a daily basis?

That’s not a new concept for Christianity, but the song’s evocatively earthy lyrics — “If I could see… behind the walls, beneath the seas, under the avalanche” (inspired by a real-life account of someone lost in a snowslide) — remind us that there are more perspectives in this world than just (1) our own and (2) the angels’. There are billions of other people’s, too, and we’d do well to remember that. In promoting the album, Grant said, “There have been times in my life when I believed something so strongly, and years later, I’d feel completely differently… I’m so hard-headed. I wish I could not be trapped by my own perspective.”

5. HAIM – “The Wire”

There’s an enticing weirdness in this song that I can’t get enough of. Musically, it sounds like ’70s Night at the beach… but those affected staccato vocals are delightfully off the wall. Their phrasing and tone call Fiona Apple to mind, but I don’t think she’d ever make something this exuberantly summery. And how about those wonderful percussive explosions each time they sing “it felt right!” — or the strings that kick in toward the end? The song’s a bundle of surprises, and I hope it’s the first of many to come from HAIM.

4. Bastille – “Pompei”

What Toto and “Circle of Life” did for Africa, Bastille do for Ancient Rome — or at least the idea of it. Narratively, the song shifts perspectives between the narrator’s personal life and its metaphorical equivalent, the infamously toppled city of Pompeii. He compares his personal vices to the volcanic wrath of Mount Vesuvius and ponders whether history repeats itself in our own lives. It’s an internal struggle worthy of the soulful chanting and wailing that this anthemic battle cry delivers.

3. Idina Menzel – “Let It Go”

Conspicuously similar to Menzel’s “Defying Gravity” but just as good (and that’s saying something), Frozen‘s flagship showstopper stands among the very best in contemporary showtunedom. Menzel is an absolute powerhouse, belting her declaration of self-liberation with the dramatic intensity of a Category 5 snowstorm. Writers Robert and Kristen Anderson-Lopez take a decidedly poppy approach to the song, mirroring Stephen Schwartz’s style in Wicked, without compromising the from-floor-to-stratosphere dynamism of the Broadway stage. Their songwriting astounds. “My power flurries through the air into the ground,” Menzel sings in one of several clever ice puns… “My soul is spiraling in frozen fractals all around.” The phrase “frozen fractals” alone deserves some kind of award. Soaring, inspiring, and endlessly repeatable, it’s the kind of animated Disney song we’ve waited a long time for.

2. fun. – “Why Am I the One”

Speaking of Disney songs, how about a fun. tune that sounds vaguely like “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” (starting around 1:04)? I won’t go as far as some have by calling it an outright sample, but the tribal beats, soft-rock piano, and enormous harmonies that seem to fill the open air do bring The Lion King‘s love scene to mind. If it’s an Elton John homage, it’s edgier than what we’d expect from him but just as brilliantly written: “My life’s become as vapid as a night out in Los Angeles,” Ruess sings. Theatrically dramatic, with Queen-inspired harmonies and an unwillingness to settle, the song continually builds upon itself… and that makes the listening a real experience.

1. Lorde – “Royals”

The first time I heard “Royals,” I thought it deserved to be a #1 song but never dreamed it could actually become one. It was 2013’s biggest surprise. With a revolutionary rejection of Clear Channel-peddled “rap crap” and the club-scene philosophy it’s embraced, Lorde might have officially ushered in a new wave of popular music that’s slowly been building toward a crest in the last few years (hat tip to those that paved her way to #1: fun., Adele, One Direction, et al). Interestingly, the song’s heavy bass line would feel at home in the hip hop culture she lambasts here, but lyrically, “Royals” is a coup… the Boston Tea Party of pop. The snap-happy production is itself addictive, but it’s Lorde’s funny, biting satire that seems to have touched a nerve with a generation fed up with their radios. Change takes time and it might be too soon to say, but “Royals” could be for the 2010s what “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was for the 90s.

Honorable Mentions