As vaguely hinted in yesterday’s Drew’s 2024 Mix liner notes, I put together a kind of runners up list of songs that I liked from 2024 (that is, of songs that were mostly new to me in 2024). I thought liner notes on these might be even more interesting than the main list, as there are some personal bugaboos that kept these tunes from making final cut. I still like these songs, but find myself focusing on the bits I didn’t love. Maybe sharing those here will exorcise them, or maybe I’ll just pass on my nits to you, so proceed with caution. Here’s the playlist:
Drew’s 2024 Mix liner notes
At the start of 2024, hoping to inspire myself to listen to more music, I undertook a challenge to add one song every week to a playlist. Specifically, I was hoping to find a song that caught my ear each week — maybe I heard it out in the world, maybe I’d sought it out specifically and couldn’t get it out of my head. Ideally, the song would be new (or at least new to me), though I found that rule would sometimes need to bend in order to keep to the song-a-week pace. And I ultimately fell off that pace towards the end — it turns out the ever-growing playlist of songs I (mostly) like took up an ever-growing portion of my listening time, until the playlist mostly stalled out in October.
Even so, I consider the playlist a successful experiment, though not without some true clunkers in the mix. So, following the tradition of a friend (who largely inspired the playlist in the first place), I culled the 40-or-so songs down to a tight 15-song playlist of stuff I truly loved in 2024. For my own benefit, I thought I’d record some thoughts on why these songs made the cut. But first! The playlist:
Textlessness and Attention in Lazarus 15
…poetry is a short story missing 99 percent of the words.
Greg Rucka
I wish I had the rest of the above quote, made by Rucka at the New York Comic Con in 2013, but to paraphrase, Rucka was suggesting that an intimate understanding of the form of short stories would prepare writers for every kind of writing except poetry. I’ve always seen a resemblance between Rucka’s taut comic work and great short stories, but what truly struck me about that quote was how it seemed to contradict the oft-quoted axiom that the required efficiency of short stories aligns them more closely with poetry than novels. This seeming contradiction may boil down to the inadequacy of our definition of “poetry”, but I couldn’t help but think of this quote as I read Lazarus 15, one of the most poetic comics I’ve ever read. (more…)
The (landscape) 16-panel grid
When I sat down to make the first page of Disconnected, I had to make a number of formatting choices. As with any choice, they carried with them both benefits and drawbacks, which I hope to discuss here. First, let’s identify some of those choices:
Page dimensions
Opting to orient the page as landscape seemed like a no-brainer to me — this was conceived as a web comic, which means folks would mostly be reading it on screens. Landscape felt like it would take advantage of screen space better. Additionally, I had just finished reading Chris Ware’s Lint, which made stunning use of its landscape pages. I doubt Disconnected will read anything like Lint, but it serves as an important formal inspiration for what I’m trying to do. (more…)
Drew Baumgartner 