Ken's Best of 2020 - #8: Laura Jane Grace - Stay Alive


There have been roughly a million quarantine albums released this year, but the best has been from Laura Jane Grace. None of them truly capture the feeling of being trapped in our house for far longer than we could have imagined while the world seems to be burning all around us. Stay Alive is such a loaded album title right now, and obviously Laura Jane Grace chose it for that reason. The vast majority of the fourteen songs on this album are just Grace and her guitar ("Shelter in Place" and "SuperNatural Possession" includes a drum machine) which gives the entire album such an intimate, personal feeling. It's a collection of songs about quarantine and the hopeless despair so many of us are feeling right now. It's not all doom and gloom to listen. Somehow Grace takes these feelings and uses them to inject a feeling of hope and community into the songs on Stay Alive.

Songs of note: "The Calendar Song," "Hanging Tree," "SuperNatural Possession," "The Swimming Pool Song," "The Mountain Song"

On Repeat...

Liam Kazar - "Shoes Too Tight"

The Freqs - "Witch"

Dutch ReBelle - "GOONIEZ"