Debbie Reynolds, Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor – Good Mornin' (1952)
All of history's great performances – and all performances generally – land somewhere on the spectrum between artifice and truth. We have faking it and meaning it, showbiz glamour and bare-hearted emotion, tears and jazz hands. And it's almost always some mixture of the two. Good Mornin', from 1952's Singin' in the Rain, is a glorious example of the same. Debbie Reynolds, Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor sing with such vim, dance with such abandon, that these acts are difficult to imagine as deception. Something seems so honest in the dumbfounding dazzle of Reynolds's personality – even though she's an actress playing a role.
Reynolds seems to mean it even when she's faking it. Our most vivid talents have a way of remaining themselves no matter whom they are being, what they are doing, even whose songs they are singing. It's not that they are inveterate characters, unable to put on another mask: It's that their eyes are unwavering while they slip into somebody else's skin.
"I feel like I'm finally myself," the comedian/interviewer Marc Maron said in a recent podcast. For me, this idea underscored many of 2016's most terrible passings, including the deaths, this week, of both Reynolds and her daughter, Carrie Fisher. Like George Michael – or Prince, or Bowie, or Jones, or Cohen, or Ali, or … – these women seemed to have intuited some of the answer of how to live. They could be themselves, no matter where their feet were moving to.
Van Morrison – Astral Weeks (1968)
The year is a wheel, and whenever the wheel rolls over I find myself reaching for familiar things, old touchstones, to feel whether they're still warm. Van Morrison's Astral Weeks became my favourite album when I was 18, days after leaving home, when a girl in a darkened dorm room put it on and said, "Here." But it's not just nostalgia that brings me back to its lifts and swoons and squiggles of bass, strings, guitar and flute, nor to Morrison's searching voice. All of this record feels like a series of beginnings and rebeginnings, from the swells of the instruments to the cycles of the refrains. It's sunrise after sunrise, sometimes skipping the sunsets: "To be born again / To be born again," Morrison sings. "There you go." The turbulence of 2016 won't really have an end, not even at Saturday's last tick. Every wheel remains in motion, every sorrow and each bliss. The horizon's still unfurling. Maybe it's already 2017 when you're reading this. New songs become old songs and maybe we get better at singing along.
Sean Michaels received the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his novel Us Conductors. He is the editor of the music blog Said the Gramophone.