The Arcadian Wild is an indie-folk trio from Nashville, TN. Their web site describes their music as “innovative in the use of vocal harmony and counterpoint”, thus opening up “new possibilities in modern string band music”. While the comments are accurate, I would add that the results are astonishing, and resulted in a gorgeously performed and produced video of their song, “Big Sky, MT”, at the top of our indie-folk performance video list for this year.

The other performances within the top 10 of our year-end list of 45 songs, include:

• an eclectic collaborative performance of Phoebe Bridgers’ song Kyoto with Philip Glass providing a pianistic, minimalist counterpoint, Jackson Browne on backup vocals, accompanied by the Scorchio Quartet. Somehow it all works together beautifully. 
• Bear’s Den, who feature in our list almost annually, this time with a performance filmed in the snow around Zermatt, at the Zermatt Unplugged festival.
• a great, original new song by Molly Tuttle, “Alice in the Bluegrass”. Wait for the instrumental fills.
• Martyn Joseph’s contribution to the BBC ’21st Century Folk’ project, which you can read about here: https://www.englishfolkexpo.com/21st-century-folk/
• Tom Odell’s searing song about school shootings, hard to watch, but hard to look away.
• Noah Kahan’s acoustic rendition of his very popular hit, Stick Season.
• English songwriter’s Cat Burns admonitionary, “live more, love more”, with wisdom that belies her young age (23).
• #3. A recent performance update of Bastille’s smash, “Pompeii”, arranged by Hans Zimmer for orchestra and children’s choir, with soaring top notes from Freya Ridings.
• #2. “Killer + the Sound”, a collaboration between Noah Gundersen, Abby Gundersen and Phoebe Bridgers. We’ve tracked Noah Gundersen in our Discovery lists for a number of years, and hopefully this and another Gundersen song, “Better Days”, featured in the list, signal a breakout year for this fine writer and performer.

Collaboration is the name of the game in the year 2023. For example, the top ten feature two collaborative efforts with Phoebe Bridgers, one including Abby Gundersen who also records with SYML from our list. Bridgers is also a member of the group ‘boygenius’ who didn’t quite make the cutoff, but are present in our 2023 Discovery list. Lizzy McAlpine and Tiny Habits have their own tracks in this list, but also appear with JP Saxe. Olivia Barton also appears with corook. Jackson Browne, who sings backup with Bridgers, also sings backup on a Discovery list track with the Watkins Family. All this pitching in has resulted in some pretty great performances.

Finally, the collaborationist sine qua non is Jacob Collier, who performed my personal favourite live performance track this year, ‘Little Blue’. Look for his February album release ‘Djesse, vol. 4’ which features almost everyone performing in indie folk, and various other genres. 

This is now the twelfth annual ‘Artsfols Best Indie Folk and Acoustic Session Videos’ list. This year we added the word ‘Indie’ to the title as it increases the gamut to include “acoustic-ish” songs, as Lawrence (the band) refers to them. The songs were all rated by a panel that included Nancy, Anna, Andrea and first-time panelist, Josh from the USA. Josh has followed indie folk for a large number of years, and increased our search list of artists considerably.

The viewer should not think that we just found 45 random videos and ranked them. Rather these are our favourite 45 songs out of thousands of such videos released on youtube this year. #45 is not that far off from #1, which helps to explain why my personal favourite, Jacob Collier, finished at position #20. Really, panel, it’s a much better song than that, but y’all haven’t listened to it a dozen times like I have.

A little more on the process involved. At this point I track over 350 performers on youtube for live performance videos. Not every one of these performers releases videos in every year. This year, my tracking software pulled up about 5,000 videos from these performers for my review. After that review, I also scrub through 80 performance video channels, some of which release thousands of videos during the year. Yes, that is you, KEXP and Paste Studios. All this work results in a list of ‘possibles’ for the year end list, which I released as our Discovery list (https://gesprek.net/2023/12/22/our-2023-indie-folk-and-acoustic-discovery-playlist-is-ready/ ), with over 650 songs. I further cull that list, with a more fulsome listening approach, down to 80 songs, for listening and scoring by our panel. The scoresheets are released, reviewed, returned, and then compiled and discussed to come up with a ‘top 40’ list of live performance videos for the year. Except there’s always a few we can’t bear to cut, thus 45 songs, this year.

Some parts of the initial review process can become tedious, but there’s great joy when it comes time to release the scoresheets to the panel, and more in compiling and discussing the results. The entire process culminates in rapture when Nancy and I sit down to watch and listen to the playlist for the first time. This year’s list takes 3 1/2 hours to view in entirety, and we had no problem doing this last night. It does help to have a big screen TV and decent sound system, for a close to live experience. Better than live in some ways, and I won’t get off on a rant about today’s sometimes inconsiderate audiences. From our living room to yours, here it is:

The list can also be viewed on any youtube app (Roku, Apple box, built in TV app) by searching for ‘Artsfols 2023 Best’. This particular list will NOT be made available on youtube music or Spotify given its focus on viewable live performances.