All Songs Considered: The Year In Music 2018

VPM | By Bob Boilen, Robin Hilton, Ann Powers and Stephen Thompson

Published December 3, 2018 at 10:00 AM EST

Updated February 20, 2024

Childish Gambino (left) performs onstage during the 2018 iHeartRadio Music Festival. Rosalía speaks onstage during the 19th annual Latin GRAMMY Awards. Janelle Monae performs in Los Angeles in June and Kacey Musgraves performs at the 2018 Stagecoach Festival in April.

Well, kids, it’s been another year of holograms, headlines and big human messes here in Orbit City. At least music brought us together again and again in 2018, whether in the crowd to see Mitski, Janelle Monáe or Brandi Carlile, or surrounded by strangers in bed at Max Richter’s SLEEP concert. This Year in Review edition of All Songs Considered is built like a little time machine to move us chronologically through 2018. And although we can’t predict the future, many of the songs selected by hosts Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton, joined by NPR Music’s Ann Powers and Stephen Thompson, sound a little like dispatches from a moment just around the corner.

One of the year’s biggest albums, Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer came heralding the marriage of sound and visuals, a trend we’re seeing in the work of an incredibly talented new class of artists. Artists like Mitski, Tierra Whack and Childish Gambino are thinking about music as spectacle, as theater, as video and as a showcase of the moving body.

New rappers, like Compton’s Buddy, are using recordings as a tool for world-building, taking us to the cross streets of their neighborhoods. All this in a year when Kendrick Lamar made history by winning the Pulitzer for his 2017 album DAMN.

That moment, in April, was one of a pair of events in 2018 where it felt like the attention of the world was drawn to music. The other arrived with the death of Aretha Franklin in August, and mourning the Queen of Soul gave us good reason to celebrate her music.

This is just the beginning of our look back at the best music of 2018. This week, we’ll share NPR Music’s lists of the best albums and songs of the year, and we’ll have personal lists and picks for the best of many different genres too. We want to know what you loved this year too: You can vote for your favorite albums of the year right here. Stick with us — 2019 (the actual future!) is almost here.

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Bob Boilen

In 1988, a determined Bob Boilen started showing up on NPR's doorstep every day, looking for a way to contribute his skills in music and broadcasting to the network. His persistence paid off, and within a few weeks he was hired, on a temporary basis, to work for All Things Considered. Less than a year later, Boilen was directing the show and continued to do so for the next 18 years.

Significant listener interest in the music being played on All Things Considered, along with his and NPR's vast music collections, gave Boilen the idea to start All Songs Considered. "It was obvious to me that listeners of NPR were also lovers of music, but what also became obvious by 1999 was that the web was going to be the place to discover new music and that we wanted to be the premiere site for music discovery." The show launched in 2000, with Boilen as its host.

Before coming to NPR, Boilen found many ways to share his passion for music. From 1982 to 1986 he worked for Baltimore's Impossible Theater, where he held many posts, including composer, technician, and recording engineer. Boilen became part of music history in 1983 with the Impossible Theater production Whiz Bang, a History of Sound. In it, Boilen became one of the first composers to use audio sampling — in this case, sounds from nature and the industrial revolution. He was interviewed about Whiz Bang by Susan Stamberg on All Things Considered.

In 1985, the Washington City Paper voted Boilen 'Performance Artist of the Year.' An electronic musician, he received a grant from the Washington D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities to work on electronic music and performance.

After Impossible Theater, Boilen worked as a producer for a television station in Washington, D.C. He produced several projects, including a music video show. In 1997, he started producing an online show called Science Live for the Discovery Channel. He also put out two albums with his psychedelic band, Tiny Desk Unit, during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Boilen still composes and performs music and posts it for free on his website BobBoilen.info. He performs contradance music and has a podcast of contradance music that he produces with his son Julian.

Boilen's first book, Your Song Changed My Life, was published in April 2016 by HarperCollins.

See stories by Bob Boilen