2012 starts and ends with Frank Ocean. Channel Orange is an album that I will play until the day I die. It’s beauty - naked and fragile at times yet full bodied and confident in others - is unlike any other album to compare to in the past decade. Ocean’s falsetto on “Thinkin Bout You” wails in sincerity. His epic “Pyramids” runs a wild gamut of funk, R&B, hip-hop, and electronic elements. I always find it an amazing accomplishment to have a song that’s over 6 minutes (this being 9:53) that I can listen to constantly.

One of Ocean’s most incredible talents is his ability to genuinely emote his feelings through his voice. I absorb his heartbreak in “Bad Religion” as he confesses to a cabbie, “It’s a bad religion / to be in love with someone / who could never love you / Only bad religion / could have me feeling the way I do.” And I can only guess Ocean may have been influenced by the late great James Brown’s “Please Please Please” as he cries “Love” over and over and over again.

Ocean takes on the role of psychologist in “Super Rich Kids:” “Too many bottles of this wine we can’t pronounce / too many bowls of that green, no lucky charms / The maids come around too much / Parent’s ain’t around enough / Too many joy rides in daddy’s Jaguar / Too many white lies and white lines / Super rich kids with nothing but loose ends / Super rich kids with nothing but fake friends.” Ocean’s take on the privileged and entitled is refreshing. He goes further with his tongue-in-cheek track “Sweet Life, ” a tale about “domesticated paradise,” with one of my favorite lines: “So why see the world, when you got the beach / The sweet life.”

And then there is my favorite track: “Lost.” Words don’t really do this song justice. Ocean’s ability to meld rapping and crooning over a beat like this while juxtaposing what he can do with a orchestral song like "Thinkin' Bout You" is in a level of its own. I just love Frank Ocean, and I cannot wait for his new album to hopefully arrive in 2015.