Does anyone else think it’s rude to release your list of the year’s best songs before the year is over? It’s not just that artists are still releasing new music; anyone who posts a list on Thanksgiving is giving up five weeks of listening to music! Seriously, did any of you out there feel like you had enough time to listen to music this year? Are you on top of all the albums you meant to listen to, and all those random MP3s your friends kept pushing on you?
I thought not! Hence, I waited until New Year’s Eve, using every last moment to listen to new songs. One of them even got onto my list, just four days after I heard it for the first time. Of course, given that it’s New Year’s Eve, you will all be drunk and pass out before you get to my No. 1, and by tomorrow my list will be buried under an avalanche of re-posted New Year’s songs. F.
Anyway, each year, rather than try to find the “best” songs of the last 12 months, I look for the tracks that are timeless — the ones I will still be listening to a year or five down the road. This year, I found at least 20 such songs. Here are the ones I know for sure — and to show you how serious I am about these tracks, I’m including their 2009 iTunes playcount. (In the case of the Dirty Projectors and the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, each song is effectively standing in for the entire album from which it derived.)
20. “Low Man,” Alberta Cross. (8 plays in four days)
19. “Feeling Good,” My Brightest Diamond. (31 plays in 10 months)
18. “Everything With You,” the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. (34 plays in 9 months)
17. “People Got a Lot of Nerve,” Neko Case. (34 plays in 11 months)
16. “The Mountain,” Heartless Bastards. (36 plays in 8 months)
15. “Walkabout [w/ Noah Lennox],” Atlas Sound. “Much of those bands’ work is impenetrable to me, but this is like the Shins singing lullabies over the bossa nova intro to Austin Powers. Bouncy, melodic and fundamentally sweet.” (29 plays in 1 month)
14. “Replay,” Iyaz. “A girl has been running through Iyaz’s mind all day, and so that we might understand what he’s going through, he has transmuted her into an earworm. Like all great pop songs, it ends way before you want it to; the chorus has a nice circular melody to it, and at times I’d like to hear it go on forever.” (22 plays in 2 months)
13. “Ex-Girl Collection,” Will Sheff. “It turned out there was something relatively easy Sheff could to do make the song his own: enunciate. The original”Ex-Girl Collection” draws much of its power from the fact that the lyrics are so personal and self-loathing that Bissell has to mumble them; Sheff rescues them from obscurity, and leaves them plain for the world to hear.” (35 plays in 10 months)
12. “Northern Lights,” Bowerbirds.” “A perfect Sunday singalong, this is the best Bon Iver song not actually written or performed by Bon Iver. If you’ve ever woken up next to someone you love and thought, woah, this one’s for you.” (35 plays in 5 months)
11. “Audience of One,” Cold War Kids. I started out lukewarm on this one, but it’s growing on me in a hurry. Nathan Willett has an attractive swagger throughout this song, and much of what people love about Spoon is present in this track. A standout song from a band that needed one. (18 plays in 1 month)
10. “Blood Bank,” Bon Iver. Am I alone in thinking that, track for track, the Blood Bank EP is better than For Emma, Forever Ago? There wasn’t a bad track on the EP, and its namesake was the finest moment — song that oozed winter from its pores. (42 plays in 11 months)
9. “Two Weeks,” Grizzly Bear. One of the twin masterpieces on Veckatimest. Good lord, these harmonies! And the song was also responsible for the best fan-made video of the year / all time (pending). (45 plays in 7 months)
8. “Zero,” Yeah Yeah Yeahs. One of those tracks that, the first time you hear it, immediately goes on repeat for the next several days. Karen O deserves credit here for her wonderfully cryptic lyrics — “Shake it like a ladder to the sun”; “Get your leather, leather, leather on.” Oh it is on, girl. (41 plays in 8 months)
7. “Two” (Daytrotter version), the Antlers. I prefer the live take to the studio version because it omits the lyrics-obscuring falsetto. “This version puts the vocals up front, where they belong. Peter Silberman relates his sad, angry tale of a man losing his wife to cancer, and it just levels you.” (38 combined plays in three months)
6. “Auditorium,” Mos Def. The Ecstatic was the rare hip-hop record that held my attention all the way through, and “Auditorium” was my favorite thing on it: a slinky, Middle Eastern beat with Mos Def and Slick Rick dancing circles around it. Just fantastic. (44 plays in 6 months)
5. “Swim Until You Can’t See Land,” Frightened Rabbit. “In this euphoric song, Scott Hutchinson realizes he can’t go back to where he’s been. Instead he wades into the unknown, resolving to keep going forward until he can’t find his way back to where he’s been. It’s the impulse that makes us finally delete that phone number we’ve been using to send those pleading midnight texts. Texts we send even though we know, in our wrecked exhausted hearts, that we’re never getting a text in return. To anyone who loved The Midnight Organ Fight, this is the hard-won happy ending we’ve been waiting for. Damn if it doesn’t feel good.” (20 plays in 1 month)
4. “Pulled Fences,” the Wrens. Someday, hopefully, there will be another Wrens album. Until then we have “Pulled Fences” as proof it’s worth waiting for. This live track, recorded at Abbey Road and available for purchase on iTunes, is a marvel of slow-burning intensity. Charles Bissell works himself up into a frenzy over yet another tenuous relationship, and brings the house down in the process. “You’ve gotta leave it all behind,” he repeats several times. But not this track. This track stays! (52 plays in 11 months)
3. “Stillness is the Move,” Dirty Projectors. Solange’s version got more attention in the latter half of the year, but let’s not forget Amber Coffman’s stunning original. I watched her perform it live this year, and she owned it. (46 plays in 6 months)
2. “While You Wait for the Others,” Grizzly Bear. I’ve been talking about this song since last year, when a live version performed for an NPR station sneaked onto my list of the year’s favorite songs. But the studio version was well worth waiting for — that heart-stopping climax, where the Grizzlies combine all their vocal power for a hypnotic round of hocketing, is my favorite musical moment of the year. This song had the structure and the power that the rest of Veckatimest, to my mind, was lacking. Also: Michael McDonald. Michael McDonald! (54 plays in 7 months, not counting Michael McDonald, live or acoustic versions)
1. “1901,” Phoenix. No surprise here, I suppose: The song has been a yearlong obsession. There was no happier moment in my life this year than when I was in New Orleans with Danimal and Sazerac, pumping my fists along with them while Phoenix played this song. As I said then: “Nearly a hundred listens in, I still can’t tell you what the lyrics are about, and at this point it’s fair to say they’re beside point. Three minutes and thirteen seconds of bliss; it was over before it began.” That’s the magic of this song: it always is. (80 plays in 10 months)
