Alas, the photoblog is dead! Long live Flickr! Typepad arm-wrestled with Ludicorp, and Flickr emerged triumphant! (Seriously, I couldn't go on paying a monthly fee to Typepad when I was really only uploading to Flickr. I loooove Flickr.)

Kings of Convenience — Riot on an Empty Street

"Through life we have to go through periodic moltings in which our old insulated and gnawed surfaces must crack and fall away. And there's a certain kind of beautiful ugliness we experience when we're going through those awkward dismemberments, the falling away of old skins." — the delightful David Whyte, from an audiobook that my sister-in-law gave me, called Clear Mind Wild Heart




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January 8, 2005
My Top 7 Songs of 2004

Sometimes in chess when it's your turn to move, you can make a move that doesn't really reveal any information about your plans for the game. For example, you can shuffle a pawn forward one square. In chess, this is sometimes referred to as a delaying gesture. Well, this entry is a delaying gesture. I offer no real information here about the developments in my life over the past month — which have been enormous in scope and extraordinarily painful as well. Ah, there will be time for that later.

Instead, today, we have this entry about my Top 7 Songs of 2004. My gosh, I've been trying to write this entry for the past five weeks, and I just haven't found the time until now. Yes, it's a delaying gesture. But it's sincere.


So throughout the year I keep a little running list of these songs. I love this practice — I love listening to music, encountering songs for the first time, trying to figure out when a Top Song of the Year is coming to me. It can't be just a good song, it has to be a great song. Whenever I encounter a great song, it gets jotted down in a list for consideration for this entry at the end of the year (or the beginning of the next one).

Sometimes I encounter songs that I should've come across sooner. This year's list contains a few songs that were released before 2004. Since I'm making up the rules, I let it happen this way.

Also, I'm thinking about last year's top songs entry, and noting that maybe my musical taste hasn't changed much over the past year. So be it.


#7: "Golden" (My Morning Jacket, from It Still Moves)
My Morning Jacket is rock music. They mix up a bunch of Neil Young vibes with a touch of psychedelic folk, and it comes out somehow sounding both very grounded and very pure. "Golden" came along in the winter of 2004. And it had me at hello. The song has a clean, transparent sound, crisp acoustic and electric guitars, and gorgeous three-part harmonies that echo around the room. When I listen to this song, the sensation is one of taking flight. Somehow, the song sounds like it was recorded in a big empty warehouse with sunlight coming through huge windows.



#6: "Gone for Good" (The Shins, from Chutes Too Narrow)
Yes, Chutes Too Narrow was a 2003 album. I didn't encounter this album until this month when my brother gave it to me for Christmas. But Garden State, that deeply flawed but still lovable film, introduced me to sound of The Shins over the summer. I took an immediate liking to their gentle music, the sweet wistfulness of their vocals. "Gone for Good" is a classic breakup song, with lonely lyrics, twangy guitars, and soulful harmonies:

Go back to your hometown
Get your feet on the ground
And stop floating around

I find a fatal flaw
In the logic of love
And go out of my head



#5: "Carry Me Home" (Hem, from Eveningland)
Hem's long-anticipated second album, Eveningland, was released this fall. If you love American music and heartbreaking lyrics and lush melody, this is a band you need to know about. There are sixteen songs on Eveningland, each a perfect little jewel. Sure, you could argue that "Carry Me Home" is not the best song on the album (I also like "A-Hunting We Will Go" and "Strays"). But that would be splitting hairs.

The song starts with a cryptic lyric:
We were raised in the nettles
And they showed us how they grow
Where a poison comes to settle
And what a poisoned man comes to know

As the song opens it becomes something like murder ballad (in one band interview, songwriter Dan Messé referred to this song as "a burying song," then added, "...I don't even know what that means"). This song gives us Sally Ellyson's pristine vocal and guest Josh Rouse's looping echo behind her. Is this a song about being delivered from something, or being condemned to something? Both chilling and beautiful, this song raises the hair on my arms every time I listen to it.



#4: "Float On" (Modest Mouse, from Good News for People Who Love Bad News)
Every year there is one perfect pop song that makes the sun shine, inspires the birds to sing, and restores my faith in humanity. In 2004, "Float On" was that song for me.

#3: "Reflecting Light" (Sam Phillips, from A Boot and a Shoe)
If I made a mix CD for you in 2004, it probably contained a heavy dose of Sam Phillips. I just want to say I'm sorry if I overdid it. But I love this woman. Musically speaking, this was the year of Sam Phillips for me. I've always known about her — Martinis & Bikinis was a favorite some twelve years ago — but over the past few years I'd lost track of her. In May, I heard an NPR interview with her about her new album, A Boot and a Shoe. I was completely taken with some of her remarks in that interview — it was all over for me after that.

The songs in this album are cryptic little gems. Many are written in the first person. Even so, there is a sense of mystery in her lyrics that makes me crazy (and I mean crazy-good). The writer of these songs has obviously been through a great deal of pain, and she comes out on the other side into a world of her own, a bittersweet place where the only thing of which she can be certain is her own sense of loss and longing:
Now that I've worn out, I've worn out the world
I'm on my knees in facination
Looking through the night
And the moon's never seen me before
But I'm reflecting light



#2: "Naked As We Came" (Iron & Wine, from Our Endless Numbered Days)
Once again, I am a little late in catching a very important train. I passed right by 2003's The Creek Drank the Cradle, so coming across Iron & Wine this year was another important discovery for me. This delicate, beautiful song opened me to that discovery. It gently hums along like any tenderhearted love song, but when you stop and listen to the lyrics, it takes another turn. And the intimacy of the relationship in the song becomes almost too much to bear:
She says "if I leave before you, darling,
Don't you waste me in the ground"
I lay smiling like our sleeping children
One of us will die inside these arms
Eyes wide open, naked as we came
One will spread our ashes round the yard



#1: "Greek Song" (Rufus Wainwright, from Poses)
I'm showing some roots now, naming a 2002 song my favorite of 2004. Can't blame me: this is the year I discovered Rufus' second album, Poses. My encounter with Rufus Wainwright last year cast a long, lovely shadow over this year — he was my companion through every adventure of this past twelve months. "Greek Song" is classic Rufus Wainwright: a soaring melody, an inscrutable, whimsical lyric, and so much musical imagination that it almost can't be contained inside the song. I adore this man.

....Don't leave me here
Don't leave me where angels fear to tread
When I get back I will bleed after my beating
Don't leave me here, don't leave me here
I'm scared to death
All the pearls of china fade astride the volta
Don't sew beelines to anybodys hide
Save your poison for a lover who is on your side.

The melody rises and falls and rises again. The lyrics push me father away, and then draw me back in. In Rufus's music I find a marvelous tension between how much of the self to conceal and how much to reveal. In 2004, this was a major theme in my life.

Honorable Mentions:

There are several songs I really liked that just fell short of making The Big List:

"Heartache" — A Girl Called Eddy
"Inside of Love" — Nada Surf
"Bird Stealing Bread" — Iron & Wine
"Five Colors" — Sam Phillips
"Carnival Town" — Norah Jones (yes, I really like this very, very mainstream Norah Jones song)
"Lover's Spit (Redux)" — Broken Social Scene
And there are also a bunch of important albums I didn't get around to this year — releases from Franz Ferdinand, Wilco, Rilo Kiley, Ron Sexsmith, and many more. For this, I must ask your pardon — and then remember with gratitude that there's always next year's list.