Matt Gallivan

albums

5. Home Again by Michael Kiwanuka

This one snuck up on me. Hadn’t heard of this guy until a text from a friend demanding that I listen to the album. It’s just goddamn great. It’s a throwback not for the sake of being a gimmick, but for the sake of capturing a warm production tone that is nailed right down to the album art. And the songs are just wonderful.

4. Coexist by The xx

I was so so in love with their first album that I was actually nervous for them when this came out. I mean, this band is three kids who write quiet little love song duets who absolutely blew up and were hailed as geniuses when their debut came out. The potential for disappointment was so huge. Would it just be more of the same and boring? Would they force themselves to grow, try to something new and fail?

They took a third approach, and it took some major guts:  take their minimalist approach to song construction and strip it down even more. You could drive a truck through the whitespace in these songs. And damned if it didn’t work. For me, it took one listen to acclimate– to get it and understand what they were doing– but after that… floored again.

3. Barchords by Bahamas

This is one of those albums that will forever be linked to a certain time and place for me. Living in a sublet on Market Street in San Francisco, an artist’s apartment filled with plants that I was slowly killing, being away from New York and my fiancee, drinking a ton of coffee and beer and watching The Walking Dead on Apple TV and– AND!– listening to this album on some good speakers while I typed away at a desk overlooking the foggy street and palm trees and cable cars. It is a bunch of sad songs, but that’s OK.

Goddamn Canadians strike again.

2. Break It Yourself by Andrew Bird

Up until this year and this album, I’ve always been an Andrew Bird admirer, but not an Andrew Bird lover. This album, though, took all of his strengths and rolled them into a tight little nugget of awesome. You know the last scene in Master and Commander, where Captain Jack and Dr. Maturin start playing that incredibly beautiful song on cello and violin and the camera pans out slowly over the ship as it turns around and makes chase after the other ship holding who they had just then realized was the enemy captain? THIS IS AN ALBUM FULL OF SONGS LIKE THAT. I’ve been waiting for it for years. It’s so great.

1. Heaven by The Walkmen

Well look who has my favorite album of the year again. Truth be told, the slow cadence of the opening track threw me for such a loop that I fired off a careless email to a friend saying the whole thing was garbage and that I was disappointed. So stupid. This is another great effort by these guys that stands entirely on its own in terms of tone and mood. The Walkmen have the uncanny ability to sound different across albums but entirely like themselves at the same time. I singled out “Song for Leigh” as one of my favorites of the year below, but really, there are so many contenders here. “Heaven.” “Heartbreaker.” “The Love You Love.” “Nightingales.” They all make you want to put on a white button-up shirt, wrap a mic cord around your fist and scream along at the top of your lungs.

honorable mentions

Strapped by The Soft Pack, Little Broken Hearts by Norah Jones, Shut Down the Streets by AC Newman

tracks

(rdio playlist)

10. “Bugeye Jim” by Billy Bragg & Wilco*

9. “To Just Grow Away” by The Tallest Man on Earth*

8. “Tides” by The xx

7. “Happy Pills” by Norah Jones – She is still the best in a timeless classic way. I love that she tries new things all the time. Always sounds great.

6. “Clean Slate” by M. Ward*

5. “We Are Fine” by Sharon Van Etten – Love this song. Something about her stuff, good as it is, just doesn’t grab me. But this one is an exception. Also, Zach Condon!

4. “I’m Getting Ready” by Michael Kiwanuka – The song that had the biggest impact on me at first listen this year. Listen to it in a quiet place, where you can hear it build. It’s really beautiful.

3. “Orpheo Looks Back” by Andrew Bird

2. “Song For Leigh” by The Walkmen

CITY  San Francisco. I listed this place as a revelation in my highlights of 2008 after a trip here while working for NPR. Glad to get the chance to live here, and to fall asleep to the sound of the foghorn in the bay. It’s a beautiful place. Leaving the other place was a punch in the gut, but life’s too short. Honorable mentions for Nashville and New Orleans, each of which deserve their own blog post some other day.

SHOW  Laura Marling at Cafe du Nord. Lordy. She is phenomenal. She’s kind of an anachronism, unafraid of Dylanesque rambling in a way few other singer songwriters are these days. She’s got the swagger and the chops (the former of  which is actually the key ingredient) to pull it off. No one else does these days. No one.

BOURBON  Bulleit. Now, I’m not a true bourbon guy. I met a couple of those guys this year and the stuff they drink could take the paint off of your car. Bulleit is probably not for those guys, but it is for someone like me. It’s a nice, warm-belly, new city company-provider. And a great bottle.

BBQ  Fette Sau. Meat by the pound. Beer by the gallon. Whiskey by the glass. I finally made it here while in New York for my bachelor party. My brothers and friends and I ate and drank until we couldn’t speak. It was glorious. Have you ever had beef cheeks? You need to try beef cheeks.

TRAVEL LOYALTY PROGRAM  Virgin America Elevate. Seven trips back to New York and ten other trips since moving west in February mean the busiest travel year I’ve ever experienced. I hope desperately not to become one of those people who wear airline miles as a badge of honor, but Virgin America does make flying more fun. Just as I hope to never be anything but excited by flying in a metal tube at 30,000 feet above the ground, I hope to never be so jaded that WiFi on every flight, leather on every seat, a touchscreen food ordering system and live television seem rote to me on an airplane. And the ability to use the fancy pants security line as an Elevate Silver member is pretty great, too.

STREAMING MUSIC APP  Rdio. I wrote it off when Spotify showed up. Thought it was done for. But it keeps getting better! And, as it turns out, the fact that Spotify had more people using it wasn’t such a selling point after all. I don’t want to see what Spotify users are listening to. I want to see what the designers I work with are listening to. They’re the ones with taste, and they’re on Rdio. And it’s easy to see why: it’s beautiful.

SACRED CULTURAL INSTITUTION  Marriage. I am a lucky man. That is all.

BONUS SECTON!

2012′s most disappointing albums

5. A Wasteland Companion by M. Ward

4. Delta Spirit by Delta Spirit

3. Reckon by Jason Collett

2. Milk Famous by White Rabbits

1. Le Voyage Dans La Lune by Air

This coming weekend will be my last visit to New York before movers come and pack Dana and my stuff to be shipped west to San Francisco. Even though I’ve been in California for nearly three months, it’s this last visit to our apartment in Manhattan that is really forcing me to come to terms with saying goodbye to New York. I only lived there for 16 months.

I drove up to New York City from Washington, DC by myself in a rented SUV. It was a brand new Jeep– some newfangled, family-friendly version of the Wrangler– and it was fun to drive. Before I left DC, it dawned on me that I had no way to plug my iPhone into the car’s stereo system. I burned a solid hour and a half driving around downtown DC trying to find a place to buy one. I couldn’t, so I ended up listening to the radio the whole way up. It was a beautiful, sunny October day and I suppose I knew that I didn’t need a damn auxiliary cord that badly. I just didn’t want to leave DC.

I was incredibly nervous, and got more nervous with every mile I drove north. I was nervous about driving in Manhattan, for one. Less immediately, I was also nervous about being an under-qualified bad hire at my new job. I was nervous about leaving my dream job at NPR, a place I loved. I was nervous about not knowing anyone in a new place. But mostly, I was nervous about the fact that I was about to live in New York City for some indefinite amount of time.

It’s one thing to never feel any burning desire to live in New York, as so many do. It’s quite another to actively want to never live in New York. I fell into the latter camp. It was just too much. It was too big and not made for laid back Vermonter dudes with (frankly) only a modest sense of professional ambition. But my girlfriend Dana had encountered one of those professional opportunities that you just don’t say no to. We both knew it, and knew that we wanted to stay together and not be long-distance, so there I was driving away from a life and friends and stability 8 years in the making. It was hard.

One week earlier, I had made the same trip, but with Dana. I had driven her parents’ white Prius that time, which was as packed as we could make it with stuff– just the right amount of stuff, it turned out, to fill the 375 square foot apartment we were moving her into, and into which I would follow after wrapping things up that week in DC.

That first trip had ended miserably. We had arrived on a Saturday and managed to lock ourselves out of the apartment on Sunday. We stopped some folks in the lobby of the building and asked where we could find the super.

“That would be Lester. He sells hats down on the corner. You can find him there.”

We walked to the end of the block and found Lester, a big surly Russian who fancied himself something of a tough guy. “Ey don’t know yoo. Ey can’t let yoo eento an apartment just beecauss yoo ask nisely,” he told us, aloof and avoiding direct eye contact. And he was right. We were subletting unofficially, so there was no way he or the property management company he worked for could let us back in.

But he felt compelled to not simply leave it at that. “You are soobletting eellegally,” he said. “Ekspekt an eeviction notice in thee next few dayss.” With that, he turned around and went back to tending his hat stand. It was then that Dana had a near-complete meltdown at the corner of Mott and Prince. I had to leave her at a friend’s apartment in Harlem that night. She showed up to her first day of work in day-old casual Sunday clothes. She spent the next night dodging through a cold autumn rain trying to catch up with a friend of our renter who had a copy of the apartment key. The rest of that week, she sat alone in the tiny apartment, hiding from Lester, watching Mad Men on DVD and being miserable. This is what I was driving toward in my rented Jeep. As it turned out, it was the last really bad week she would have in New York. I never had one.

When I emerged from the Holland Tunnel that next weekend, it was nighttime. As if the universe was winking at me, Frank Sinatra came on the radio. It wasn’t schmaltzy Sinatra, though (and it was definitely not the song you’re thinking of), but sad, smooth, pretty Sinatra with a clear twinkling piano. That’s how I remember it, anyway. The traffic I had stressed about navigating was there but easy to manage. I put the windows down and the lights of West Village glittered. It was instantly, unceremoniously magical.

The next 16 months included unremarkable things that life sometimes includes: stressful periods and slow periods at work, a new (and, thankfully, bigger) apartment, friends visiting from out of town, a couple of vacations, business trips, etc. But everything in that time was imbued with an energy and excitement I had never experienced before, and the result was that I reacted to the city in the complete opposite way that I worried I might. Instead of being intimidated, I felt at home. Instead of feeling cowed, I felt emboldened to embrace as much of it as I could.

I listened to a lot of Bob Dylan in my first months there. Bob Dylan sounds good anywhere, but he’s right there next to you in New York. Same with the Velvet Underground. Same with Ryan Adams, when he’s plugged into an electric guitar and screaming like a brat cut loose in the city. They are all right there with you.

It wasn’t all bright lights and big buildings and the subway and good coffee and shops and restaurants that made it so incredible, though. We formed some great friendships there. All of these things combine to make a hell of an elixir.

Dana and my time in New York coincided almost perfectly with my discovery and obsession with Instagram. The result is that my Flickr stream (remember Flickr?), a place where I had meticulously collected and organized hundreds of photos from my various point-and-shoot cameras over my years in DC, became completely overrun with square-shaped iPhone shots of the minutiae, sights and events of that year. Looking at the collection of those shots from 2011 now gives me an almost overwhelming sense of happiness. Every one of those photos communicates such a powerful feeling of time and place to me that it would make more sense if it had been taken decades ago rather than months ago. They all evoke an intense nostalgia for the very recent past.

But that’s the New York Dana and I experienced and fell in love with. Every sensation was amplified one hundred times. You always had the intense sensation of being there. It was like a dream, the ease with which new wonders fell into our laps.

So I will miss it terribly. I don’t know if it will ever work out that it makes sense for Dana and I to go back. We’re getting married in November and we’re committed to making the most of what San Francisco has to offer us. But damn, I’m glad we lived in New York. And I hope that, in retrospect, leaving while it was still amazing and dizzying will prove to have been wise. Leaving New York isn’t tragic in itself, but if the memory of living there felt like anything other than getting smacked in the face with an exploding bag of pixie dust… well, that would be tragic.

So with that, goodbye, New York, and thanks for the magic.

Outro.

albums

5. The Whole Love by Wilco

First listen was at a Starbucks in Boston. I was so excited I tweeted about it.

I point out both of these things because I think they probably both support New York magazine’s indictment of Wilco and similar acts as the new “adult contemporary.” This was intended as a knock because, the logic went, the music is no longer new or interesting enough to bother with.

The main criticism you hear about this kind of record—even outweighing references to Starbucks and/or the bourgeoisie—is that it is just too dull to even bother producing any more complex indictment of it. These acts, intentionally or not, have won; they’ve taken a lower-sales, lower-budget version of the type of trip Sting once took, from a post-punk upstart to an adult staple.

There’s something to that: if exploring new sonic space and witnessing bold new artistic direction in music is how you get all your kicks then yes, you should probably pass on The Whole Love. The critic seemed to grant that Wilco had already done this in their career. He was just disappointed to see that it appears they’ve stopped.

It’s a fair point, and I agree with it, generally. I disagree, though, with the subtext: that I should feel self-conscious about enjoying the new album. That’s the key distinction, I suppose, between the meaningfulness of a criticism like this to a music critic and the meaningfulness of it to a… well, human. It’s a great example of why one should not put too much stock in music criticism. It’s fun to talk about music. It provides a useful framework and let’s us better understand where we’re all coming from when we talk about how it makes us feel. But it ain’t rocket science, folks. A clever observation is just that. It most often won’t change how someone reacts to the music itself. And, as my adult contemporary Starbucks-jitters-induced tweet indicated, I reacted well to The Whole Love.

4. El Camino by The Black Keys

This is two years running on my top albums list for these guys. What’s interesting about that is that I don’t think of heavy, guttural guitar rock like this as something I’m particularly into. But the songs are so good! And the sound is so incredible! The Black Keys do what they do so well. I find them totally undeniable. This album made me pick up my guitar, find the three chords in the chorus of “Gold on the Ceiling” and rock out in my living room by myself. I hadn’t done that in a while.

3. The King of Limbs by Radiohead

Am I allowed to nominate the second half of an album if that second half is so good that it outweighs the terrifying fuzzed out blippiness of something like “Feral?” This is my goddamn list, so the answer is Yes. (Actually, I should say that the first half of The King of Limbs has grown on me somewhat, only because I trust Radiohead enough to give them the benefit of multiple listens. But really, this one starts at “Lotus Flower.”)

2. The Harrow and the Harvest by Gillian Welch

Gillian and Dave do it again. They are such incredible musicians that I think even their treatment of terrible songs would still sound better than a lot of what’s out there. I was lucky enough to see them again this year. When you see two people with acoustic instruments standing on a bare stage cutting straight through the guts of everyone in the audience, you rethink every other form of music out there. It’s like listening to Otis Redding after going a few months without. You say, “Damn. Why do I ever waste my time listening to any music other than this??”

1. The Rip Tide by Beirut

My love affair with Beirut continues to grow. With each successive album, I like them more and more. I remembering listening to Gulag Orkestar and just not getting it. But The Rip Tide is more accessible and emotive. Its percussiveness and horns and Eastern European influence are things that are all entirely new to me, and make me feel like I’m occupying some great movie involving coffee shops in Prague. This is the most consistently fun album of the year from where I sit.

honorable mentions

Bon Iver by Bon Iver, Ashes & Fire by Ryan Adams, Within and Without by Washed Out

tracks

(spotify playlist)

10. “Black” by Danger Mouse, Daniele Luppi & Norah Jones

9. “Holdin’ on to Black Metal” by My Morning Jacket – O-whoa-whoa-awhoa-yeahayeahyeahyeeeeeeeeaaaaah!

8. “Gold on the Ceiling” by The Black Keys

7. “One Sunday Morning” by Wilco

6. “Give Up the Ghost” by Radiohead

5. “Hard Times” by Gillian Welch

4. “East Harlem” by Beirut – “Payne’s Bay” deserves an honorable mention, as well. But this is the best song on the album, no question. 

3. “Ashes & Fire” by Ryan Adams

2. “Rise to Me” by The Decemberists – I still goddamn hate this band. But this song is just great. The whole album is actually pretty great. The things about The Decemberists that grate on me are largely absent from it. Except for when Colin Meloy sings lines like “a panoply of song,” which bring out that old wanna-punch-the-wall feeling.

1. “Helplessness Blues” by Fleet Foxes – The Fleet Foxes generally don’t do much for me. They make beautiful sounds but for the most part I just don’t find it that interesting. But HOLY SHIT THIS SONG. It is gut-wrenchingly beautiful. 

… and other good stuff from 2011

SHOW   Radiohead at Roseland Ballroom. When I talked to my friend Jonny about it the next day, he asked, “You had seen them before, right?” “No,” I said. “Oh. Then, welcome.”

ACADEMIC FIELD OF STUDY   Behavioral Economics. Reading up on this stuff is fascinating. It’s like that Simpsons line about standup comedy– “It’s funny cuz it’s true!” All of these observations about human behavior and about how we make the decisions we do make sense because you immediately recognize your own foolishness and bad habits in them. I am really looking forward to reading Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow.”

IPHONE APP   Instagram. How fun is Instagram? It made it OK to leave my point-and-shoot at home. Every single shot in my Flickr stream in 2011 was an Instagram. Check it out. Sure, someday we may look back on it as a silly fad of the times like Disco, but for now it’s great fun.

TRAVEL LOYALTY PROGRAM   Amtrak Guest Rewards. What a luxury it is to be able to zip up and down between DC and New York and Vermont. And these points make it possible financially.

CITY   New York. For the second year running. I knew there was a possibility I may grow to like this place, but there’s just no preparing yourself for the experience of living here. It is rich and complex and beautiful in an incomparable way. It’s no place for me to stay for the long haul, but it’s a great thing to experience. I was an asshole, way back when, for saying it wasn’t for me. It’s for everyone, and that’s part of what makes it so incredible.

BONUS SECTION!

2011′s most disappointing albums

5. Rome by Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi

4. Codes & Keys by Death Cab for Cutie

3. Mondo Amore by Nicole Atkins

2. Mylo Xyloto by Coldplay

1. Angles by The Strokes

Last year, I wrote a post outlining my wishlist of updates to the streaming music service rdio. I had just started using it and I loved it. It was beautiful and social in a way that Rhapsody has never been. It was slick. Its user base’s taste in music seemed well aligned with my own (also something I value about eMusic, and why I still subscribe there). Unlike Spotify, I didn’t need to set up an account through a proxy server abroad.

Since then, the company has done a lot of what I hoped they would do. Their desktop app went from being a remote control of your browser to being a fully-functional, beautiful music browser and player, they successfully negotiated rights for a lot more great indie acts, they totally revamped their iPhone app to enable more new music exploration.

Then Spotify finally launched in the U.S. This, after a solid year of reading tantalizing “Spotify coming soon! End of the month!” headlines. This, after already having fallen in love with rdio. I was annoyed.

Not annoyed enough, as it turns out, to not want to sign up and give it a shot. My first impression of the interface was that it is painfully ugly, especially compared to rdio’s. It is dark, industrial and heavy compared to rdio’s light, dynamic and swift look and feel.

rdio

spotify

And the ads. The free version looks like a banner ad with an interactive music player built into it. It’s disgusting.

But there are two key things that, once I got over the initial esthetic shock, made me stop and say oh, well THAT’s cool:

1. Imported iTunes playlists. This was one of my original beefs with rdio, and it’s one of the few things they have yet to tend to. I have literally dedicated years to creating and cultivating my iTunes playlists. I sort records by year and have dynamic Smart Playlists that auto-populate with my favorite songs from different periods of my life. These playlists (which could probably be better described as chapters) are the pillars of my music listening. They are the fenceposts and the starting points, not albums or artists or genres. They’re all about me. And who doesn’t like that? Importing playlists from iTunes is not perfect in Spotify– there’s no way to manually select only certain ones to import, they don’t update dynamically, the logic of Smart Playlists is lost– but it is close enough for now. And rdio makes you build your own from scratch. That’s just way too much work.
2. Other people use it. Within days of a limited U.S. launch, Spotify already had more users among my Facebook friends than rdio was able to accumulate over a year+’s time. Music as a social experience is still new and exciting and I really want to explore it, but there’s no way to do that if only a handful of people are using the same platform as you. Rdio just wasn’t able to get enough momentum in terms of acquisition to keep me around.

So, uh… I’m on Spotify now. I bailed on rdio. Chose VHS over Betamax. I don’t like it. I wish it wasn’t so. But such is the power of the herd.

Baaa.

albums

5. God Willin’ & the Creek Don’t Rise by Ray LaMontagne and the Pariah Dogs

I’ve talked to some people who think Ray LaMontagne’s style is a bit overwrought, and I guess I can see how one might think that. But I try not to over-think these things too much. All I know is how I felt when I heard “Beg, Steal or Borrow” when it came on the radio during a drive from New Hampshire to Maine this summer. That was the highlight of the year.

4. Contra by Vampire Weekend

Ezra Koenig can sing. I don’t think people appreciate that guy’s voice enough. The songs are so good, their focus is elsewhere. My only complaint about Contra is that it was released in the dead of winter. This is a summertime album if there ever was one.

3. Brothers by The Black Keys

I had always liked albums from these guys, but until now they had all been too similar from song to song to be standout albums. “Brothers” is a bit different. I mean who could’ve pegged “Never Gonna Give You Up” as a Black Keys song on its own? (That song, incidentally, is amazing.)

2. Broken Bells by Broken Bells

Great songwriting and singing coupled with amazingly creative production. Not a bad song in the bunch.

1. Lisbon by The Walkmen

I feel like this album confirms that The Walkmen really found their sound with You & Me. They can still blow your ears out and leave you begging for more (a la “The Rat”) but they can also swagger along this subtle line between sounding boozy and sloppy and tight and pretty. They sound unlike anyone else out there, and it’s so damned good.

Thinking about it, the top three albums this year all had noticeably amazing sound. Guess that matters.

honorable mentions

Odd Blood by Yeasayer, The Wild Hunt by The Tallest Man On Earth, The Suburbs by Arcade Fire

tracks

(spotify playlist)

10. “City With No Children” by Arcade Fire

9. “Bushwick Blues” by Delta Spirit

8. “Madder Red” by Yeasayer]

7. “Cold Blue Halo” by Jason Collett

6. “The Mall & Misery” by Broken Bells

5. “Ultraviolet Light” by Ryan Adams and the Cardinals

4. “Juveniles” by The Walkmen

3. “Diplomat’s Son” by Vampire Weekend

2. “I Can Change” by LCD Soundsystem

1. “Beg, Steal or Borrow” by Ray LaMontagne and the Pariah Dogs

… and other good stuff from 2010

VIDEO  Justin Townes Earle playing “Slippin’ and Slidin’” from his good-but-not-great album Harlem River Blues:

VIDEO  The Walkmen playing an acoustic version of “Woe Is Me” in the New York Public Library. There are no words to describe how much I love this video.

CITY  New York. I moved here. It’s big. There are a lot of people. I like it.

BONUS SECTION!

2010′s most disappointing albums

5. “Goodbye, Killer” by The Pernice Brothers

4. “Jupiter” by Starfucker

3. “Transference” by Spoon

2. “Rat A Tat Tat” by Jason Collett

1. “Forgiveness Rock Record” by Broken Social Scene

(This was originally posted on my old music blog, but I’m moving them all over here.)

albums

5. Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros by Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros

It’s not always a compliment to say of an album or band “I have no idea whatsoever how to describe this sound.”  It is in this case, though.  I mean, who the hell are these guys?  What is this?  Where did they come from?  Who do they sound like?  Who cares?

4. Hold Time by M. Ward

So so solid.  Even though it’s been out for a number of months now, I still have a tough time ranking my favorite songs on this album.  And ranking songs on albums isn’t something I always do, but in this case I think it’s a result of there being about four songs that always make me say “Oh yeah, this one has got to be my favorite of the bunch.”

3. Dark Night of the Soul by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse

Gritty, twisted, dark and funny.  I think I remember David Lynch telling Scott Simon that Sparklehorse had many of these songs tucked away but unrecorded because Mark Linkous felt he didn’t have the right voice for them.  If that’s true, that the voices here fit so perfectly with the songs totally validates Sparklehorse’s thinking.

2. Merriweather Post Pavillion by Animal Collective

I brought a lot of baggage to this one.  The little I knew about Animal Collective (not much, but mostly influenced by being bored to death by the last Panda Bear album) made me think this would be over-thought, pretentious art rock.  And it was hyped, to boot.  Before I had heard it, I think I actually read a review of this album as introducing an entirely “new kind of music.”  Praise like that, when attached to a band name like this and all of the preconceived notions I had coming in, was admittedly enough to make me judge a book by its cover.

But then the 2:30 mark of “In The Flowers” happened.

1. Midnight at the Movies by Justin Townes Earle

Last time I’ll mention/list this one, promise. But I just liked it too much not to give it the top slot for the year.

honorable mentions

Dark Was The Night by Various Artists, March of the Zapotec & Realpeople: Holland by Beirut, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix by Phoenix, The Fall by Norah Jones

tracks

(spotify playlist)

10. “Gentle Hour” by Yo La Tango – This band had always bored me. But this track (from the amazing Dark Was the Night compilation) jumped up on the earbuds as I walked to Georgetown to renew my driver’s license early one sunny morning.  Slayed me.

9. “Up From Below” by Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros

8. “Jailbird” by M. Ward

7. “Laundry Room” by the Avett Brothers

6. “Daddy’s Gone” by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse featuring Nina Persson – The sleeper track with the beautiful chorus that rewards you on about the 6th listen of the album.

5. “They Killed John Henry” by Justin Townes Earle

4. “Percussion Gun” by White Rabbits – Winner of “Best Air Drum Song of the Year”

3. “Summertime Clothes” by Animal Collective

2. “My Night With The Prostitute From Marseilles” by Beirut – I recommend listening to this one jetlagged and exhausted in a part of the world about which you have no knowledge or expectations.  On the ferry from Piraeus to Naxos, Greece, say.

1. “I Dreamed of My Old Lover” by Elvis Costello – Still not over that standup bass. This one’s ranked #1 because, of all of these songs, I think it’s the most timeless.

(an incomplete playlist can be found here)

… and other good stuff from 2009

BOOK  The Road by Cormac McCarthy – Finally read this at the beginning of the year and it gutted me.  I’ve heard mixed reviews of the movie, but I think that’s because some people have a hard time seeing the redeeming parts of the story.  Which is understandable given the, you know, hopeless post-apocalyptic setting of cannibalistic craziness, death and overall misery.

FOOD The annual OysterFest at Hank’s Oyster Bar – $60 for all you can eat and drink at my favorite DC restaurant.  I tackled 34 raw oysters and the bliss was totally worth the monetary and gastrointestinal cost.  And yes, we kept count.

TV Top Gear from the BBC – Bloody brilliant show of car reviews, challenges and auto-related cross-country adventures.  I’d never seen it until my vacation in Ireland this past summer, when rain kept me and my brothers locked in to our rented shepherd’s cottage for a few days.  I am far from a motorhead– I don’t know the first thing about cars or about their inner workings.  But, as with any other excellent programming, it doesn’t matter because they present it so well– beautiful film work, spot-on humor, easy-to-understand language, the whole nine.  Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond are all hilarious and have off-the-chart “I’d like to get a beer with that guy” ratings.  Now one of my favorite TV shows.

COUNTRY Switzerland – It was even more amazing than in my fantasies of living in a ski chalet in Wengen and skiing through 18 inches of fresh powder to work at the beer and music factory every day.

(This was originally posted on my old music blog, but I’m moving them all over here.)

albums

5. Visiter by The Dodos

Just barely beating out You & Me by The Walkmen.  Such an original and amazing release.  No one else sounds like these guys (same could be said for The Walkmen, I suppose, and Vampire Weekend, for that matter).  Punchy, rocking and intense.  I love it.

4. Vampire Weekend by Vampire Weekend

Hype schmype.  You will be playing this record while you make potato salad for your kids in a summer vacation beach house one of these days, mark my words.  And you know what?  It will still be great.  Best track: “Campus.”

3. Starfucker by Starfucker

By any objective measure, this should not be my type of music at all.  In fact, I can easily see how some may find it obnoxious.  But, man, I just love it.  So infectious.  It reminds me of the days when I couldn’t stop listening to Air.  There’s something about electronic music that makes it automatically thematic for everything going on around you.  I love that.

2. Viva la Vida by Coldplay

Bring on the hate.  Come on, seriously.  Bring it.  This is an awesome record.  Had they continued down the X&Y path, there would be no bigger detractor than me.  But this is big, it’s grand.  We still need rock albums like this.  Coldplay at least had the guts (the ego?) to try to make it.

1. Here’s To Being Here by Jason Collett

It’s a testament to this album’s quality that it was released in early February and is still in heavy rotation in my music library, and not yet tired or old.  I love Jason Collett’s voice, and the quality of songs on this album is remarkably consistent.

tracks

(spotify playlist)

10. “Grapevine Fires” by Death Cab for Cutie

9. “Canadian Girl” by The Walkmen

8. “Walking” by The Dodos – If only for the string vibration at 0:03.

7. “Mississippi” by Bob Dylan

6. “Flume” by Bon Iver

5. “Grounds for Divorce” by Elbow

4. “Go Easy” by Ryan Adams & The Cardinals – If only for the change at 2:20.

3. “The Rip” by Portishead

2. “Nothing to Lose” by Jason Collett

1. “Strawberry Swing” by Coldplay – What can I say? I’m a sap when all is said and done.

… and other good stuff from 2008

ALBUM The Good Life by Justin Townes Earle – Steve Earle’s kid put out a great country album this year that I highly recommend if  you are looking for something a little less pressed-gray-slacks and a little more dirt-under-your-fingernails.  Highly recommended: the brooding Civil War tale “Lone Pine Hill.”

ALBUM  House With No Home by Horse Feathers – Was hooked at the first track. If you liked Bon Iver this year, I bet you will be too.

MUSIC VIDEO  “Time To Pretend” by MGMT – Best. Video. Ever.  HE RIDES A CAT.

NOVEL  The Other by David Guterson – I was blown away by Snow Falling On Cedars years ago, but then disappointed by Guterson’s East of the Montains.  This one reminded me how good he is.  I hope he focuses more on novels in the future; his short stories aren’t his best work.

PODCAST  Planet Money from NPR – Brilliant podcast and blog that is thrown together so ably by Adam Davidson, Laura Conaway and others, teaching you all you need to know about how the world as we know it is ending.  I can’t recommend it enough.

CITY  San Francisco.  How come no one told me about this place?  Jeez.

Dear rdio,

Congrats on your coming out party today.  I’m loving your service so far, but here is my wishlist for your future.

• Privacy. You need privacy settings. I searched for how to limit what other users saw of my music collection and listening history, but found no way to do it.
• On a related note, please let me delete artists, albums or songs from my collection and from my listening history. I know that I shouldn’t care if people see that I own Train’s “Drops Of Jupiter”… but I do. I have never trusted people who say they “don’t believe in guilty pleasures.” I do, because they exist. “Drops of Jupiter” gives me goosebumps, and this fact deeply, deeply embarrasses me. There’s no contradiction there; it’s just the way it is. Allow me to hide this fact from people who know me. Please.
• iTunes playlist support. My playlists are how I organize my music listening life, and they’re hugely important to me. I’d love to be able to have them sync up to rdio just like my music collection does.
• Allow “add to playlist” from artists and albums, not just songs. How else will I make the requisite Bob vs. Bob playlist?
• iTunes rating support. I neeeeeed to be able to keep track of what songs do it for me and what songs don’t. It forms the basis for all my future listening, not to mention the structure for all of my smart playlists. (I realize I’m asking for iTunes features where you’re trying to create a whole new listening experience, but I think there’s room for both. And I think you should support my current listening habits– they’re actually really important to me– as a gateway to getting me to change them in the long run.)
• Enable more connections between my collection and your catalog. You have so much great music by artists in my collection that I don’t have already, but there’s no way to find it short of searching the artist’s name. If I could see an “All Artist Albums” option when an artist is highlighted on the site or in the app, that would be unbelievable. Come to think of it, the “Play Artist Radio” option should be there, too.  My listening experience needs a starting point, and that starting point is often going to be my collection. Poke and prod me from there to branch out and explore based on things I’m looking at or “own” already.
• Make your desktop player a player, not a remote control. I think it’s elegant and beautiful, but robust it ain’t. Please allow me to browse to and start other music without using a browser. For that matter, please allow me to open the player and start music without having a browser open and logged in to your site.
• Genre-specific Top Album charts. Get Eminem off my computer screen.
• Pavement. Arcade Fire. You get the point. More rights, please. I’ll do my part to make it worth your money.

I didn’t watch the now-infamous game Wednesday night, but like everyone else who follows baseball, I’ve watched the replay a number of times and thought a bit about the different aspects of what happened.

Everyone seems to agree that the subjective calls of umpires are an inherent part of baseball. What I haven’t heard anyone talk about, though, are situations where those calls have created an unearned perfect game rather than taken away an earned perfect game. More specifically, I’m wondering if there’s ever been outrage over a debatable called strike on a 3-ball count in a perfect game? And if not, should there be?

Taking a look at the box score from Roy Halladay’s perfect game on Saturday, I count 3 instances of called strikes on 3-ball counts.  Dallas Braden’s perfect game from May 9th is a bit more impressive: he had only one called strike helping his cause (against Evan Longoria in the 3rd). In the third-most recent perfect game, Mark Buehrle’s on July 23rd last year, Buehrle had two consecutive called strikes on a 3-ball count against Jason Bartlett in the 6th and another in the 9th against Michel Hernandez.

Last night, though, Gallaraga got up to a 3-ball count only once, only to have Travis Hafner pop a foul ball that was caught. So with respect to Wednesday night’s game, the point is moot. But I think there’s a larger point that’s more broadly relevant.

The instances of called strikes on 3-ball counts seems relatively low on a per game basis in these situations, but across all 20 perfect games, there are likely around 35-40 instances of it happening. I just don’t buy that every one of those calls was indisputable.

But called strikes are temporary, ephemeral. We see them all the time, so we don’t give them a second thought when they happen. Even in potential perfect game situations, no one would likely give a called strike on a 3-ball count a second thought unless one or two conditions were in place: 1) it was late enough in the game where the possibility of a perfect game was within sight and people were scrutinizing pitch counts accordingly, or 2) the called strike was a third strike.

Questionable strike calls are not uncommon, and in a situation where a batter has 3 balls and the pitcher is otherwise flawless, the resulting “perfect game” would be something no less artificial than what happened on Wednesday. But no one would seriously propose overruling a called strike in a situation like that, even if it were obviously miscalled. We’d accept it. Why? Because everyone knows that calling a strike is hard. It’s imperfect and subjective. Umpires can be forgiven for getting them wrong. Wednesday night’s call, on the other hand, seemed easy because we all have the benefit of hindsight and a million viewings of the replay. What’s more, it happened on what would have been the last out, when everyone was waiting and hoping for the same thing to happen.

That’s why I think that to retroactively award a perfect game to Gallaraga would be, on some strange but important level, phony. If that was done, then it’s entitling us to all sorts of revisionist sports history.

And besides, who would benefit from changing the call? Gallaraga has already gained more positive press and career capital (for not only his performance but for the way he handled the situation) than he ever would have without the disputed call. Joyce would only be further shamed to have an official asterisk added to his career history. Every baseball fan knows it was a perfect game, even if it’s not in the books as such. The lucky people at the game not only know they saw a perfect game but were witness to the biggest story in baseball this year, and will still tell the story to future generations of baseball fans.

There’s no need for Bud Selig to retroactively change the call so that “everybody wins.” Everybody already has.