2008 - songs

I didn't get out a lot this year. Or, maybe I got out too much, I dunno. The point is, I didn't get to hear a whole lot of new music this year. So instead of making a really long year-end list, I'm going to try to keep it relatively short. I'll start with my ten favorite songs of the year.



10 - Okkervil River, "Lost Coastlines" from The Stand Ins

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKmZRO8XzyY (video)

I didn't get a whole lot of time with this album, in fact, I've really only had it for about a week. But that was more than enough time for me to fall in love with the album's first real song and first single. It's got that driving beat and wonderful happy-but-wistful kind of sound that should put it at over the ending credits of a teen movie. You know what I mean. Also, while lacking the strained emotion that makes me love Will Sheff's voice so much, Jonathan Meiburg's voice here is pretty great. Maybe I should go check out Shearwater.



9 - The Hold Steady, "Lord, I'm Discouraged" from Stay Positive

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMrCIUUtWHU (song, low-quality)

My favorite song from Boys and Girls in America eventually ended up being "First Night." As good as Craig Finn is at shouting as many words as he possibly can in as little time as possible, he's proved now on several different occasions that he can also write himself a really killer ballad. This song not only contains one of the very best lines/couplets of the year (that which closes the song), it also just happens to have the best guitar solo.



8 - She & Him, "This Is Not a Test" from She & Him, Volume One

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzB8Qs2sI3o (live)

This is my favorite song from Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward's album, which is very, very good, but not quite in my top five albums. So here's my chance to talk about it: it's very sweet, simple pop music that manages to feel very old and very contemporary at the same time. Zooey's voice is fantastic, and even occasionally overpowers the songs themselves, but that definitely isn't a problem with this song. This wasn't the album's single (that was "Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?"), but I think it should have been.



7 - Portishead, "Deep Water" from Third

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwrgzdJGexA (song)

It's going to be hard for me to talk about this song apart from the album, or at least hard to not repeat myself when I talk about the album later. It just happens that when I look at my playcounts for this year, I listened to "Deep Water" way more than any other song on Third. It is absolutely minimal, just Beth and a ukelele and eventually some vocal backup, but its power is undeniable. Actually, I'm just going to stop now so I have more to write about with the album.



6 - The Gaslight Anthem, "The '59 Sound" from The '59 Sound

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxTmgUx2TOE (video)

This is the single and title track from the Gaslight Anthem's really good and almost excellent The '59 Sound, whose main flaw is that the rest of the album just isn't as good as this song. When everyone says this band "sounds like Bruce Springsteen in a punk band," they aren't lying, nor are they trying to insult them. That's a compliment. This song expertly captures that thing that the Boss always did so well (maybe he still does, I wouldn't really know, I haven't heard a Springsteen album from this decade), that feeling of confused and rebellious optimism. The song is sad, yes, but it's not sad in a mopey or depressing way. The best Springsteen songs aren't personal, they're universal, and this is a great tribute to that idea.



5 - Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, "For Every Field There's a Mole" from Lie Down In the Light

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O2aH4XLbto (okay, sorry, I can't find it, but everyone should be familiar with this anyway)

Best clarinet solo of 2008. This is also my way to honor this album, which is really completely wonderful but for some reason I just didn't listen to it enough this year. This song, though, man, this is a good song. Wasn't that a great review? Really though, Will Oldham is a fantastic songwriter, and after continually proving that he could write some of the darkest and most haunting songs ever, he goes and writes this album of light and, dare I say (yes I do) sweet music that is wonderfully uplifting. The harmonies in the last third of this song are pretty much amazing.



4 - Death Cab For Cutie, "I Will Possess Your Heart" from Narrow Stairs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq-yP7mb8UE (video)

You can say a lot of things about Death Cab and about Ben Gibbard specifically, and you may or may not be right, but you have to give them at least a little bit of credit for having it in them to showcase and market their new album with an eight-and-a-half minute single. I loved "I Will Possess Your Heart" the first time I heard it, I loved it when I heard it on the radio, and I love it now. Well, less so on the radio, because it's shorter. But I've come a long way from the days when I used to get bored when a song would hit the three-minute mark. There are three specific moments in the song that I love (0:21, the first couple times through bass line; 4:40, when everything else cuts out for Ben's first lines; and the three beats that kick the drums back in at 7:21), but without the very slow build and the patience it demands, those moments mean nothing.



3 - The Hold Steady, "Constructive Summer" from Stay Positive

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=019ax9vm_kk (song, low-quality)

It shouldn't really come as a surprise that my favorite band would get two spots on this list, but here it is. This is the opening track from Stay Positive, a song that very easily summarizes everything that makes the band great. As with the rest of the album, Finn is a little more subdued than on other albums, but his passion is still definitely there, and his way with words is just as sharp as ever. Wheras "Lord, I'm Discouraged" gets the best ending line, "Constructive Summer" gets the best opener.



2 - Vampire Weekend, "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" from Vampire Weekend

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wHl9qRsMzw (video)

Sometime around February or something like that, Vampire Weekend completely exploded. I'm not sure how it happened, but I certainly know why: "A-Punk" and "Oxford Comma" and "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" are pretty damn catchy. This is the best of the three, in my opinion, and I've been listening to it all year. The album is good, but not great, as it completely dies off after the first half, and I could get into one of those weird arguments about the problem with America falling in love with an Afro-beat band comprised of rich white kids, but none of those things change the fact that this song is really great. I'm also not going to comment on the fact that this song has been around for over a year and was actually on one or two best of 2007 lists; the single came out on August 18, 2008, and I'm sticking with that.



1 - Bon Iver, "Skinny Love" from For Emma, Forever Ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_1E6s7mQxA (fan video about Jim and Pam, apparently by someone who doesn't listen to lyrics)

Speaking of release date arguments I'm ignoring, "Skinny Love" is my number one song of the year. For Emma, Forever Ago is going on a bunch of year-end lists that I'm seeing, so I guess we can just assume that everyone's going with the album's wide release instead of its independent release last year. That's fine with me, since it doesn't really matter to me what year this song comes from, there isn't a better one in either of them. This song is beautiful, heartbreaking, and powerful. It's simple and stripped down, so much so that I can't really say all that much about it other than how much I love it. Here's a final compliment: the album isn't on my best-of list, because I honestly just don't listen to the rest of it. There's no point. I've tried. I just hit this thrird song, and that's enough. Maybe one day I'll try to get past it.

stretch out your legs and dance with me

it's pretty amusing to look back and read the last personal post i made on this blog.  it seems to have been written on the first day of february 2007, which by my count is 21 months ago.  it doesn't really seem all that long by some counts: i remember exactly where i was sitting when i made it (right over there on my kitchen table, at the chair that faces the door), and i'm pretty sure i remember the odd mix of self-pity and self-loathing that drove me to write it.  it reads relatively positively if you'd just happen upon it and read it without knowing who wrote it, but i don't really have that luxury, and so i know the whole thing is bullshit.  that was no turning point.  no epiphanies came to me that day.

like i said, by one or two measures, february 2007 doesn't seem that long ago, but across other wavelengths of my life, along other strands of the great swirling mass of spaghetti that is my life, that was a long, long time ago.  i wasn't happy in those days, which wasn't particularly anyone's fault, not even mine, i don't think.  i gained a lot of things in the last 21 months that i really needed, and i lost some of the things that i probably shouldn't have had.  most importantly, of course, i re-evaluated the things i had and still have, and i determined that they were the most important things in my life.  i am of course talking about one specific thing especially, and i think making an effort to establish that as a presence in my life until the day i die has been pretty key to my being happy over the last couple months.  sure, it involved a pretty hefty monetary investment, and yeah, it's a hell of a lot of work at a time when i have absolutely no free time, but it's made me happy and it will continue to do so for my entire life.  so it's worth it.

i stopped taking medication for my stomach in april, right after i started my new job.  i started school officially in late august, unofficially 12 months prior.  i proposed to lindsay 27 days ago.  i made my first donation to the obama campaign one year and one month ago, three months before the iowa caucuses and three months and a couple days before lindsay and i went to costa rica.  i became 25 years old 16 months ago, then 26 years old 4 months ago, and then i went to new york city and washington dc 3 months ago.  i met a penguin almost exactly 11 months ago.  these are the things i've done since february 2007.

it's pretty much true that i only write when i get in a very specific mood.  i haven't yet determined what exactly causes this mood, or even what this mood really is.  it's kind of like nostalgia, but it almost never involves looking back--present company notwithstanding.  i can't imagine what this blog would look like to someone who doesn't know me; good thing nobody reads it, much less people who don't know me.  but i'd think that someone reading it would think that i'm always like this, always taking small, seemingly-insignificant things in my life and turing them into some larger metaphor or trying to pull some deeper meaning out of relatively everyday things.  but that's not entirely true, imaginary reader who doesn't interact with me on a daily or semi-often basis--well, it's a little true, i guess, but it's not the entire story.  i would say that the mood that i'm in when i start thinking like this just happens to be the mood that makes me want to write.  this wistful, over-analytical, and yes, pretentious style of meandering thought is really just how my brain works when i get that weird voice in the back of my head that tells me to write it down, whatever it is.  these moods seem to be more and more rare (see the last 21 months of posts here for evidence), so i might as well get it all out of my system before i fall asleep.

were i to be tasked with making some sense out of the third paragraph's mash of chronological points of interest in my life, i'd have to say, and not just because tomorrow happens to be november 4, that october 6, 2007 was a pretty important day for me.  i can't really remember if i recognized that fact at the time, but at the very least it has become something of a symbol for how the next year would be.  i had just started taking classes again and getting back into the swing of thinking about things that really matter, and so 10/06/07 marks the day that i decided that politics was in fact something i cared enough about to actually invest some meaningful sense of myself in, however small and effortless my contribution might be.  i've gone up and down in my enthusiasm for the obama campaign and the american electoral system in general over the past year, but that point still remains as the time in which the real political world started to matter to me.  after that decision, the decision to work for my masters was easier, which gave me a direction again and pushed me to work out some of the things that i'd been letting stack up.  allow me one of my metaphors: the campaign for me was like playing fantasy football.  it's easier to be interested when you have a stake, when you feel like part of the competition.

it's always been interesting to me that the obama campaign would latch on to the word "hope."  obviously, it's clear what the campaign wants it to mean: hope for the future of america, hope that we can succeed as a nation if we change the policies that brought us here.  but when i see a poster with a picture of a black man and those four capital letters, i think of a different slogan: i hope we can elect him.  i hope we can be what we haven't been for 230 years.  the campaign's hope is a noun, mine is a verb; theirs is a positive emotion, a rallying cry for unity and brotherhood and a brighter future, mine is a despairing cry for help, a way for me to hide my disappointment in a thick cloak of sarcasm.  barack obama wants america to prove him right, and i want america to prove me wrong.

so with that, i'm going to bed.  the polls open in about six hours.  do the right thing, america.  and if you could also vote down prop 8, that would be great.  thanks.

i was at work one evening with nothing to do so i wrote this

sam wasn't nervous.  not exactly.  being nervous implies apprehension about something that's coming up; being nervous therefore requires at least some level of knowledge about what that something would be.

and sam most certainly had none of that.

he had his meticulously-constructed playlist, of course, developed over the course of two hours, despite being only ten songs long and requiring only to occupy the twelve-minute drive from the hotel to the office.  he had his cell phone, recently updated with a new message from alison ("they will love you! i love you! good luck"), and his laptop, and a notebook with a pen in case they weren't the typing type.  he had his favorite dark blue shirt and his favorite tie, steel grey and completely innocuous, which he called his "lucky tie" although it wasn't particularly luckier than any of this other ties, and the black shoes which were just comfortable enough for him to think they made him look quite sensible but still uncomfortable enough to fit in.  he had all his nervous energy--not to be confused with nervousness, remember--and he still had at least 70% of the enthusiasm he had on the night they called and told him to pack up his life and move to chicago, which by his estimation was a pretty good percentage to be at at this point.

none of these things, he thought, really made him ready for whatever it was that was coming, but oh well, the rest was out of his control, and we should all try not to worry about the things we can't help, and no, of course he didn't really believe that.

Peggy Noonan: The Democrats aren't the ones falling apart, the Republicans are.

http://online.wsj.com/article/declarations.html

"This was a real wakeup call for us," someone named Robert M. Duncan, who is chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the New York Times. This was after Mississippi. "We can't let the Democrats take our issues." And those issues would be? "We can't let them pretend to be conservatives," he continued. Why not? Republicans pretend to be conservative every day.