My Best of 2011 playlist is taking shape on Spotify. These are objectively the best songs of the year! I’ve made them so through pure force of will!! Don’t even bother listening to any others!!!!!!!!
Flow is (roughly) thus:
FIRST - Worldbeat melodies!
AND THEN - You could dance to these!
FOLLOWED BY - Slowing it down a bit!
AFTER THAT - Indie rock, or Dudes & Ladies with guitars!
THE END - Songs from two apocalyptically huge rock records!
Notes:
- Two songs from Skeletons! Skeletons are a sentimental favorite - I first saw them open for TVOTR at the Cleveland Grog Shop in March 2004, when they were still Oberlin students and nothing more than the local support on the bill. Since then, they’ve had an extremely under-appreciated run of four excellent albums (Git, Lucas, Money, and now PEOPLE). “Barack Obama Blues” is my #1 song of the year (I’m hoping to write more on it soon), and here serves as the centerpiece, while “More Than The One Thing” was the one that was passed around the blogs and seems to be the album’s “accessible” track.
- I tried to keep this mix Spotify-friendly, so apologies to Grails, Jesu, and Nat Baldwin, whose new albums aren’t available there. Check Nat Baldwin covering Arthur Russell’s “A Little Lost” (in Cleveland on my birthday!), Jesu’s “Sedatives”, and the title track from Grails’ Deep Politics.
