Growing Old with Grace: A 2009 Album

Sunset RubdownThe goal: Make an album from favorite songs released in 2009, with special attention paid to the arc and to the relationships between songs. The rules: one song per performer; artists featured in the previous three years of this project are excluded. The caveats: I listen to a lot of music, and I estimate this list is culled from roughly a thousand songs from the past year. But I don’t hear everything, and my listening is constrained by both taste and work. These are merely favorites.

To Hell and Back: My 2008 Album

Kathleen EdwardsMy 2008 album begins in Utah and ends in (or near) hell. Whether you think the distance between the starting point and the destination is a lot of territory or not much, we do get to travel pretty far afield. There’s sunny California with the Botticellis, lovely inner-city Baltimore with DoMaJe, Iraq with the estimable Danny Elfman, and someplace sublimely absurd with Flight of the Conchords.

My 2007 Album

noisettes.jpgThis isn’t a list of the “best” songs of 2007, or even my favorites. It’s a personal 2007 compilation that tries to capture my experience with music over the past 12 months. The songs are meant to play off each other – sometimes in obvious ways, often not – and there’s a purpose to the sequencing.

Mix 2006

Dresden DollsYear-end lists of the best albums of the past 12 months are cruel, because either you’ll go bankrupt buying all these fantastic records or you’ll resent how much great music you’re missing because you can’t afford to buy them. I’m not typically a nice person, but these are the holidays, so my year-end list is something that most anybody can afford.