Follow the link at the end of the post to download the mix CD as a .zip file.

If you’ve been a regular reader of the Post-Rockist’s best-of lists for the past two years, you know the drill by now: with only loose regard for new releases, I stitch together an aural topography map of the year’s emotional terrain.

Well. This year was goddamn Mount McKinley.

Three years ago, I was just a jaunty, freshly Bachelor of Arts’d kid, living in Milwaukee for no particular reason and writing about music when the mood struck. This year, I quit my job, gave away my heavy old record player, packed up my clanky apartment, had a shot and a beer at the Polish Falcon and loaded a van for a lake crossing out of Milwaukee and back to Michigan.

We tell our friends, and each other, different stories about how it “all started.” He thinks it all started when he sought some crowd-sourced advice about Twitter, but we were already g-chatting regularly by then. I blame the night I took my laptop to the bar and drank Malbec, the night Scott gave me that Leonard Cohen “Marita/Please find me/I’m almost 30″ line. The deal was pretty much sealed by the time he sent me Simon Schama’s Power of Art DVDs (plus a CD of four Jonathan Richman songs about artists; at the bar that night, I drunkenly blathered that it was a SIGN), and clearly, by the time we wrote that song together (BEST OF 09!!), something irrefutable was afoot.

But I really think it “all started” when Todd’s savvy, super-smart wife Kim — a friend of mine from high school — said, three years ago, “Todd! Get some women writing about music for you.” And I’m not just talking about the big story of 2009 that began in January and unfurled toward inevitability.

That’s a longer, more abstract yarn about growing up and finding myself, though, so as not to bore you, I’m just going to get right to the play list, which tells a better tale than I really can in words.

1. You Can’t Force a Dance Party — Dent May and his Magnificent Ukulele — The Good Feeling Music of Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele (2009)

A fitting early-in-the-year infatuation for a girl who later fell in love with a guy with a ukulele. This was a nice album to have around in the dead of winter; it makes everyone within earshot feel like they’re in Maui. Also, I wish someone had told me the moral of this song two years ago, when I kept trying to throw inevitably unsuccessful dance parties.

2. The World’s Greatest — The Sweptaways — The Sweptaways Show (2009)

R. Kelly’s 2002 single “The World’s Greatest” is a soaring, gospel-tinged, radio-perfect R&B power ballad in which Kells is at his self-glorifying best (“And the world will notice a king”) — in the video,  he plays a boxing champ in flowing crimson robes with the word HERO emblazoned on the back. In the ring with him appear soldiers, preachers, doctors and firefighters (and, toward the end, fireworks), cut with vintage footage of Muhammad Ali.

The song is pretty ridiculous, but unless I’m extra-susceptible to sentimental tripe (and I might be), I think it’s actually a good song, and hard not to like. Which may be why it lends itself nicely to twee renditions — enjoy it because it’s Bonnie Prince Billy! Isn’t it funny, Bonnie Prince Billy, covering that R&B hit? So clever!

I’m pretty taken by this taffeta a cappella cover by the gaggle of pretty Swedish girls known as The Sweptaways. (And by now it should be evident from this list and my other contributions to The Post-Rockist that my musical tastes have been greatly informed by my peers at The Post-Rockist.) I never get sick of it. Sometimes, secretly, I listen to it when I need a little oomph of upward thinking.

3. We; Camera — Shenandoah Davis — We; Camera (2008)

A visiting friend from Seattle introduced me to the out-of-tune spinet sorcery of Shenandoah Davis in the summer of 2008, but I didn’t get around to spending a lot of quality time with this album until 2009. I tried to winnow out most of the non-2009 songs from this mix, as well as many of 2009′s placeholder songs (like “Lisztomania”) due to the insane length of the director’s first cut. This stays, though. It is inextricable from my year.

4. While You Wait for the Others — Grizzly Bear — Veckatimest (2009)

No introduction necessary.

5. Sunken Union Boat — John Vanderslice — Romanian Names (2009)

If we’re giving out gold stars here, this was definitely my favorite album of 2009, in the most ineffable way. It just really moved me, really deeply, in a way that not a lot of albums have managed to do in my life. Maybe that’s the fundamental force of mystery in music. I don’t know.

At Turner Hall in June, after the lights were up and the crowds cleared out, he asked a few lingerers to stay for a few minutes while he ran backstage to grab his guitar and the rest of his band. And when he came back, he sang a song by the merch table, and some of us sang along, and it was beautiful. Plus, he totally hugged me, totally out of nowhere, before I could even introduce myself and tell him I thought he was great.

6. The Privateers — Andrew Bird — Noble Beast (2009)

Most of Bird’s best music is so personal and interior that it makes me flinch to hear it in public spaces or on commercials. Noble Beast was on my mind a lot in the late winter, right before the spring, and my fortunes, turned – when I was still staying up too late, drinking bad whiskey out of the bottle, and putting too many close hopes into the hands of clumsy hucksters.

When the weather finally broke, I walked to a park on the bluff over the lake (the one with the Leif Erickson statue!), lay on my back, and listened to Noble Beast all the way through, watching seagulls.

7. I Hope She Won’t Let Me — Baby Teeth — Hustle Beach (2009)

For more on Baby Teeth, how I feel about Baby Teeth, and this album in particular, please see my review from earlier this year.

8. How to Get My Head Back on My Shoulders — The Daredevil Christopher Wright — The Daredevil Christopher Wright EP (2008)

These bearded boys from Eau Claire, Wisconsin stole my heart at a tiny show in the attic of the YNOT3 in Milwaukee, where they pounded some tom-toms, shook their ample heads of Wisconsin lumberjack hair, and let loose a river of raw talent. We all needed it; it wasn’t long after venerable independent bookstore Harry W. Schwartz shut its doors forever and its sister company, 800ceoread, laid off some people we really loved. It was one of those everyone’s-drunk-and-hugging nights, a night that made me think, “How could I ever leave this place?” A few months later, I did.

The Daredevil Christopher Wright released a pretty excellent debut LP this year, In Deference to a Broken Back, but this song really calls it all home for me, and those are the rules of the year-end mix CD.

9. I Want You Back — The Jackson 5 (1969)

I’m sorry, but I just had to.

10. Sugar Fish — Daniel Johnson — Lazrus (2009)

This album is generally genius, and I usually put it on when I needed to take it easy, clear my head or draw some focus. Daniel’s voice is smooth and sincere but cool and controlled; he piles on layer after gorgeous layer without ever giving you the sense that he’s letting go of you or pushing you into any lawless territory. It’s very comforting in that way, which I guess is a weird thing to say about an electro-pop/dance album, but I’ll give it to him.

11. Pulling on a Line — Great Lakes Swimmers — Lost Channels (2009)

The song I was mostly likely to listen to this year when I was literally pulling my own rug out from under me. I will not seek to explain to you why this might have been a meaningful song for me so as not to condescend to your basic ability to grasp metaphors.

12. The Atlantic Ocean — Richard Swift — Atlantic Ocean (2009)

Boom tap boom tap! Ah-boom tap boom tap!

13. Lalita — The Love Language — The Love Language (2009)

Cue the dance card! Every time he sings “This year has just begun,” I feel a little flush of the possibility and the thrill and the danger of a new, unknowable year. Maybe it’s because the whole year felt like the new year.

14. Good Time — Lightning Love — November Birthday (2009)

America’s most adorable keyboard pop band graced my spring with this feel-amazing anthem. Seeing them live in the fall at DIY Fest was even better. Making friends with them: Best of all.

15. Dreams Come True Girl — Cass McCombs — Catacombs (2009)

Please, before you say “barf,” remember that this is a love song about accepting the truth of love – a truth that is both a relief (“All the troubles in my past/That’s just what they are”) and a reckoning. And it ends with a 70-year-old golden-age movie star squawking “Take me out!” It’s a fuzzy-lens soda-shop sweetheart ballad that’s not too drunk on itself to be a little funny. And if this video doesn’t make you feel like you’re in love with something, you’re a weirdo.

16. Make a Little Time (for Me) — Jason Croff — A Cake for a File (2009)

I can’t really think of any other outfit today working as hard as Jason Croff to emulate the sound of Steely Dan, ’70s smooth jazz/R&B bands and lounge-y easy listening. If anyone is making music like this right now at all, no one is doing it better than the Jason Croff Family Band.

17. Stealin’ — The Trusty Knife — The Trusty Knife (2008)

(photo by C.J. Foeckler for Turner Hall/WMSE)

The Trusty Knife’s late-late-2008 album provided the soundtrack for the year to come. We went to all of their concerts, danced like fools in our hotel room in Vegas, turned it way up in the car, and if we didn’t have the album handy, we just belted whatever choruses we could think of, making up the verses with a few falsetto “ahh-wooohs” thrown in for maximum Pieper effect.

Less than a week before I bid Milwaukee farewell, I went to see Trusty Knife play with my other favorite Milwaukee band, Juniper Tar, as part of bad-ass community radio station WMSE‘s fabulous Radio Summer Camp fête. It was a drenched and drunken celebration of love and friendship: community luminaries tipsy and dancing way up front, friends from the bands smoking and watching the sun go down on the fire escape, brothers Schleicher sneaking me into the dressing room and plying me with whiskey. It was the best send-off a girl could ever want.

18. Beggars Might Ride — Destroyer — Streethawk: A Seduction (2001)

So begins the big-picture coda to the year-end mix CD, with two songs that served as light-posts for the big decisions I made this year. Most people know how much Destroyer means to me; this year, I listened to him constantly, in gusts of snow and on quiet summer afternoons while I watched squirrels in the overgrown garden behind my first-floor studio. And as the year crept forward into fateful August, I repeated these lines like a mantra:

“I imagine it must be hard/To stay away from a life of public relations, but try/Girl, you’ve gotta try,/You’ve got to stay critical or die,/Stay critical or die.”

19. I Don’t Know if She’s Worth 900 Kr. — Jens Lekman — You Deserve Someone Better Than a Bum Like Me (2005)

Out of all of the “it all started when” moments we have discussed, this song might be the it-all-started to start them all. On a humble birthday mix CD shipped priority mail from Detroit to Milwaukee, this sweet little song about the uncertain decision to visit a near-stranger in Barcelona was nestled near the beginning, unassuming but clear as a beacon. It took me a listen or two to really get it, but I can remember exactly where I was when I decoded the message: I was running down the beerline trail, just past the old train bridge underneath Holton Street, approaching the weedy west bank of the Milwaukee River.

In a few days, we’re leaving for Chicago to see Jens Lekman play a New Year’s Eve show at the Empty Bottle, meeting up with Todd and Kim — the only possible conclusion, it seems, for a year that Jens helped set into motion, with friends without whom nothing would have started at all.

2009: The Mix CD – Right-click and save-as to download

Also, Amy’s got her own blog now. You can read it at http://www.nighttraintodetroit.com.

Without this man, rock & roll as we know it probably wouldn’t exist. It’s tempting to say that about a lot of music legends, but the man who pioneered both the solid-body guitar and multi-track recording has a pretty convincing claim to the title.

Here he is with his wife, Mary Ford, on their 1953 TV show, singing “The World is Waiting for the Sunrise.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bon voyage, you sorcerer, you.

Baby Teeth – “Big Schools” (buy)
Download audio file (BigSchools.mp3)

You procure (legally!) a copy of Hustle Beach, the new album from Chicago pop-rockers Baby Teeth. Congratulations! You’re ready for an American musical adventure of an exceptional caliber. We hope you’ve brought an enterprising can-do spirit and a positive attitude.

If you are familiar with the brash, bombastic, sometimes nonsensical, always endearing music of Abraham Levitan (nee Pearly Sweets) and company, perhaps having heard The Baby Teeth Album or 2007’s The Simp, these instructions are provided merely as guidelines for your aural enjoyment. If you’ve never heard these guys before, that’s okay! Sit back, relax, and let us take care of everything.

Step one: Pleasantries

Before you do anything crazy, it’s worth it to give this album a spin in the ol’ ceedee player (or a metaphorical spin in the ol’ digital mp3 device of your choosing), maybe while you’re sitting down and making coffee, or while you’re at work (work, work, work – don’t worry, you’ll get that reference once you listen to the album), or however you like to initially encounter good (or even – magnificent! Triumphant! Nonsensical, but endearing!) albums.

Hustle Beach represents a shift for Baby Teeth, one we will entertain to explain later on in the pamphlet (in Mr. Levitan’s own words, no less). Suffice to say that it’s almost like the band is going back in time, or at least trying on different period costumes. The Baby Teeth Album is an off-beat salute to coked-out celebrities, velvet sweet melons, big menacing trucks and other fever-dreamy things. (A long-favorite video from Baby Teeth Album-era Baby Teeth is this greasy tale of a stalker and his fantasy derby girl, with a prominent riff on Madonna’s “Borderline.”)

The Simp was a break-out work, a more sincere – but still ardently and irreverently theatrical – album, with cheeky disco dance-breaks, na-na-na sing-alongs, references to Russian art critics and some of my favorite ultimatums in pop music ever writ (“You’re either on the swim team or you’re not”). It was a showy, glossy, thoroughly modern album.

But Hustle Beach. Well.

The first track, “Big Schools” – that arena-ready, so-pantomime-able opening keyboard line – sounds, even before Abraham belts out the first portentous line of this college rock anthem (“Friday night/Frat house in sight,/A party that I couldn’t get into”), so essentially Springsteen that when Springsteen came up in conversation a few days after I heard this album for the first time, the first song that came to mind was “Big Schools.”

This album (some smarty-pants music critics might call it a “jukebox album”) does not hold its hand of influences too close to its chest. In fact it’s kind of like they don’t know shit about playing poker and they want you to help them figure out what to do, because they’re showing you everything right over their shoulder. I particularly like that about this album: depending on how you look at it, it’s like a Rorschach test (just like Barack Obama!) in which you can hear damn near anything you want, or a reflecting pool, in which you can hear shades of just about everything in the Great Pop Songbook of the late-20^th Century, from Queen to Cake to Billy Joel to Otis Redding to Prince to Cheap Trick to David Bowie to The Beatles to, in ample evidence, The Boss.

One of my favorite tracks on this album – in fact, I’ll go ahead and not mince words, it’s one of the best tracks on this album – is “I Hope She Won’t Let Me,” a Vox-drenched ballad in three-part harmony and six-eight time that is as old-school pool hall soul as “Let it Roll” (my other favorite, and the other best, song) is genuine-article slow-burn hair-band anthem – it’s a song I’ve called upon, in many dark and difficult hours, to bring me strength. I know that sounds crazy, but tell me honestly – you’ve felt the same way about “Don’t Stop Believin’,” haven’t you?

The more absurd touches that are Baby Teeth’s calling card are still here, like on “Snake Eyes,” a droning, off-key defense of some lady named – uh – Snake Eyes. (“If you’re thinkin’ you know about Snake Eyes/ … You’re right!” “If you’re thinkin’ you’re gonna touch Snake Eyes/ …. You’re wrong!”) It sounds ridiculous. It IS ridiculous. It is also a riot.

But in general, Baby Teeth is trying something that’s new for them, but pretty old-fashioned as the story of modern songwriting goes: telling the truth, and confronting those age-old issues – love, work, ageing, insecurity, uncertainty and defeat – head-on.

And I don’t just know this because I’m a music writer. I read about it! On a blog. Which brings us to step two.

Step 2: Scholarship

If you’ve listened to Hustle Beach a few times now (and regardless of how you feel about it, I bet you can at least concede that it’s damn catchy), and you’re struggling to suss it out, or would just like to learn more, hop on over to the 52 Teeth blog.

Hustle Beach, as it turns out, is the final product of a whole year’s worth of writing one new song every week. Come hail or high water, Abraham clunked out a shaky little demo, popped it on WordPress and – to the joy of archivists, historians, and scavenging music writers like me – wrote about its varied influences, ripped-off melodies, lyrical levels of meaning and whatever else struck his fancy.

Not all of the songs on Hustle Beach were on 52 Teeth first, and obviously, not every song on 52 Teeth made it onto the record. But a few are there, and reading the artist’s thoughts on them, after a few listens to the whole work of art, is mighty edifying.

I’ve learned, for instance, that the (genius) first line of “The Part You Play” (“You walked into the party/Like it was your yacht”) is actually a play on the first line of the Carly Simon song “You’re So Vain,” and that the title track “Hustle Beach” is an attempt to merge the influence of reggae, David Foster Wallace, neuroticism about work ethic, Andy Pratt, The Eagles, Allan Touissant and M.I.A. Fun! It’s also the source of, yes, my belief that the men of Baby Teeth are attempting to do something a little more direct in their songmanship. Again, from his entry on Hustle Beach, Abraham writes:

The lyrics represent my attempt to write more directly. Every line was scrutinized to make sure that I could understand what it was about. This is how I’d like to write from now on.

Abraham reads a lot (as you may have realized if you made the connection that “The Swede” is a reference to a Phillip Roth novel. I did not), and his writing is charming, so if you’re the scholarly, researchin’ type, you might find yourself, as I have, lost in the archives for an hour or so.

Step 3: Forgetting

When you’ve thought all there is to think about Hustle Beach – there’s a lot, although to be fair to this blog’s very indulgent editors, probably no more than there is to think about most other good albums – you should take a few deep breaths, cleanse your palette with some other album (maybe one that you know and love well, so you won’t get wrapped up), then pack up Hustle Beach and take it with you on a good old-fashioned American road trip (maybe to a beach).

I have always allowed myself to give in to Baby Teeth most wholly in the car, and in fact have both their first and second albums burned onto a single CD (which never, ever leaves my car). I turn up the volume, sometimes little by little as I become more and more enveloped in the bravado, showmanship and silly earnestness of the music. And then I drive a little faster.

Driving along to Baby Teeth allows me to forget all of the garbage that I sometimes feel obliged to project upon an album, to lose my critical mind, to strip away all of the influences, necessary comparisons and value judgments. With Baby Teeth, I usually remember, subsequently, that even their most derivative songs are derived from classic, timeless works. The smart, snappy, slightly irreverent, somewhat scholarly, sometimes nonsensical, always endearing way in which Hustle Beach folds all of those derivatives into itself makes it, I have to say, a classic, in its own right.

“So,” says Chuck Klosterman, instead of saying hello, or thank you to the host, “Michael Jackson’s dead.”

Michael Jackson has been dead for three hours, and Chuck Klosterman has been on the road in Milwaukee, traveling from the airport in a south suburb to the downtown east side, where he’s giving a talk at Boswell Book Company. Consequently, he’s been away from the internet wildfire blazing forth from the news of Jackson’s passing, from initially unconfirmed reports of cardiac arrest and coma to the announcement from the mainstream media and the thunderclap of shock and grief across the world.

“I had the audacity to call my friends, who sit in front of computers all day” to confirm what his driver told him about MJ, Klosterman says. “The man’s been dead 10 minutes.”

Klosterman is at Boswell to talk about his new novel, Downtown Owl, but no one expects him to just gloss over the death of the King. After all, the music critic, pop culture commentator and former senior writer for SPIN magazine wrote a whole book (Killing Yourself to Live) about the deaths of rock icons and the way we feel, as a culture and as personal, existential creatures, as a result. Chuck Klosterman knows we are expecting him to talk about it, so he wastes no time.

“In retropsect, he may have lived the strangest life in American history,” he says – the lost childhood, the pressures of an abusive parent and the rigors of early fame, followed by international superstardom unprecedented by any other artist and exponentially platinum record-breaking albums.

“There will never be another record like Thriller,” he says. “There can’t be.” But after 1987′s Bad, during a prominent decline into eccentricity, bizarre behavior and outlandish tabloid rumors (some of which Jackson himself helped perpetuate), “his only purpose in life became being weird.”

Or notorious, reviled, or suspected of some awful things. MJ was of course acquitted, but  “even if he’s innocent, he’s guilty of something,” says Klosterman. “He’s living with llamas or something!”

“It’s been 20 years since anyone said anything nice about him,” Klosterman says. “This is gonna be a weird, difficult death for people. Would anyone here consider themselves a big Michael Jackson fan? Would you say you relate to Michael Jackson?” No one in the audience is sure how to respond. A few people raise their hands.  But no one really knows how to articulate how they feel about the man and the music he made.

But in the bookstore, less than five hours after his death — and later that night, in a smoky basement pool bar down the street, where we cram quarter after quarter into the jukebox to load it up with every Michael Jackson song we can find, playing the hits again and again–it’s already clear that in death, the man will be canonized, perhaps even loved once more, if not for the man he might have been, then for the musical legacy he leaves.

“Now that he’s dead,” said Klosterman, “it’s hard to think of him as ever being alive.”

There are few times in my life when being a little careless works out for the best, let alone for the rapturous and revelatory. But last week – on a rainy but refreshing afternoon – it did. Let me set the scene.

I had left work earlier than usual. I had just called my dad to wish him a happy birthday and learned that, entirely by a remarkable coincidence, we would be seeing each other in Las Vegas in less than three weeks. Upon arriving at my apartment, I found (oh bliss!) The Power of Art in my mailbox (guess who was responsible for that). And the crux: that morning I had spilled an entire cup of coffee all over my car.

I was charged, flushed and gleeful. It was time to take action. I would clean up not only the coffee spill, but all of the papers, show flyers, media kits, bar coats, loose magazines, all of the detritus of every day life that had accumulated in my car for the past few frigid months.

And prominent among the refuse, I am ashamed to admit, were CDs.

I found a stack crammed in each door pocket and another stack in the glove box. I found CDs under the driver seat and the passenger seat and my visor sleeve of CDs was above capacity, with two in each sleeve. I found burned copies of albums I couldn’t get enough of, bizarre double-features (Thom Yorke, Eraser burned on the same disc as Andrew Bird, Armchair Apocrypha?), podcasts-on-plastic, data CDs that don’t actually work in my car stereo.

Most of them were unlabeled, distinct only by level of sun damage and CD-R brand. Some of them were destroyed beyond belief – translucent, gouged, water-damaged. I threw out the ones I knew were done for. And then I found a Sharpie in my console, and I set to work as archaeologist, and archivist, of my own life in music.

I thought this would be a routine, methodical exercise; I’d pop one in, find out what it was and if it still worked, then file it for keeps or throw it away. But almost immediately, I was seized. One CD I’d given up for dead – a mix I’d made in 2004 – played almost all the way through, charting a course through mysterious, half-remembered terrain. The last track on a volume that was both emotionally transporting and evasive – The Mountain Goats and Cat Power one minute, “Midnight Train to Georgia” and Britney’s “Toxic” the next – was the Blur song “Out of Time.” I’d forgotten this song completely; hearing it again, remembering it beat by beat, was like seeing a ghost.

I excavated the twin mixes made a year apart for my boyfriend – neither of which I’d heard since we split up two summers ago. The first CD – I must have given it to him three weeks into our relationship, which now seems crazed and completely preemptive to me – is striking in its confidence, full of Chopin etudes, accordions in dangerous waltzes, singing in French. There are tender folk songs, and Count Basie, and Etta James. It’s breathless, flirty and cosmopolitan – like a wobbly bicycle with a balloon tied to the handlebars, or woman in a sundress, sunlit.

The second mix is almost all soul music, and never has soul been the righter word for soul music – listening to it now I am almost embarrassed by how wanting it sounds – and how wanting I must have felt. Somewhere in me, somewhere in my soul, I knew we were on our way to being over, and it made me want to shout. Otis Redding howling, “Don’t be afraid of love.” Brenton Woods, cool but growing impatient, imploring, “Gimme some kind of sign, girl.”

It went on like this. I sat in my car for an hour, entrapped by half-alive emotions and memories, half-decayed albums, the architecture of time and experience becoming transparent. Whatever I played – Elliott Smith, The Shangri-Las, Wolf Parade – was draped with gauzy layers. Falling in love, falling away from love. Leaving home, coming home. A demo cut on a four track that had put me to sleep on a shaky train out of Poland. A mix of power jams someone left in my car – Belinda Carlisle, AC/DC – that drove us through an obliterating thunderstorm in Branson, Missouri. A searing Turkish pop song that kept me from crying on a long, lonely bus trip across southern Anatolia. Rowboats in central Wisconsin. Apple orchards in the fall. One interminable winter where I’d listened to nothing but dirty Southern gospel songs, searching for strength and guidance.

I found my burned copy of Oh, You’re So Silent, Jens, long ago given up for lost. Something about this album had made me bashful when I first heard it (the same summer I made that brazenly flirty mix CD) – the swoopy flutes and glissandos under Jens Lekman’s insecure, inflected tenor, like a paper boat on a glittery sliver of water. It was so vulnerable, so unapologetically pretty. It was one of those albums I was conscious of, careful not to have on in the car if I was driving with someone I didn’t know very well (or with my boyfriend, who really didn’t like it – probably out of that same shyness).

But in my car on a Tuesday afternoon, and in the rabbit hole I’d fallen into, it all felt virtuosic, even in its most naked, honest moments. I sat there – in my winter coat, my windows foggy, the rain getting forceful – and listened to “A Man Walks Into a Bar” over and over again.

When I finally came inside it was dark out. And I decided to make this meta-mix CD for you – a mix CD of my clearest moments from all of these mix CDs, a distillation of this eerie and gorgeous hour of my life. It won’t sound the same to you, of course.

FORGOTTEN SONGS: THE MIX CD
Burn it, play it a few times, lose it for a few years, return to it gloriously

1. “Out of Time” – Blur (from Think Tank) (buy)
2. “Rocky Dennis’ Farewell Song” – Jens Lekman (from Oh You’re So Silent, Jens) (buy)
3. “Midnight Train to Georgia” – Gladys Knight and the Pips (buy)
4. I have no idea what this song is called! – Melodia
www.myspace.com/melodiaband
5. “Don’t Be Afraid of Love” – Otis Redding (buy)
6. “Shine a Light” – Wolf Parade (from Apologies to the Queen Mary) (buy)
7. “Akbaba” – Nil Karaibrahimgil (info)
8. “Wheels” – Cake (from Pressure Chiefs) (buy)
9. “God’s Unchanging Hand” – (from Southern Journey V. 3: 61 Highway Mississippi – Delta Country Blues, Spirituals, Work Songs & Dance Music (buy)

What can I say, friends? It’s Thursday night, the end of a long, weary week, and I’m writing to you from the top of one of Milwaukee‘s highest hills, looking out at a freezing, glittering town, drinking a glass of wine and fighting the accumulated fatigue of one more battering day.

I just left the national premiere of Handmade Nation, a coast-to-coast documentary of the revival of indie craft and DIY art and design philosophy, a project helmed by Faythe Levine, one of the most active and visible members of Milwaukee’s tenacious creative community.

I’m exhausted. I’m trying to save my independent local monthly from oblivion, spending long hours with web developers, underpaid freelance writers, designers working on the promise of future projects, video interns who have long outlasted their requisite semesters and have only stayed on to help the cause. At the end of every day (and sometimes, on the really bad days, at the very beginning), I just think it’s time to give up the ghost. I’m tired of the meetings, building strategies from the ground up, optimizing every last resource, asking for favors. I just want to get into bed and sleep until springtime.

I’m drinking said glass of wine at a beautiful slow food restaurant at the top of those previously mentioned highest city hills. One of my best friends tends bar here. Since the kitchen closed an hour ago, the bar has become an impromptu staff party; no one is drinking here but off-shift waiters, cooks, bartenders, managers and me. The sous chefs are playing bar dice to my right. To my left, I just showed my friend Robert how to make an uppercase cursive letter Q. (I bet you a buck you have to look that shit up.) This is my Cheers. It’s suffering, too; the owner just bought out all of his investors, who all wanted to shut down the shop. Everyone I know right now who’s really doing what they love is living on a wing and a prayer.

But today, for you, is a Friday, and that means all sorts of new hopes. And among them are these three: Milwaukee musicians, some of whom I’ve told you about already, all of whom are doing something approaching sublime, their styles ranging from the earnest to the indulgent to the gloriously ridiculous. Maybe I’m just a big sissy, but it’s taken me a whole lot of time and reckoning to recognize what an absurd and incredible amount of hard work it really takes to get shit done in this world. But by God, these men (and that lady bassoon player) have done it.

THE OFF KEY –”A Family at Home”
Download audio file (theoffkey.mp3)

^{The lovely, sweaty Schleicher brothers. Photo by Kat Berger.}

With his humble blog, one-man band Aaron Schleicher (who also plays in Juniper Tar – you may remember him from that Iron Maiden shirt) has made a promise to keep himself honest – he holes himself up in his studio once a week, come hell or high water or one of his bandmates accidentally burning the place down, and writes a song, records it track by track, polishes it up and posts it on his site for the taking.

It helps that Aaron is a good producer and a sensitive writer of graceful, considered songs. If he misses a week, you can send him your address and he’ll send you his entire catalog of recorded works. Besides the incentive of, you know, exploiting failure, it’s really satisfying to watch the project evolve. And when Aaron performs live he brings along some (or all) of his brothers and they all play music together. If you’re reading from Milwaukee, or if you feel like taking a really impulsive vacation, The Off Key, with all four brothers Schleicher, performs tomorrow night at Mad Planet with Time Since Western and Conrad Plymouth.

THE TRUSTY KNIFE –”Stealin‘”
Download audio file (stealin.mp3)

The inscrutable Zach Pieper makes every day feel like the 4th of July

Ah, the endless summer of the Trusty Knife –the blaring horns, the twangy guitars, the bassoon. A garage, a red wagon somewhere, some lemonade, a bunch of stoners eating caramel apples, maybe an unattended yard sale, somebody kicking a can –these are the timeless images this sunny, jangly lo-fi band evokes. I love the sing-along chorus and the burst of the harmonica. I love Zach Pieper’s impenetrable lyrics (the man, though full of rumpled charisma, is pretty impenetrable himself) and I love that I can’t turn on this record and do anything but dance.

YOUNG E-DOUBLE aka MR ELEMENTARY – “Happy Birthday”
[audio:
Young E’s eponymous debut album is available on iTunes and CD Baby

In case, on first listen, you miss any of the mind-bogglingly delightful turns of this 10-year-old’s phrase, here’s a few highlights to keep an ear out for:

“Like you got a good job with a lot of pay/Show your teeth with a bright smile, no tooth decay”

“I’m the man of the house/See my mom do the cooking/but I’m the one that takes the garbage out”

And of course, the part where he gives a shout out to everyone who has a birthday in every month of the year is just exultant. So even if your birthday isn’t for another eight months – even if you’re not sure you’re going to get another birthday – Young E-Double wants you to boogie-oogie on your day. Groove on.

(I heard an interview with Young E-Double on Milwaukee’s mighty WMSE, in which he thanked not only everyone who’s bought his record, but everyone who is thinking about buying his record. If that’s not incentive for you to buy his record, I don’t know what is.)

Friends: the gig is up. Last year I put together a mix CD for you, dear readers, as a highly self-conscious and tongue-in-cheek exercise in revisiting the year, made relevant only by merit of my return to the world of indie rock after a long, wandering absence.

This year bears no such self-important or self-derogatory flourish. This year was epic. And mostly shitty. And while in some way, no amount of good music can change any of that, it is true, ultimately, that music is an anchor in otherwise stormy seas. I’m not sure this mix CD does this year poetic justice, but I hope it takes an acceptable stab in that emotional direction.

“Fernando,” ABBA, 1976

Download audio file (Fernando.mp3)

I went to Kalamazoo for New Year’s Eve to reunite with some college friends, and I hitched a ride with a mysterious man named Fernando. This song was playing in the car when I met him for the first time, and it played over and over again until I realized it was on repeat. I said, “Is this on repeat?” And Fernando said, “Oh, damn! You figured it out!” It was the beginning of an often frustrating but generally beautiful friendship, and in its nascence, I listened to this song over and over again.

“A Little Lost,” Jens Lekman

Download audio file (Little_Lost.mp3)

Four Songs by Arthur Russell, 2007

In June I wrote about a fresh heartbreak and included this song. Casting a romantic eye on this year I might say that this song could have been the turning point. When Jens played it to a hushed theater –alone at center stage with a thumb piano –I looked at the young man sitting next to me and thought, “This could be serious.” And from there on out, the stakes started to climb. One brief, pretty love affair was just the beginning.

“Skinny Love,” Bon Iver

Download audio file (Skinny_Love.mp3)

For Emma, Forever Ago, 2008

By far the most personally affecting album I listened to in 2008. This song sums it up for me –the yearning to have some solid ground to stand on, something to trust, the struggles we all face in our flailing attempts at self-improvement and the distraction that always exists in the quest for genuine love.

“Honey, Won’t You Let Me In,” The Tallest Man on Earth

Download audio file (Honey.mp3)

Shallow Grave, 2008

On a whim I went home for Memorial Day, and my friend John and I stayed up all night on his back porch drinking wine and whiskey by candlelight and caught each other up on our strange and changing lives. This album will always make me think of him, and the thrill of the spring.

“Michael, the Lone Archer of the North Shore,” Deastro

Download audio file (Michael.mp3)

Keepers, 2008

I dated two men named Michael, one right after the other. Both of them broke me a little bit, and both of them broke up with me, one for an asparagus farm, one via Facebook message after a night he spent so blotto that he doesn’t remember getting the shit kicked out of him. This song reminds me of the better parts of both of them. I really like this album.

“Death Take Your Fiddle,” Spiritualized

Download audio file (Spiritualized.mp3)

Songs in A&E, 2008

This year more than any before it evoked the specter of death at every turn. I lost my uncle in July, the body of the man in the studio next door to our office was discovered almost two weeks after he died, I learned of suicides of high school classmates and former business associates and fatal car accidents involving college friends. This dark, spooky song shouldn’t make me feel better about any of that, but it does, and that’s what music is all about. Seeing Spiritualized was also one of the better concert-going experiences of 2008.

“Time to Pretend,” MGMT

Download audio file (Time_To_Pretend.mp3)

Oracular Spectacular, 2008

It wasn’t until October –when, driving around Detroit, my friend turned this song on and said, “you know ! I like this album” –that I realized I have heard this album in every strange situation and on every ridiculous road trip and during production at the office and on the radio and at parties and all over the place. It’s almost getting tiresome and I don’t really want to hear it anymore, but I couldn’t leave it off of the mix because it has such sheer power to bring to mind so much with so little. I woke up singing the resigned refrain –“everything must run its course” –all the time this summer.

“Let it Roll,” Baby Teeth

Download audio file (Let_It_Roll.mp3)

Hustle Beach –to be released 2009

This cheeky power ballad gave me so much odd, triumphant hope every time I heard it. Even in some seriously dark hours, it gave me the will to fight. I also like that this song is from the future. This recording is from a Daytrotter session. Maybe my favorite song of the whole year, and I think Hustle Beach is already a shoe-in for next year’s top whatevers.

“Danke Schoen,” Wayne Newton, 1963

Download audio file (Danke_Schoen.mp3)

Starting in June with an ill-advised assignment in Branson, Missouri, the magazine began sending its most mean-spirited and impetuous reports on uniquely American road trips. On our trip to Des Moines, IA, in August, we were thrilled to learn that we would be staying in the same hotel as Wayne Fucking Newton, who was in town for some sort of really important Arabian horse exposition. We spent the whole weekend trying to track him down. And we failed. But we did discover Mr. Newton’s catalog, of which this song is the only notable work. If I could say one thing to the year 2008, it would be: Thank you for all the joy and pain.

“Get On Up,” The Esquires, 1967

Download audio file (Get_On_Up.mp3)

I remembered this song existed when a wonderful man played it for me on a charmed October morning. Less than two weeks later, I was sitting next to that guy who sings the bass line (“Get on up ! get on up !”) at a bar. I didn’t know it was him. We talked about Barack Obama for a while, and the death of Four Tops lead singer Levi Stubbs, and then he was invited to the stage for an impromptu rendition of “Get On Up.” Oh my god.

^{(Photo Credit Joe Kirschling. And yes, Aaron is wearing an Iron Maiden shirt)}

“The Mouths of Fields,” Juniper Tar

Download audio file (The_Mouths_of_Fields.mp3)

To the Trees, 2008

I saw these handsome Milwaukee gentlemen for the first time this year and was instantly infatuated. This song in particular always chokes me up, and whenever I admit to my friends in the band that I cry about it they make fun of me and I deserve it. I saw them play on one of the happiest days of the whole fall, when I went to an apple orchard with my friends and an adorable 2-year-old and we played with the goats and saw some bunnies and ate some apples and afterward went to A&W. The band didn’t play at the orchard, or at A&W, but they might as well have.

“Gila,” Beach House

Download audio file (Gila.mp3)

Devotion, 2008

I’m not sure what it is about this song. I think it speaks for itself, pitch-perfectly, and I think it speaks for my internal emotional world in the latter half of the year with jaw-dropping clarity.

“No One Does It Like You,” Department of Eagles

Download audio file (Dept_Eagles.mp3)

In Ear Park, 2008

Thanks, Post-Rockists, for introducing me to this marvelous album! I love it! This song is so catchy and buoyant. Which at this point in the mix CD, and in the chronology of 2008, becomes dreadfully important.

“Take Me,” Karen Dalton

Download audio file (Take_Me.mp3)

In My Own Time, 1971

My discovery of Karen Dalton seems to prove that there is a Right Time to hear all of the music that becomes a big part of your life, and this year was definitely the Right Time to discover her, and listen to her endlessly, and put this song on repeat at the end of many chilly, sad night. When I went home for Thanksgiving, John and I listened to this album together and drank beers on the couch and took a long walk in our old neighborhood, which kind of brings everything full circle, summer’s brink to autumn’s quiet slip into snow.

doesn’t milwaukee look like fun?

“Latest Flame,” Quinn Scharber and the !

Download audio file (Latest_Flame.mp3)

Being Nice Won’t Save Milwaukee, 2008

There’s really nothing like a simple but expertly crafted rock song to take the edge off, and Quinn delivers. He likes to invite audience members on stage to play tambourines, and in December I was a proud tambourine-welding/booty-shaking/clapping and singing along member of the orchestra.

“This Will Be Our Year,” The Zombies

Download audio file (Zombies.mp3)

Odyssey and Oracle, 1967

I rediscovered the Zombies this year and they accompanied many of 2008′s most joyful, redeeming moments, of which there were many, despite my melodramatic howling about how everything turned out.

But damn, do I hope this is true of 2009.

A band I like is playing in your (sort of) town.

It’s a special joy for me when the distance between my heart’s two cities –- Milwaukee and Detroit –- is triumphed, for whatever reason, however briefly, like planets crossing paths. I even felt perversely comforted this year when Milwaukee Alderman Michael McGee Jr. was on trial this year –- and ran for reelection from behind bars –- around the same time embattled Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s shit started to hit the fan. I felt tied into a grand legacy of corruption, big city bullying and tragicomic falls from power.

This weekend presents another chance to bridge the chasm, one that YOU, dear reader, might experience even more keenly than I can, as Juniper Tar, a Milwaukee band that’s recently overwhelmed my affection, comes not just to Detroit but, in a strange and elegant coincidence, to Livonia, to a dinner theater less than a mile down the street from the hospital where I was born, across the street from a trashy mall I hung out at in high school.

I know what you’re thinking: why would I go to Livonia to see a show? That sounds like something I did when I was sixteen. But I urge you to think twice, especially if you like any of the following people, places or things:

Old Crow bourbon
Cabins up north
Pine trees
Three-part harmony
Soulfulness, generally
Slow dancing
Medium-fast dancing
Sailors
Lumberjacks
Wintertime
Autumn time
Plaid shirts
Trucker hats
Long, winding drives at night
Charming, handsome men

If you would like to know more, I highly recommend this interview on Milwaukee’s new-ish music blog Fan-Belt. You can also download an mp3 from their beautiful debut album, To The Trees, released in February. The full album is available on eMusic.

If you DO venture to Livonia to check them out (or perhaps if you’re a fan of American Mars), please let me know how it goes and what you think. I’m homesick!

As with all these sorts of things, I saw it coming, but it still came out of nowhere. It was like a basketball to the face; of course you see it coming, but you can’t move out of its path, and you don’t really believe it’s going to hit you until you hear it collide with your skull.

It wasn’t one of those “big” breakups. We’d only been together for a couple of months –enough time to get to know each other, but not enough time to understand the mechanics, which I think makes things worse –when you don’t know why things happen the way they do in a relationship, when you’re not sure what made those formidable bridges of expectation fall to bricks all around you.

Download audio file (A Little Lost.mp3)
Jens Lekman – “A Little Lost”

Appropriately for a post-rockist romance, we met at a Jens Lekman concert, where the starry disco lights, swelling ballads and the sweet Swedish crooner’s honey tones set just the right mood for a swoon. Then we found out that we knew each other already; I’d commissioned him to do an illustration for my magazine months ago, and we had exchanged a lot of pleasantly-mannered and modestly flirtatious emails. If every great love needs a great story to hold it together, this one, I thought, was clearly meant to be. How could an encounter so enchanted not lead to a legendary affair?

But as sultry June snuck up on us, he decided to move to a farm in western Wisconsin for a few months, and he decided to leave whatever was between us behind.

Download audio file (Somethings Changed.mp3)
Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings – “Something’s Changed”
(from 100 Days, 100 Nights)

In college, where I was accustomed to the blunt bottoming-out of things I’d come to trust, I did a radio show, once a semester, bitterly titled “Love Can Suck It.” I’m over the phrase “suck it” these days, and I live a much more balanced emotional life, and I don’t let men shit all over my heart the way I used to.

But after this sudden and saddening break –a strain all the more because neither of us found it quite possible to talk about the subtleties of our affection for each other, and because it feels like one of those loves that wouldn’t have ended except for some clumsy circumstances –I found myself pawing through my music catalog, frantically searching for the right songs to bring succor and guidance to my rancorous heart.

Download audio file (Greenfields.mp3)
The Brothers Four – “Greenfields”
(from Folk, Gospel & Blues: Will the Circle Be Unbroken)

There are more songs about this kind of garbage than there are molecules in the known world, and picking just the right ones requires a measure of randomness. Why isn’t there a Large Hadron Collider for plumbing the mysteries of human heartache, with all of its tiny black holes?

Download audio file (I Sold My Heart To The Junkman.mp3)
The Starlets – “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman”
(from Girl Group Sounds Lost And Found (One Kiss Can Lead To Another))

Of all the stories these songs tell –the treacherous first steps into a love we know will be trouble, the gnawing anxiety that something isn’t right, that ridiculous impulse to sell your heart to the junkman (and not because you’re in love with a junkman, which was what I initially took this song to mean) –the only number that doesn’t entirely make sense to me is Mark Mallman’s power ballad “Knockout on 22^nd Street,” which is, for all intents and purposes, about boxing. I guess it’s also about lost opportunities, and lost grip on life’s chaos. I guess it’s like my friend said when I called him to wail it out: “you can’t win them all.” In any case, it’s practically the only song I’ve really listened to for the past two weeks, in endless and deafening repeat in my car, day after day, in moments of buoyant clarity and moments of sinking despair.

Download audio file (Knockout on 22nd St.mp3)
Mark Mallman – “Knockout on 22nd St.”
(from Between the Devil and the Middle C)

We all make ourselves vulnerable to love; sometimes it’s beautiful, and sometimes it tears us apart. Which is why, if you’re like me, you go into these things not with giddy schoolkid thrill, but under the crush of excruciating anxiety.

A long time ago a man I loved told me that love is just like music: there has to be tension, suspense, something at stake. There has to be dissonance in order for there to be resolution. And the resolution is what music is all about; that’s what moves us. And so it is with love. Maybe that’s why music seems so infinitely suited for the love we make, take, and break, over and over again.

Download audio file (DontThinkTwice.mp3)
Bob Dylan – “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”
(from The Freewheelin’)

Download audio file (BonEmma.mp3)
Bon Iver – “For Emma”
(from For Emma, Forever Ago)

This is the kind of creative awakening all of us romantic, moony creative-types wish for: a retreat to the north, a burst of lightning in a field of deep meditation, a fully realized work of art borne from the soil, fresh and whole, edifying like a baptism.

What happened here? Justin Vernon spent a few months in a cabin in the woods, never intending to make a transformative album, or any album at all. But weeks went by, he took up his guitar and his four-track and looked at the snow and, one can only imagine, this heartache-lovely piece of poetry poured forth intact.

In the real world, Vernon released For Emma, Forever Ago independently under the name Bon Iver (French for “good winter”) last fall; it was scooped up by Jagjaguwar records and re-released this February. In the real world, yes, For Emma has been prattled on about at length. You kids out there in the real world probably know about it already; maybe you’ve listened to it a few times yourself. But as soon as I put this album on, friends, I leave that world –the snarky, self-conscious sphere of who knows what and when and how well, where all that ever happens sincerely is second guessing and spilling coffee.

It’s not just the album’s spare-ness, or how lonely it is, or the fact that you can hear a chair scooting over creaking floorboards and sirens howling miles away or Justin Vernon coughing or dropping things. It’s not just the eerie whistling, the gentle hand-claps or the expansive, echoing harmonies.

It’s the way I can’t understand half of the words the man sings in his warm, wide voice, but every lyric seems nonetheless mysterious, precise and true. It’s the gradual piling-on of layers and volume that build to irresistible breaking points and the sudden bursts of percussion and exclamation that seem, amidst tall wells of reflection and doubt, to be unforgiving in their affirmative joy. The killer opener, “Flume,” is as welcoming in its sadness as the moon on the river in November; the title track, “For Emma,” is like the sun coming out in the spring: lazy horns, bright and pulsing strumming, a far away slide guitar line.

Much has been made of Bon Iver’s Walden-esque, man-in-the-shack conception myth, as has the inescapable winter’s tale the album tells, and you can hear all of that, if you’re listening for it. But in every cadence of this album I hear so much Wisconsin, Wisconsin in every season, and maybe that’s why it hits my heart so hard. There are sunsets over old train towns in For Emma, walks through dark streets, highways carving through big rolling hills, seagulls diving through fog on the lake, diner coffee too early in the morning, secret creeks and Indian mounds, menacing bare trees, hot summer evenings on wooden porches.

For Emma, Forever Ago is as gorgeous as an opera and as fitful and simple as a song you don’t know the name of that you hear on your car radio in the middle of the night. In the real world, I might be writing this review months too late, but I am writing it out of love, which is the only way to write about anything like what it is.