2009: THE (Ultimate) MIX CD
OR: 2008 was a clunker, but 2009 was all cash
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. Read More »
Todd’s Favorite Albums of 2009
The problem with maintaining a digital music library is that it gets so easy to acquire that there’s hardly time left to appreciate. So while I easily listened to over 100 new releases in 2009, each met with at least a modicum of enthusiasm and anticipation, looking back there were only a handful that truly resonated with me and begged for repeated listens as the year wore on. There were plenty more quality releases that I could have included here, and some of my choices may be obvious to people who (like me) spend an unhealthy amount of time reading and writing these sorts of lists, but these are probably my 10 favorite albums of 2009:
10. Bill Callahan – Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle
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“Too Many Birds” (buy)
For someone with a voice as oaken and stout as Bill Callahan’s, he sure has a fleet-footed deftness in tackling ephemeral subjects, crafting Byzantine-tinged fables about familial burdens or grappling with the sudden loss of a perfect song that appeared in a dream and dissipated in the morning. This album, for me, is a little like an old Navy peacoat: heavy and maybe a little musty at times, but reliably built and familiar enough with broken-in grooves to comfortably return to when the weather demands it. Read More »