We want more of this.

Please make another album. I don’t care if it isn’t based on any of the 50 states. If it wasn’t about Christmas, that would be nice too.

Thanks,

Everyone

I just coined the word “partifact.” It is any sort of artifact created during a party.

The partifact above is a chalkboard from a New Year’s Eve party.

In reflecting on the music of the 00s (or what I’ve been affectionately referring to as the ‘oughts’) I spent a lot of time listening to albums that I hadn’t listened to in awhile. You’ll notice, for example, that number 10 is one that I hadn’t listened to since I was 14 or so — if you’re going to tell a story about yourself, you have to dig deep and get honest, which is what I’ve tried to do here.

So, I’ve compiled the following list of the ten most important albums to my past ten years. Some experiences of mine I’m going to note exactly as they happened, some I’ll make vague reference to, and some I’m just going to leave out so that you can fill in the blanks (provided you were there.) Also, note that I’m going to be as honest as I can. You’ll probably note that I spend a lot of time thinking about music, and a lot of time thinking about thinking about music — some would say to a degree of obsession. I don’t relate to music like a musician commonly would, so as a result, my language is probably a bit more colorful than my other friends. Its just how I communicate ideas, so if quasi-poetic references to how something feels turns you off, I suggest you not bother. My mind really wanders when I talk about this stuff.

Also, please don’t think that I regard myself and my own story as any more important than anyone else’s, but know that I could talk for hours about this stuff, hence the really long entries. Hopefully someone, somewhere, gets something out of it. And now that I’m finally submitting my Top 10 of the 00s, weeks after it was originally due (thanks for being patient, folks) you can all see the finished product. Enjoy!

10. Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Silence by GlassJAw

Released May 9, 2000 on Roadrunner

At 14, more than anything, I needed a heavy dose of comfortable independence. I was an angry kid, and I needed an outlet. The countless Adidas-rock CDs lining my backpack just began to feel like a load of falsehoods. I wasn’t quite the hard-partying Fred Durst type, it turns out, and the trash that KoRn was turning out never quite stuck with me.

Then, this album came along. Daryl Palumbo, lead singer of the band, was the character I felt like when I turned 15: skinny, angry, a bit effeminate, and as different from my Metal friends as this album is from the rest of the Roadrunner Records products (the band would later sign with Warner Brothers). Without exhagerration, I became this album.

From track one to twelve, its an absolute typhoon of sounds, exploring the gamut from fierce, pounding hardcore-inspired madness of “Siberian Kiss” and “Babe”, to bouncy post-punk riffing on “Ry Ry’s Song”, to the thumping daydreaming of “Piano”. I wanted to be this band, every member. The drumming and guitar work are consistently changing, and Palumbo’s voice seems to stretch the meaning of dynamic vocals, consistently growing, shrinking, and twisting itself. The lyrics, while generally musing about lost love (girls) and bad decisions (girls), are somehow a mark more honest and poetic than most other songs I’d heard about the same subjects. Toss in a number of gutsy songs about the pains of having Crohn’s disease, and you’ve got yourself a pretty heartfelt, if angry, album.

High school was four years of ‘I’ statements, and this album stuck with me through all of them. From the comfort of my hometown bed, I listened to this album on repeat over, and over, and over. When I got a driver’s license, I blasted it and sang along word-for-word at any chance I got, including the 5 minute drive from home to my grocery-store job. It lasted through my punk rock phase, through my youth-crew-hardcore phase, through my Postal Service phase (yeah, me too), and finally went to rest a year into college. Listening to it again, now, it all comes back. While it doesn’t quite strike me the same as it did in my early teens, there’s something undeniably ‘there’ in this record.

09. Sung Tongs by Animal Collective

Released May 3, 2004 on Fat Cat (UK)

It’s the summer of 2004, and I’m on an overnight train from Paris to Madrid. The total time of this journey, on a regular train (as opposed to bullet train) is about 13 hours. At the border, you change trains, going from a classy, comfortable sleek-looking French train to what may be the oldest train still riding the Spanish rails, which winds through the mountains and into the plains to Madrid.

I didn’t sleep at all during the entire 13-hour trip. My brain, from the utter blackness outside of my window at night, felt like it had collapsed in on itself like a weak lung. The human mind isn’t meant for this sort of thing. As my traveling-friend slept for almost the entire journey, I started to go a bit crazy from the stillness of the car, and the lack of stimulation. When we got to Irun, at the border, I had a cup of coffee (I know) and a croissant, and boarded the next train. Fortunately, in those early hours of the morning, I was met with some of the most incredible sights that I have ever seen. Mountainside villages with plumes of smoke, twisting streams, and then, just as my brain was regaining stamina, 4-5 hours of wide open plains and an occasional town.

Despite previously wanting to save the battery on my pre-iPod music provider, I decided that I couldn’t take it any more, and dove into my small collection of albums, electing to fill some of the time with Sung Tongs, an album which had been given to me right before I left. At this point, the opening drums of Leaf House took shape, and I began to feel as if I were in a dream. Maybe it was just the lack of sleep, but I swear it was as if the wind picked up on the plains, and every single beat of every song (even the wandering atmosphere of ‘The Softest Voice’) just melted me into my window. The following 50 minutes felt like four hours, in the best way possible.

In the rest of the world, Animal Collective broke onto the music scene with Sung Tongs and proceeded to really mess things up for a lot of people. Their songs, which range from the 13 minute guitar hypnosis of ‘Visiting Friends’ to the sunny-Sunday jaunt of ‘Sweet Road’ seem to smash acoustic instrumentation and electronic sampling together to create a place in your head that you don’t want to leave. The album breeds curiosity, and takes every concept that formulates the common definition of song and pulls it apart like salt-water taffy. Tracks like ‘We Tigers’ are equal parts smart and goofy, and really reward a good pair of headphones with lots of aural secrets.

There are people who love this band, and people who absolutely detest them. Personally, I could leave everything between Sung Tongs and Merriweather Post Pavilion (one of my top 10 of 2009), but this one just keeps coming back to me as striking the perfect balance between experimentation and experience, and is worth every second.

08. Funeral by Arcade Fire

Released September 14, 2004 on Merge Records

Mission Hill is a notorious part of Boston, in two ways. First of all, if you’ve never been to Mission Hill, you probably think that it’s a scary place, full of crime. If you live on/have lived on Mission Hill, you’ll know that it’s actually divided into two parts: half college students and half low-income families. It’s a constantly changing (gentrifying) place, but for the most part, it’s full of people that scream at 4 in the morning for no reason. I know this because I spent three years of college wandering around it, as it’s less than a five minute walk from said college.

The year before I moved to Mission Hill, I remember sitting at my dorm desk and watching a clip of Conan O’Brien, which featured a new band, known as Arcade Fire (or The Arcade Fire, depending on who you talk to.) It was confusing at first, with a woman and man on violin, a woman playing accordion, a guy on guitar and vocals, a bassist, a drummer, and two dudes who seemed to spend most of the performance drumming on garbage and each other’s motorcycle helmets. It was like watching a bizarre Quebecois indie-rock circus, but it was catchy, and after watching a minute or two, I was dead set on getting the album.

From start to finish, this one is constantly catchy and sweet. The number of Mission Hill art school parties that I went to in college, where ‘Neighborhoods #3 (Power Out)’ was a featured jam, is impossible to remember. The band has it in spades, implementing common and experimental instrumentation throughout. Energy seems to come out of every track, and stays with you even after you shut the album off. I can recall a lot of hazy mornings on ‘the Hill’ where I would wake up, brush last-night’s party out of my eyes, and climb off of whatever I’d fallen asleep on to descend back down to my dorm room, tapping my feet to ‘Wake Up,’ (recently featured during the weepy trailer for ‘Where the Wild Things Are’). It’s a beautiful song, and quite honestly the entire album follows suit.

(Note: Also, it’s worth noting that these folks are huge supporters of Partners in Health, the health and social justice nonprofit that my girlfriend, Meredith, works for. They donated quite a bit of the proceeds from their Neon Bible tour to help get serious medical aid to some of the poorest countries in the world, and they deserve enormous props for that, too.)

07. Give Up by The Postal Service

Released February 18th, 2003 on Sub Pop

It’s worth noting, of course, that this is another record that I don’t really put on anymore. Of course, this may just my way of wriggling out of the inevitable embarrassment of revealing that this album was a big part of my decade, but let’s to put that aside. Be serious, here, if you were born between 1983-1987, this was most likely on repeat for you for a good portion of the winter of 2003. Go ahead, admit it, you’ll feel better.

My freshman dorm at MassArt was a weirdly-shaped building with even weirder rooms. On each floor, no one room was shaped like any other. Mine, for example, was an L-shaped room, fit for one person but shared by two. Most colleges at least have square or rectangle shaped closet-rooms for their eager freshmen, but Smith Hall was different. The good thing about this arrangement, however, was that most Freshmen would end up congregating in each others rooms and in the common ‘art space,’ where one might spill quick-drying plaster on every available surface and still not get in trouble. In perfect honesty, it was actually a great year, despite how cramped it might sound, and Give Up played a huge part in that.

When it started to get cold in Boston, and the irregular rumbling of the Green Line started to fade into back of our minds, Give Up started to come out. I maintain that, at any hour of the entire day, you could go to a floor of the building and find it playing somewhere. This, of course, made for the perfect introduction, where you could knock on a dorm door, introduce yourself, and start to gush about the candy-sweetness of tracks like ‘Such Great Heights’. You’d end up smiling a lot, and moving to a real conversation about whatever weird project you were currently slaving away at (to eventually throw out).

Ben Gibbard, who I have never been a huge fan of, really did pop music some justice with this one. As the legend goes, he and electronic producer Jimmy Tamborello would send each other tapes (yes, made of tape) by mail (see what they did there), effectively collaborating on the same album from long distance. Gibbard would write sugary lyrics about love and weather, Tamborello would add beats and bleeps, repeating over and over until Give Up was finished. The product turned people into sappy, lovey messes, each song chock full of hooks that were immensely pleasant to listen to, and was somehow both great for active listening or background music. Unfortunately, the album was kind of a one-off, and made the rounds of indie-movie soundtracks and commercials for awhile before it gently faded into the background.

Don’t tell anyone, but this one still makes me feel kind of warm.

06. Ben Folds Live by Ben Folds

Released October 8th, 2002 on Sony/BMG

In 1997, when I was 12, I bought Ben Folds Five’s album “Whatever and Ever Amen” with chore money, after seeing the band perform their single, “Brick” on MTV’s Total Request Live. Initially, the song shook me in a way that most of the Alternative Rock Radio songs couldn’t. I brought the CD home, shoveled dinner down my throat, and ran up to my room and put Brick on repeat. I recall, vividly, just laying down on my bed and listening to it play over and over, soft, gentle, and chock full of sullen piano. It’s highly possible that I listened to that song over fifteen times on repeat before my parents yelled up to me to change the song. After this, I quietly listened to the rest of the album from the confines of a discman, relishing in the fuzzy basslines, bouncy drumming, and Folds’ endlessly giving piano.

At some point, I played the album for my childhood friends, who naturally dismissed it as being ‘pretty gay’, and so out the album went. Being twelve is so funny.

Fast forwarding five years, I’m entering my Senior year of high school, a year that I would spend half-time at North Haven High School and half-time at the newly rebuilt Educational Center for the Arts in New Haven, Connecticut, a city that I was not yet familiar with. Wandering around the Broadway area, taking in the good that comes with being a suburban kid in a small, but hip city. That first day of exploring put me in Cutlers, a veritable record-store institution. After browsing the selection for a bit, astounded by the variety of things that I had never seen in my local Strawberries record store, the clerk at the counter decided to put on Ben Folds Live, which had just come out. It all flooded back to me, and I was astounded at the fact that I had completely forgotten about Ben Folds Five. In what may have been an act of quiet defiance against my childhood friends I bought it, right then and there, and spent the entire Winter and much of the Spring with it on repeat in my car. I remember countless trips to and from the house of a girl I was seeing at the time, where we’d blast the album and sing along to every single word, even splitting into dual harmonies on the song ‘Army’, which Ben helpfully teaches the audience to do on the album. It was exciting, it was funny, and I still know every word.

The album is an interesting thing. For some context, Ben Folds Five broke up (on amiable terms) in 2000, never seeing much of the new decade. In 2001, Ben put out an album of material that he had written, doing all of the instrumentation himself and taking on a slightly altered lyrical tone. After the release of the album, which was a bit of a hit, Ben decided to embark on a solo tour, with just his piano. As a result, he assembled various takes from various shows and released them on this album, which is chock full of funny anecdotes, the story of ‘Brick’ (spoiler alert: it’s about abortion, a concept that would’ve blown my mind at twelve), a great cover of Elton John’s ‘Tiny Dancer’, and enough singalongs to leave you a sore throat for a week.

More than anything, this album really points out Folds’ skill with a piano, which seems to be nearly effortless pursuit for him. Some of the songs, at just the right time of day, seem to weave themselves into your life like a soundtrack, whether driving home at one in the morning, singing to yourself, or psyching yourself up for your senior prom (where you decided it a good idea to rent a burgundy tuxedo, with a pink ruffled shirt underneath). Yeah, that happened, too. I don’t have the tuxedo anymore, but I still know the words to every song on this record, which is why it stuck so well.

05. The Milk-Eyed Mender by Joanna Newsom

Released March 23, 2004 on Drag City

At the end of January, in 2005, Boston was buried under nearly 26 inches of snow in a three-day blizzard. Waking up on the last day of the blizzard, the entire world outside of my window was completely covered in a thick white sheet. A small open courtyard in my dorm revealed a wind-blown snow sculpture, running cars became scarce, and area college students wandered around at a complete loss for exactly what to do, next. I remember doing the only thing I could, which was cooking up an egg or two and sitting at my 6th floor window to watch the city try to figure out how to dig out their cars, which were completely encased in snow. As was my custom in the early morning, I put on Joanna Newsom’s ‘Milk-Eyed Mender’ and just tried to soak up the enormity of what the city was dealing with. Classes were cancelled, of course, and so I eventually threw on some boots and long-johns and found a snowdrift to jump into with my then-girlfriend and her roommate.

The blizzard of 2005 clearly stands out as the most astonishing weather event that I’ve ever witnessed, and Newsom’s album, with its delicately plucked harp swimming around her strange and wonderful voice, became the soundtrack of that blizzard. Like us kids in those days, her voice feels helpless, quivering, and curious. The songs are structured in such a way that you begin to feel as though they’re being sung to you by a close friend or relative, in a house filled with the best blankets. They’re soft, and sometimes they just lull you down like a baby. This lulling factor would turn out to be far more important than I could have imagined.

Almost two years later, on September 6th, 2006, my first dog was put to rest. Naturally, I put myself on the first available train. Halfway home, my sobbing mother called me, informing me that I had to make the difficult decision of whether or not to have the hospital put her to sleep, without me being there to say goodbye. At that point, the vets at the animal hospital said that her lungs were rapidly filling up with fluid, and that she was in quite a bit of pain. After a minute of quiet thinking, I swallowed hard and told them to do it. It would be better to put her out of that pain than to selfishly consider my own emotions. My mom asked if I was sure, and I told her that I was. We hung up the phone and I was a wreck, sitting cold on a train with the sun rapidly sinking into the earth. Looking for anything to help, I grabbed for my music and, almost instinctively, put on this album. Skipping forward to the song ‘Sadie’, I put my head against the window and weeped for my dying dog. The song, which memorializes the last days of a beloved animal, blanketed me and brought me through it. This incredible line really puts it into perspective:

“And all that I’ve got, and all that I need, I tie in a knot that I lay at your feet. I have not forgot, but a silence crept over me. So dig up your bone, exhume your pinecone, my Sadie.”

It’s true, that sometimes a song, or a series of songs, can really pull you through some cold days. By the time my train pulled into Union Station, I felt ready to face my family and the a quieter home than that which I remembered.

04. Hymns for a Dark Horse by Bowerbirds

Released June 29th, 2007 on Dead Oceans

On the day that I graduated college, the world was quickly becoming a weird place. The next day, I’d be arriving in the real world, eyes shining and hopeful. I had a summer job lined up on the campus of Yale University, teaching fine art photography to high school students and acting as a residential advisor for tenth grade boys, trying to inspire creativity and adolescent peace in an environment similar to boarding school. After that, I had big plans to drive around the United States with one of my best friends, culminating in a move to Brooklyn. As is my nature, I had everything lined up in a smooth progression, so that I might hop from one step to the other in such a way that the transition from student life would be butter-smooth.

Unfortunately, as is the nature of the world, Brooklyn became an impossibility around the end of the summer, and my well-planned escape became a stumbling fiasco, with the previously mentioned road trip ending back at my childhood home, one-hundred percent broke. At one point, I took out a cash advance on my credit card to pay my monthly minimum on said card, and realized that I’d be stuck there for awhile. Stagnation and I don’t get along too well, and so this record from North Carolina’s Bowerbirds created the perfect escape.

I discovered the album during my time at Yale, after reading an astonished, glowing review from John Darnielle (of/aka The Mountain Goats) which noted that they were his, ‘favorite band in forever.’ This sort of endorsement is, of course, a golden opportunity. Darnielle is like a demi-god of indie music, and so clearly his opinions carry some clout. Sitting in my room, pushing the songs through earbuds, I felt almost as if I were physically glowing at the immense pleasure that I got from each passing song, like each track was a new set of breezes to soak up.

As a whole, the album is like a self-contained planet, where super-environmentalist lyrics aren’t corny and where dexterously plucked nylon guitar, melancholic huffing accordion or violin, and thumping percussion never feel old or cliche, as they might if played by less-capable hands. The trio seem to sink into each song gently, and tuck you under sheets of melody until you catch yourself just staring into the middle-distance, forgetting what you were doing. Lead vocalist Phil Moore weaves you into stories about dashed hopes for the natural world, while multi-instrumentalists Beth Tacular and Matt Damron provide a symphony of harmonies to emphasize each hook. Truthfully, it’s almost hypnotic in effect, the sort of thing that you could lay back on your bed on or make dinner to, fumbling a few measurements each time you catch yourself singing. In those moments, is as if you’re in some quiet cabin in the middle of the mountains, and you’re with some of your closest friends, and in the middle of listening to a song you all just stop talking and everything pauses. It’s full of those moments, where words just aren’t necessary.

In the rest of that summer I tried to share it with as many people as I could, as is my nature to do when I stumble upon something so pleasurable. I cleaned art supplies to this record, I wrote lesson plans to this record, I fell in love to this record, I transitioned through two part-time jobs in Connecticut and into a full-time one in Massachusetts, and this one just kept finding it’s way back into my head. It makes its way to number four because I still haven’t quite gotten to the point of putting it down. Not long ago, I had the distinct pleasure of seeing Bowerbirds open for Elvis Perkins in Dearland, and it just brought the whole craving back again. This band isn’t going away for some time, by my prediction, and as the indie-folk resurgence continues to grow, they’ll only find themselves closer and closer to the forefront, and that is truly exciting.

03. For Emma, Forever Ago by Bon Iver

Released February 19th, 2008 on Jagjaguwar (Originally self-released, July 2007)

Growing up in New England, you tend to end up misunderstanding the United States and the people inside of it. Growing up in Connecticut, which puts you in the awkward flux between New York and New England, you tend to miss out of the portion of human development where you develop a geographic and cultural identity. People don’t really talk about Connecticut with any sort of passion, it’s really just a’place you happen to live’, where more people talk more about where they’re going on vacation or where they’ll spend the weekend than where they happen to exist for the remainder of the year. There are nice parts, but everything seems to lack a necessary component for goodness — there’s beaches but they aren’t really on the ocean, and there are mountains, but compared to Vermont they’re just a bunch of big hills. Or, at least that’s how it felt to me.

In fact, my understanding of statehood cultural identity was limited to the following: New Yorkers love being jerks, Californians love being crunchy or rich, Southerners love cholesterol, and Texans love being, well, Texans, and that everything else had its stereotypes but everyone else was probably as bored as I was. Then, I fell in love with someone from Wisconsin, and my entire system of perception was shoved off of a cliff.

The people of Wisconsin are, and I say this without any reservation or compromise, the definition of niceness. Real, genuine, powerful niceness. The kind of thing where if you were to accidentally bump into someone’s car in traffic, they’d probably apologize for it, and invite you over for a hot meal. The first time I visited, I got more hugs from people I’d never met than at the last wedding I attended. With this kindness comes a general sense of real love, where people are proud, but by no means arrogant. Upon sharing a pitcher of beer with your rapidly multiplying group of new Wisconsin friends, you feel as though you’ve stumbled upon a big secret world where good things are always happening and good people are always appearing. There’s great farm-fresh produce and dairy, there’s gallons of clean-air, and for some reason, the cheap beer just tastes better. I miss it every time I leave.

Most of my time spent in Wisconsin has been in the town of Eau Claire, at least two hours from Minneapolis or Madison or any other large city, for that matter. One morning, sipping a cup of hot coffee at the breakfast table, Meredith put on an album by a local artist that I wasn’t even remotely familiar with. Truthfully, I didn’t pay nearly enough attention, but noted that it was good and dynamically interesting, even coming from a small clock-radio CD player. For some reason, I proceeded to forget about it, and continued to not pay enough attention to it throughout the rest of my stay in Eau Claire.

My next visit to Eau Claire was in the winter, which is by no means the most hospitable time in western Wisconsin (where the temperature is known to dip to -30° F in the coldest months). Needing something to do, Meredith and I decided to hop in the car and try to find things for me to photograph. At some point, she put on this album, ‘For Emma Forever Ago’, and within minutes the world began to feel like the inside of a movie. The snow around us, the wide expanses of field, the patches of trees, each mile brought a new degree of clarity, as if I were a part of the big secret. As the heat from the car covered us, and warmed my frozen fingers, the heartbeat bass of Lump Sum seemed to bounce along with our tires. Mer, suggesting a quick detour, took me out of town and into some nearby farmland to show me the remnants of an old ski-jump, perched up on a hill and hidden from the main road. When we arrived, I couldn’t bring myself to photograph it — there simply weren’t any perfect camera views where we were — but I was content with just looking at it, the echoing sounds of each new song coming from the open car door.

The mythology of For Emma is everywhere, so I need not recount the story again here, but know that the cabin and the isolation and the cold world of the album never made perfect sense for me until I was there, in the cold wind that spawned the album itself. Every metallic ping of guitar strings, every shouted word, every falsetto croon for lost love and isolation, it all just clicks for you when you see and experience that land and the people in it. It buries itself deep in your legs, and crawls into your gut and burrows a warm spot in your chest, and every song rings true with that aching simultaneous simplicity and depth.

Travelling to Europe, during college, taught me that there was another world outside of my own, somewhat strange and yet entirely fascinating. Travelling to the Midwest, and I mean this sincerely, taught me that there were other worlds inside of my own country. We’ve seen Bon Iver twice since I caught onto this album, and they flatten us every time, giving us small tastes of that landscape in richly-composed bursts. This album made me eager for the future of powerful songs, and I only hope that Bon Iver can keep up with our expectations.

02. Solo Piano by Gonzales

Released April 4th, 2005 on No Format!

There is something about a piano that, even alone, sticks itself in your ear and nests there. It is the instrumental force to which most Western instruments are compared, the endlessly developing tool of the greats, from Bill Evans to Bach, Elton John to Jerry Lee Lewis. It roars in frantic rock and roll, it does smooth jazz, it composed the classical canons, it even opens up sitcoms; its everywhere and for good reason. Something about the piano just defines music, and when you isolate it, focusing only on the dynamic and sonic possibilities of the instrument, it is easy to see why.

Gonzales (not to be confused with Jose) is mostly known as being a jack of trades — producer, comedian, and DJ — and surprised a lot of people in the mid 00s when he released Solo Piano, a vastly contemplative and masterfully composed record of piano by itself. There are sixteen tracks in total, most just around three minutes long, which all sound like they are coming from the attic of the one house on your street that exudes mystery. Each one has a distinct echo of something you know you’ve heard before, but likely can’t place. They are often classic in form, but not necessarily in content — they sound more likely a soundtrack to this century than of two or three ago. With headphones, you can hear each the near-silent click of each key being pressed, making the process immensely intimate and rewarding.

For me, Solo Piano transcended all five years after it was released. It brought much-needed peace to the cacophony of the Monday through Friday commuter bus, it brought a certain warmth to lonely winter naps, it made the construction of a Saturday breakfast into something monumental, it brought out new ideas in the artmaking process, it offered a constant soundtrack for most moments of my decade that nothing else could. The songs themselves never get tiring — they don’t require concentration, per se, but concentrating on them is a wonderful experience it its own right. I’ve regularly introduced this album to people, for whom it also has become a standby. It’s an album to write a novel to, with each delicately resonating key evoking the power of living. It brings in births, it sends out the dead, and it seems to match up with any moment in life and — like a sea salt — give it the extra kick it needs to remind you of your own living experience. It punctuates mountain car rides, it softens a walk on the shoreline, it becomes your soundtrack. I could gush metaphorically for hours, but I’d be saying the same thing.

This is a nearly perfect recording of the immensity possible within simplicity. Your experience with it writes the songs, Gonzales is just playing the piano.

01. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco

Released April 23rd, 2002 on Nonesuch

Most that there is to say about this record has already been said — both on this blog and across the entirety of the internet. Running a google search results in literally thousands of reviews just like this one, 99% of them immensely favorable, and 1% of them missing the point — or at least that’s my opinion. You don’t need the backstory (though if you aren’t familiar, here), and so all I have to offer is the story of how I first became acquainted with this record. Take it as you will.

This album arrived just at the right time in my life. I was around sixteen years old, amidst discovering what independent adulthood meant, and I was listening to a lot of really simple music (mostly youth-crew or throwback hardcore or late 90s screamo). My closest group of friends freaked out about this album for a few months before I finally got the picture and took the plunge.

Admittedly, I didn’t really get it at first. Now, you might wonder what I mean, and I’d refer back to the fact that the music in my cd booklet at the time was meant to be taken at face value. It was fun, sure, and it was exciting, but underneath all of that, it wasn’t really anything that took much time to write. In those first listens, as I tried my best to give it a chance, and it just felt slow, messy, and strange. There were catchy tunes, but not exactly songs to obsess over.

Cut to the summer of 2003, and I’m in the backseat of a packed car, driving through New Haven’s East Rock area. For a bit of context, put yourself in back in those shoes. We’re almost two years out of 9/11, our troop presence in Iraq is high, and everyone is still feeling angry, scared, and paranoid, of other countries and of each other. Anyway, it’s painfully dark out, and we’re on a particularly twisty section of road with no streetlights. It’s the sort of area where you forget that you’re in-between a dense suburb and a small city. From the backseat, I can see bits of trees illuminated by headlights and can hear the faint sounds of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. At some point, a somewhat eccentric friend of mine asks the driver if he could, “Turn the volume up, I love this song.”. The song playing? Ashes of American Flags. The track arrives around the 3:20 mark, and I look to my left to see my friend, his eyes closed, singing along with one of the greatest lyrical moments of the last decade:

“I would like to salute the ashes of American flags, and all of the falling leaves filling up shopping bags.”

My friend, who happened to also be a leading actor in our school’s drama club, sang these lyrics to himself as if they were a prayer. I remember actually kind of shivering at that point, where the song decays into the sea of noise that dips throughout the album’s entirety. In this moment, it went from being a record that I wasn’t so sure of to one of my favorite records of all time. As soon as I got home, that night, I laid on my twin-size bed and listened to the whole thing from start to finish, staring at the ceiling, and noticing as much as I could. The next day, I did it again, relishing and rolling in all of the little gifts that you find in a good second listen. I committed every song to memory, and I talked about it excitedly to everyone I could. Yeah, I was that guy too.

There’s something in Yankee Hotel Foxtrot that I had never heard in music before. Nothing in my previous experience had introduced me to an album where sound was so intricately layered and imaginative. The real beauty of the album, of course, is in the diverse array of sounds that approach you when you listen. Every song provides something new, from the spacey bounce of War on War to the haunting chords that swim through Poor Places. Each song is a small story in itself, which seem to fade in and out like AM radio. The line between folk music and electronics becomes blurred, and the production (which is richly ornamented and vastly complicated) hands you each song like an old friend handing you a handmade gift.

All things aside, the most important connection between me and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is that it really caused me to begin considering music as an art form, providing an experience akin to watching a heartfelt movie or reading a breaktaking novel. Music, at it’s purest and most honest, brings me closer to creative realization and meaningful connection than any painting ever could, and I began to take note of the importance of headphones in the process of appreciation. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot made me turn off my FM radio, knowing that 95% of Top 40 music could never speak to me in the same way. Of course, there’s a value in music produced solely for entertainment as well — I can appreciate a Lil Wayne club hit as much as the next guy — but if given a choice between the two, I’m going to take the route that keeps giving.

Furthermore, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot does an incredible job of considering the modern American experience, which puts aside the concept of red, white, and blue and instead has us consider the daily, trivial, American life. The days in and out, the high and low moments, and the dual isolation of being and the community of being right here. The noise between and within individual songs speaks far more than it seems to on the surface, indicating the frustration of monotony and the expansiveness of focused chaos. The album delivers wonderment at the nature of sound and fascination in the nature of words. As singer Jeff Tweedy eeks out each additional word on ‘Radio Cure’, you feel the truth in his words, the frustration with discontentment. It mirrors that very American feeling of things always needing to improve, and then reminds you that imperfection is somehow the greatest perfection there is.

There is a strong sense that this will be one of my favorite albums for many years to come, and probably one that I’ll share with my own kids someday. Hopefully they’ll feel it too.

Here’s to another decade of being.

I am worried that I am getting dumber.

After leaving college, you’re faced with two choices: that of becoming a respectable citizen of planet Earth who works a full-time job, putting to use your college degree, living on your own, and doing other things that happen on CBS comedies (marriage, babies, buying a house where the couch conveniently faces the audience). Or you could be someone who wanders around, doing a variety of things that engages their interest but doesn’t put them in a place to buy said couch in said house. I chose the former and now, two years after graduating with a degree in something I once found exhilirating, I’m wondering if I am getting dumber. I wonder if I made the right choice in becoming a respectable adult.

Here’s my thought process: I am no longer held accountable for what I do or do not know. I could never read the paper and blissfully live my life without a care in the world. It’s true! You can do that. When you think about it, you only need to know your surroundings and barely that. You have to be good at your job– a hard worker, cheerful and ready. You have to be friendly and good to get along with so you have company. That’s it. I know what you’re thinking: Are you crazy? You need to know what’s going on in the world! What about health care reform? What about the price of tea in China?! Sure, yes, you can say that you should think about those things. But if you were to stop paying attention, the world would keep spinning and these things would happen for better or worse. If you didn’t care too much, you would just shrug, pay for health care, and go on with life (or die, due to lack of health care).

And people do that. They get stuck in the mire of work, relationships, and sleep and it turns into a world in which they wear blinders.

I am worried that I am in this world. In college, I was required to read a lot. It was sort of expected since I was an English major, but beyond that I read more and kept up on what was happening and had arguments in bars about everything–metaphors, women’s rights, the importance of poetry, all the usual crap that college undergrads shout at each other about and feel pretty smug. But these days, I’m losing it. What am I talking about now? Music and pop culture and what I made for dinner. Who gives a fuck?

Perhaps I’m just self conscious about what I can provide to a conversation, but I know it’s there; the fact that I have nothing good to discuss. I should be talking about healthcare and the war (that’s still going on) and human rights and campaign promises. But I have nothing to bring to the table. Without college holding me accountable for what I know, I’m damn lazy. I’m putting all my energy into an office job and blogs and not worrying about the world around me. I know I need to invest myself into things like jobs (to be pragmatic and not childish) and blogs (to share the shit I think about when I’ve had a few to drink) but what do I do with 93% of my time? I bake things and I listen to music and I look at facebook.

Trust me, I am just as disappointed as you are.

So where have I gone wrong? I blame me, mostly, for not holding myself accountable for not keeping up with the world. Just because I work in an office that isn’t really affected by the climate talks in Copenhagen, doesn’t mean I should just forget about them. I need to keep myself challenged and talk about these things, rather than shrugging it off. I need to stop being a selfish ass and remember that there’s a whole world out there. When did it become socially acceptable to be an ass? We don’t live in New Jersey. Come on. (It will, however, always be okay to make fun of New Jersey)

The point of this is… Well, I’m not entirely sure. I’m okay with being up-to-date on pop culture, it really helps with pub trivia, but I need to be well rounded. I’m worried and thought you all should know. “You all” being the other three writers and their girlfriends who probably lie about reading this blog. Or maybe they don’t; I would lie about reading it, though. And then ask said writers to make me some kind of delicious soup because they’re so good at writing, they must make great soup, too.

Obviously, my jokes are suffering as well.

10. Plans by Death Cab for Cutie

Released August 2005 on Atlantic

I like Death Cab for Cutie. There. I said it. I’m emo-y and wear black eyeliner and hate my suburban background (semi-true). I’m (maybe) striking a balance between indie music and once-upon-a-time indie music. This album is associated with my lengthy career as a Parking Enforcement Officer in college. I listened to this album while giving people parking tickets. It was an interesting to sort of hear people yelling at me and listen to “Summer Skin.” It made me feel better about getting called names, but I didn’t feel guilty about giving the ticket. I feel the same about this album.

9. Everything All the Time by Band of Horses

Released March 21, 2006 on Sub Pop

The last house I lived in in Eau Claire was dubbed “The Pirate Ship” and every time we did the dishes, this album was invariably put on. When I listen to this now, I feel like I can smell a little bit of the beer from last night, Johnny smoking out on the lounge, and a feeling of anticipation of what was to come. We were all in transition out of college: graduating, moving, getting real jobs, and wishing that this time—that of college and cheap rent and friends over all the time—would last a whole lot longer.

8. Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool by Lupe Fiasco

Released December 18, 2007 on Atlantic

When The Cool came out, I was beginning to listen to a lot of acoustic guitars and banjo-y music and sometimes I wondered what happened to the person who was really into hip-hip not too long ago. And then I got my paws on this album, put it in my car, and fell back into step (actually, it was more of a limp).  So it goes.

7. Home by The Dixie Chicks

Released August 2002 on Columbia

I’m from the Midwest, so for me to have a country album on here is not exactly surprising, especially since it’s the band that was so publicly shamed for speaking out against one GW Bush. This album (and their album before it, Fly) made me fall for banjos and that twangy, old style of country that is rarely heard on the radio nowadays. It does have that sound—really and truly. Maybe you won’t listen to this album because it’s a modern day country album, but they know what they’re doing. You might call this a soft spot in my music collection, but I’m okay with it.

6.Futuresex/Lovesounds by Justin Timberlake

Released September 12, 2006 on Jive

Don’t deny JT’s power. It’s insanely catchy and incredibly dance-able. People freak out when they hear tracks from this album. It came out in 2006 and yet it still sounds fresh. Granted, three years ago is not long at all, but when it comes to pop– three years might as well be a decade. This album is the embodiment of everything fun to me– I hear it and all I want to do is gather all my friends for a dance party. How did this influence me? How could it not influence me?

5.Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco

Released April 23, 2002 on Nonesuch

Here is a secret that will make the rest of this list make sense: I was never “into” music until very recently. I like bands and had a pretty eclectic taste and didn’t enjoy Britney Spears (all the time…) but I had never heard this album until September of 2008. Yes, yes, that is correct. When I heard this album, sat down and really listened, I got into music. I noticed shifts and lyrics and what artists were doing differently and what made songs unique and what made songs all sound the same. And thus my transition into one of those people.

4. Girls and Boys by Ingrid Michaelson

Released May 2006 on Cabin 24

Some people think I’m all pessimism and grumpy and don’t like children. The last part of that statement is really the only true part. Maybe I am grumpy, but deep down inside, I am a total “girl” who is soft and squishy inside (emotionally, all the organ stuff is obviously squishy). The majority of my male friends seem to not be able to grasp this concept and are greatly surprised when I try to explain that I am, indeed, female despite my penchant for dick jokes.  They need to look at the albums I have listened to a thousand times (maybe an exaggeration) and they will see the truth. Like Boys and Girls. This album is definitely an album that makes me long for my group of female friends from college. I remember driving into Northern Wisconsin to snowshoe across a lake and singing this and talking about what we wanted to be when we grew up. Making dinner and drinking on Thursday nights. Music and mom-dancing. These are the things you do with good friends in negative weather in the middle of nowhere.

3. Deyarmond Edison by Deyarmond Edison

Self released 2004

This is the album that made me fall in love with Eau Claire. I hated the town when I first got there, which, if you know me know is hard to believe. I didn’t understand it and felt out of place and was just a homesick, miserable freshman. But I settled in (unknowingly) after time and stopped looking into transferring schools and stayed. In my sophomore year I stayed in Eau Claire for winter break and heard this album for the first time. During that break, I spent time in the town outside of college, staying with people off campus. I went to bars (slightly illegally) and found good restaurants and trekked around the river paths and settled in for the winter. I fell into my own routines and made up a life for myself without worrying about times I needed to be home or would it disturb my roommate. This was me becoming an adult and embracing the place and people that surrounded me.

2. God Loves Ugly by Atmosphere

Released June 11, 2002 on Rhymesayers

This album. This album. I’ve heard people call this “emo rap” and I won’t really fight that and I’ve heard people make fun of Atmosphere, but I don’t really care. I’m from Minnesota so, in a way, I’m required to love the hometown rap sound (yikes, Allanna. Yikes…) but this album was the end of my high school relationship and the anger and hurt I felt in that and the homesickness and loneliness when I began college. Music gives you those outlets and looking back on those events I can shake my head and smile at my youth, but at the time those moments were the worst and there could be nothing more. Fortunately, I’ve done some growing up since then. God Loves Ugly was my first encounter with hip-hop that I could relate to– it was a heavy beat and lyrics that I could understand far better than gangster rap and dealing drugs. I grew up in the suburbs– I couldn’t try and pretend I was anything but a middle class teenager with a pretty good life. But I could feel all shitty about a broken relationship and love for my home state and blast this through my first car’s speakers while driving home from work. I don’t listen to this album much anymore and when I do, it’s not for very long. It doesn’t have the same draw to me, but I remember a long time (longer than many other albums) where this album was always on hand and played on repeat.

1. For Emma, Forever Ago by Bon Iver

Self -released in 2007, re-released February 19, 2008 on Jagjaguwar

I know what you’re going to say. This is so many hipsters’ favorite album of the year/decade/century/universetimeandspace and I do wear scarves and cardigans so I’m in that category. But I first bought this album from Racy d’Lene’s coffee shop in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, when it was pressed and released in a brown and black cardboard sleeve and no one knew what to think of it. This was sometime in the fall of 2007, when life was starting to change pretty dramatically for me. I remember watching Justin Vernon at the House of Rock in Eau Claire, opening for the band Halloween, Alaska sometime before this album came out. I remember being pretty intoxicated, but also not liking any of it and wishing that Deyarmond Edison would get back together. But then I heard a few songs from the album played around at the Joynt and at Racy’s. So I bought the album for (maybe) ten dollars from Mike Contezac and a coffee. I was pretty skeptical. Really skeptical. But I kept listening and when you listen to it in the middle of a Wisconsin winter, you can hear what that winter feels like– familiar and lonely and harsh and the end of the world and the beginning of it, too. When I moved to Boston, it meant even more to me. I was (and still am at times) incredibly homesick for that life in Eau Claire. I know that most of that is really the people who surround you, but there is still a feeling to Eau Claire that can’t be replicated. I’m going to fumble in my description of how Wisconsin can feel in the winter, because it can be a sorrow-filled, bitter time. All that talk about the country being a slower pace is true—there’s time to spare out there. It can seem like eons, but it can also be magical. You can take a day at the Joynt seeing all the people you love, having a variety of conversation, and you never feel at a loss for that time. Suddenly, all the time in the world is enough or maybe it gets to be too much, but you have to leave. You have to move on, otherwise, that perfect stillness that comes with the winter becomes something that weighs you down. I still look forward to visiting, though.

10. Dear Science by TV on the Radio

Released September 22, 2008 on Interscope

This album holds the dubious position of being most likely to not really have earned its spot on the list. Its inclusion is me accounting for some time adjustment as all of the other albums on this list are from 2005 or earlier. This spot could easily be owned by The Arcade Fire’s Funeral but I currently feel like TV on the Radio might have more staying power.

Dear Science stands out amongst TVOTR’s discography as their most consistent effort, relying less on musical gimmicks and more on solid songwriting still filtered through their off-kilter sensibility. Every time I listen to it I want to either be in their band or form one like them. I saw them live at Boston’s newly opened House of Blues and my girlfriend and her brother had to stop me from climbing on stage during the encore. Alright, that’s not true, but only because I was afraid that the jumper-clad girls from the opening band (Dirty Projectors) would trample me with their hipster galloping.

9. A Grand Don’t Come for Free by The Streets

Released May 18, 2004 on Vice

The top ten album that most closely adheres to the definition of a “concept” album, A Grand Don’t Come for Free is the best story-driven colloquial English rap of the decade (I’m not very well-versed in the world of rap, so I had to be really specific in case I’m missing something). Mike Skinner, aka The Streets, uses deceptively simple beats and surprisingly beautiful hooks (along with a lot of words that only rhyme in a Cockney accent) to tell the story of getting money, losing money, getting girls, and losing girls. In the end, it’s true: **SPOILER ALERT** a grand don’t come for free.

8. ( ) by Sigur Ros

Released October 28, 2002 on Fat Cat Records

“You xylophone the fight. You saw the light. The light. You suffer. Oh. You saw the light.”

This line of nonsense is what you will hear repeated throughout The Brackets Album, as it is known to the members of Sigur Rós. A concept album quite different from #9, this one involves neither a story nor even recognizable lyrics. The album is sung entirely in Vonlenska (aka Hopelandic), a made-up language composed mostly of vowel movements (the ridiculous English version I wrote above is not at all what Jónsi sings). Its untitled tracks are heavy on synthesizers and long chord progressions, flowing more like movements in symphonic music than the verses and choruses of rock.

During spring break of my Junior year in college, my friend Steve had the connect and got us tickets to see Sigur Rós live at Radio City Music Hall. At one point in the middle of a song, the entire band just paused. There was silence. Jónsi stood there with his violin bow poised over his guitar and looked up at the audience. Nobody made a sound. It’s difficult to describe how magical it felt to be sitting in absolute silence with thousands of other people in this huge hall. I could hear the rhythms of my own body. Then, “WOOOOO!” Some drunk guy in the back ruined the moment and the band ripped back into the song, Jonsi’s guitar almost unbearably loud.

When I saw them 2 years later at the Boston Opera House, the same thing happened again, but this time nobody made a sound and the beautiful moment of silence went on for over a minute. The audience must have known better.

7. Heartbreaker by Ryan Adams

Released September 5, 2000 on Bloodshot Records

Arguably another concept album, but unlike the previous two, rather than being based on a plot or a musical idea, this one is written on a theme, perhaps the most prevalent theme in art: heartbreak. Written after his breakup with a long-time girlfriend, Adams smeared his injured heart all over this long, rambling set of the best alt-country songs ever written. While Beck’s Sea Change, another heartbreak favorite, might be a more cohesive album, Heartbreaker delights its listener song after song with brilliantly rendered country tropes, sad ditties, and stories of weary travelers who know how to turn a phrase.

More than any other, this album made me want to be an alt-country singer. And for a very short time I became a busker in the T stations of Boston.

Years later, after breaking up with a girl I played these songs on guitar in my room. Later that night, my roommate asked if I had been playing them out of heartbreak over my ended relationship. She didn’t know that I was playing them for her.

6. Broken Social Scene by Broken Social Scene

Released October 4, 2005 on Arts & Crafts

When this album was released I thought it was the epitome of cool (and I still do, a 2005 sort of cool). Listening to this album makes me feel like I am at a very exclusive yet friendly party in Canada. This self-titled effort was in close competition with Kevin Drew’s Spirit If… for the slot on this list that would inevitably go to a Broken Social Scene album, but this one wins the day with its persistent tempo that, track after track, makes you swivel your hips Canadian-style until it reaches a cathartic, sloppy climax awash in trumpets and bestiality. I still want to know, “Why are you always fucking goats?”

5. Lifted; or, The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground by Bright Eyes

Released August 13, 2002 on Saddle Creek

Before Conor Oberst was Conor Oberst, he was Bright Eyes (with Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott). After spending about 2 years only knowing him as the mopey guy who warbled “I’m gonna get me some whiskey and get real fucking drunk” out of my roommate Mike’s room, I decided to take a chance on him.

I had heard many things about how I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning was one of the best albums of the year. I bought it, listened to it, loved it, and for an entire year after that I listened to nothing but Bright Eyes. (Coincidentally, that year was completely lacking in romance for me. If I had to attach a cause and effect relationship to this phenomenon, it would probably be, “I listen to Bright Eyes, therefore girls don’t like me,” rather than the other way around.) I went through the entire Bright Eyes discography in reverse chronological order. Each successive album, although I was receding further and further into his back catalogue, seemed to fit my mood at the time ever more closely.

I could easily have chosen another Bright Eyes album to make the list but Lifted has the best lyrics and is just the right amount of angry. Conor Oberst is only a year or two older than me and I think if I had listened to this album when it was released in 2002, it would only have hit me harder.

4. Kid A by Radiohead

Released October 2, 2000 on Parlophone

While the Radiohead album that appears later on this list merely assured me that they still had it, this one completely blew my mind. I was in my freshman year of college and I went to Bullmoose Records with my roommate James to buy it on the day it was released. I remember first seriously listening to it on a dark, quiet van ride to a track meet. I pressed play and everything felt in its right place.

Initial complaints about the album had been that it lacked a human aspect, but I dismissed those gripes out of hand as being from people who wanted a remake of OK Computer. I loved that album, but I did not need a remake. I needed a favorite modern band and in order for Radiohead to be them, I needed some more cement.

Turns out, Kid A was not just another brick in the wall, though. It was a wall unto itself: a conceptual album in which the band deliberately tried to eliminate all familiarities with rock music.

While I consider Radiohead’s The Bends to be the best guitar-based alt-rock album ever, I likewise think that Kid A may be the most successful incorporation of electronic elements into a mainstream album, another argument in Radiohead’s complicated thesis about the interaction between humans and machines.

3. Illinois by Sufjan Stevens

Released July 5, 2005 on Asthmatic Kitty

This album contains the best modern song written in 5/4 time, the best serial killer sympathizer song, the best backing band name pun, and the best song about a Polish Revolutionary War hero that isn’t actually about him at all. It is with these thoughts in mind that I write the following letter:

Dear Sufjan,

Please do not let the 50 states project be a joke. Even if you don’t ever finish it, I won’t mind, I won’t mind. It’s the best thing you’ve done, in my mind, in my mind.

Sincerely,
Jordan Harrison

Illinois never fails to disarm me, removing bits of the emotional armor I put up against the world. “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is Out to Get Us!” gets me every time.

2. Amnesiac by Radiohead

Released June 4, 2001 on Parlophone

When this album was released in 2001 it caught me completely off-guard. Radiohead had just released Kid A less than a year before so I was not prepared for a new album for another 3 years or so. I remember hearing one night that a new Radiohead video would be premiering on MTV. No videos had been released for Kid A and considering that I had always been a fan of Radiohead’s videos, I was rabid for a new one. I dashed downstairs in the dorm to the common room and turned it on just in time to see the video for “Pyramid Song.” I found it unfathomably sad and beautiful. Upon listening to the rest of the album, I felt that Radiohead had recorded the human response to Kid A’s machine.

1. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco

Released April 23, 2002 on Nonesuch Records

Somewhat removed from the emotions of Jeff Tweedy’s heart (Summerteeth) and the emotions of his head (A Ghost is Born), Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is a masterpiece of songwriting saved from Wilco’s wall-of-sound tendencies by (I assume) producer Jim O’Rourke. Wilco albums before and after YHF suffer from a glut of instrumentation, yet this one operates like a palimpsest: some layers are scrubbed clean of all but the bones while other parts explode with rich strings, strange percussion, and stratospheric distortion. Songs are given space and silence, described as “holes” by Tweedy himself. Surrounding and supporting those holes is musical magic provided by the late Jay Bennett in his most successful sound experimentation; John Stirratt’s inventive bass lines, string arrangements, and harmonies; Leroy Bach doing a million awesome things that will never be revealed; and Glenn Kotche’s lyrical and indescribably wonderful drumming. A new level of absurd stream-of-consciousness combined with Tweedy’s trademark word-play make the lyrics on this album a treat to decipher.

In addition to the musical merits of this album, the story behind its release, as documented in the film i am trying to break your heart and elsewhere, is one of the greatest yarns in rock and roll history: Big bully label drops fan favorite band but luckily gives them the rights to their album for free, band happily (sort of) goes free agent and posts album on the internets, then band sells album back to big bully label’s artist friendly subsidiary label. It’s like an indie version of O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi!”

I remember playing this album on my radio show in college shortly before its release. My show was called “New Noise” after the Refused song and I only played newly released music. I had a secret policy that I would play the first song of any new album and if it was good enough I would play the rest of the album throughout subsequent shows. I figured if a band couldn’t make the first song of their album interesting, they weren’t worth pursuing further (this policy was of course proven wrong a million times). The problem when it came time to play Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which had already been hyped for nearly a year, was that the first track was 7:00 long, over one tenth of the length of my show. I was not about to waste that much time on an untried song, so I played track two first, which rang in at a reasonable 3:30.

While I liked “Kamera,” it definitely did not live up to the hype surrounding the album, at least not as a standalone song. I decided to give the first track a try the next week and I was so glad I did because it was everything wonderful I had heard about the album condensed into a single song. When the buzzer-like feedback finished screeching at the end of the song, I gushed on the air, “Now I understand.”

I bought the album the next day. On the first track, Tweedy told me he was trying to break my heart and by the end of the album if “Poor Places” didn’t do the deed, “Reservations” certainly did.

The Next Ten; or, Honorable Mentions:

11. The Arcade Fire – Funeral
12. Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes
13. Broken Social Scene presents Kevin Drew – Spirit If…
14. The Strokes – Is This It
15. Bright Eyes – I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning
16. Feist – Let It Die
17. Interpol – Turn on the Bright Lights
18. Sigur Rós – Takk…
19. Sigur Rós – Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust
20. My Morning Jacket – Z

Maybe this bizarre desire to put myself in front of people I don’t know and perform stems from something in my childhood. Like when I used to dress up in costumes consisting of green tights (with tighty whiteys over them, of course), flippers, snorkel and mask, and a belt with a rubber knife in it and go downstairs when my parents had parties and entertained the crowd.

I don’t know who can be credited or blamed for suggesting that I do it. Maybe I even came up with the idea myself. All I know is that within a month of living in Boston, I was considering being a subway performer. I heard guys doodling away on their clarinets in the T stations and I had seen their hats overflowing with cash. I figured I could do it. I play guitar…and I make noises akin to singing…why not try it?

In order to play in a subway, I found out, one must obtain a subway performance permit. This of course requires a performer to jump through a couple hoops made of red tape, travel to the farthest reaches of Boston in person, hand the MBTA your application, your photo, and a piece of mail proving you’re not homeless, and then (of course) give them a money order for $25. The distance and bureaucratic BS might have dissuaded some, but I was determined. So I went, and I filled out many forms. They promptly mailed me a piece of plastic that I attach to myself while playing.

So after getting my permit and chickening out for a week, I finally decided it was time to “sack up” or “grow a pair” (as my roommates put it) and try to earn my $25 back. On Monday, Nov 8, 2004 I set my sites on Government Center at 5pm rush hour, when business men and women were leaving work. They needed someone to serenade them. I arrived with my guitar in tow, dressed in my best brown outfit (cause it matches the guitar) and after wandering around for a while, building up courage, I set up shop behind the Dunkin Donuts kiosk in the middle of the station. In front of me were about 25 people waiting for the green line outbound, just wanting to go home.

I opened the guitar case and removed my weapon of mass distraction, making sure to leave my case open for spare $5 bills that might fall into it. I stood there for a minute, pretending to tune up, while I was actually crapping my pants. After a couple minutes of internal pep-talks I figured, “Now’s as good a time as any.” I capoed the 3rd fret, took a breath, and ripped into “Come Pick Me Up” by Ryan Adams, beginning what was to be a full-fledged assault on the unsuspecting mass’s ears.

As soon as I started singing everyone turned around and looked at me with faces of bewilderment and intrigue. Then they turned back to the tracks and I imagined that they were listening, eyes closed, humming to themselves in quiet rapture. In spite of shaky hands and wavering voice, I felt good. I expected to have 10 bucks by the time this song was over. After the second verse the B train to Boston College arrived, screeching to a halt in front of me. I was singing as loud as possible, trying to compete with the sound of several tons of steel trying to stop with un-oiled brakes. The people reluctantly boarded the train, hoping I would be back to play for them again another day. “I wish I could,” I sang. The train left and everyone was gone, and I looked down into my open guitar case and saw only black felt. Where was the green! The silver! The bronze? Nothing. Not even a Canadian coin. I stopped right in the middle of that damn song and picked up my case.

“Where do the subway performers play in here?” I asked an MBTA employee.
“Right where you were standing,” he replied. He must have been enjoying the performance.
“Tough crowd over there,” I said.
“Yeah, well, they’re used to people over there,” he replied, as though I were playing in an old folks home where they might get cranky if I played somewhere different than usual.

So I returned to my spot, opened my case again, and decided I would not give up until I could at least pay my fare back home ($0.90). So how was I going to make more money? Maybe starting off with a song that has multiple F words, lines like “screw all my friends, they’re all full of shit,” and a very accusatory tone was not the best idea. So next I decided to play something sweeter (like Wilco’s “Say You Miss Me”) and as I did my audience began to replenish itself. Some might say they came because that’s where they had to go to wait for the train, but I knew they came because they heard my refreshing “ooh-hoo-hoo’s” and the repeated refrain “Baby say I miss you…just say you miss me too.” Still, in spite of there being at least 75 people in front of me with beautiful peacoats and apparently plenty of money to throw around, not a single cent had fallen into my gaping case.

Perhaps “Say You Miss Me” was too saccharine for this crowd of calcified hearts. So next I decided to let them know a little bit about myself through a performance of Loudon Wainwright III’s “One Man Guy,” which if taken the wrong way could raise some questions about which team I’m playing for. In fact, it did prompt one balding man to ask me, “What’s that mean, you’re a one man guy?” as he jogged towards the train without waiting for an answer. “It means what it says,” I shouted after him. I was becoming a cryptic and gritty, road-hardened performer, yet still I was not making any money.

After a couple more alt-country clunkers I hit upon the song that would not only earn me my first dollar, but would eventually become my most lucrative number: Ryan Adams’ “My Winding Wheel.” (At this point you might be thinking that I’m just some hack who doesn’t have any originals and only plays covers. And yes, that would be true.) Of course, the biggest money maker had to be the song that requires an open G tuning where I have to spend 2 minutes before and after the song messing around with the tuning pegs, losing all momentum. But the very first time I played it, in the middle of the song, in mid-strum, a shy man held out a dollar bill, extending his arm as far away from his body as possible, as if I was the plague or something worse. He held the bill there until I was ready to take it. I halted immediately. Snatch! “Thanks.” I dropped the bill into my case and when it hit the bottom it made this sound: CHA-CHING…and I was off.

From there the dough started rolling in. It was only then that I realized I should have put some money in the case to start off with because people are more likely to give you money if that’s what they think they’re supposed to do. One might assume that if a passerby saw a lot of money in a performer’s hat that he would think “this guy has enough dough already, I don’t need to contribute.” In fact, this passerby thinks the converse: “I don’t want to be left out, I better give this guy a dollar…no wait, I’ll give him two just to outdo the rest.”

And let me tell you, there were a lot of men who agreed that “Damn Sam, do they love a woman that rains” and a whole lot of women (and a dude or two) who wanted to “be my winding wheel.” My guitar case was becoming an ocean of curling green waves and white foam resembling dead presidents, sprinkled with little silver beacons and rusty buoys. One man who was inexplicably wearing headphones told me in a thick Eastern European accent that I was “thee best singer een Boston.” Yes, things were going well, and I was just hitting my stride as rush hour was reaching its zenith. I was so excited, I didn’t see him coming until it was too late.

In the middle of “Oh My Sweet Carolina” I glanced to my left and he was already upon me. I’m surprised I didn’t smell him approaching. This poor guy was a full-fledged hobo in the most classic sense of the word: greasy fingers, matted beard, sagging eyelids, and so much bourbon on his breath that I think his inebriation had become comparable to the rain cycle and he was perpetually feeding his drunkenness on his own fumes. I became very self-conscious that I was singing a song about a vagabond. The feeling wouldn’t last long though because he came right up and started talking to me in the middle of the song.

He could barely keep his eyes open and he was staggering around like he was on a jerky bus, except he was on solid ground. After some small talk which I didn’t really understand (his voice was a low rumble, like someone gargling gravel), he told me about the kind of music that he liked.

“I go way back for music…born in the 50s….brought up in the 70s….I won’t say his name cause he just died, rest his soul…(the ellipses represent incomprehensible mumbling)…yeah, I go back there for music…I may be a drunk but I know what I’m talking about.”

He then began a rendition of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” that can only be described as….well, I surprised myself with my ability to hold in laughter. His voice was grittier than Louis Armstrong’s and lower than Johnny Cash’s and he pretty much only had two notes, the higher of which he hit on the chorus of Country Roads…”take me home, to the place, I be-loooong.” As he was singing “belong” he went into his upper register, which was actually only a high pitched wheezing sound. No tone, only air. He said, “I just need to warm it up…I’m a professional singer you know.”

Not only was this man a drunk, he was a liar as well.

We had about ten more minutes of conversation in which he told me about his “boys” that he plays with over at the Park Street Station and about how he toured all over the country playing with the biggest names. I told him he should go get his band from Park St and bring them over for a jam, but he didn’t fall for my trick. He was more suspicious of me after that. Then we sang Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” together and he was getting pretty antsy in his pantsies while I was working out the chords. He tried to show me how to do it, but I didn’t really want him to touch the guitar, so I said, “no, I’ll hold onto it.”
“I’m not gonna take it.”
“I know,” I said.
Then he pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket and asked me if I wanted it. I said, “No, you hold onto that.”

We sang the song, which was much more suited for his vocal range, and I said, “See, you just needed a warm-up.”
“I need a warm-up?” he said with a cocked eyebrow.
“No, I mean, you just had one.” I was getting scared. After some more staggering and mumbling he finally left.

Now it was time to get back on track and make some more money. I played a couple songs with minimal results and all of a sudden my friend was back….and he was yelling at me, “I was all the way down there, couldn’t hear a damn thing, you need to be louder….give it to ‘em!” So I brought out “Come Pick Me Up” again and yelled the lyrics as loud as I could. “Louder….More,” he shouted as he danced around in front of me like he was conducting a huge orchestra. He turned around and entreated the listeners to pay me, “Give this kid a dime,” he shouted, “he’s working hard!” To set a good example he threw some of his own change into my case. When I got to the part with the bad words I made sure to sing them real loud. Boy did that get him going. I don’t know if it made him mad or if he thought it was inappropriate or what, but he was scampering around and yelling even louder. The audience was laughing, I was laughing, I don’t know what was going on. When the song finished he gave me a standing ovation. Nobody else clapped. I appreciated his enthusiasm.

Next he wanted me to play some Elvis. He asked for a specific song but I couldn’t understand what he said so I started playing “Hound Dog.”
“No, …ailhouse rock,” he said with a hiccup.
“Oh, ok.” As I hit the first “duh-dum” two cops walked up.
“Alright buddy, go upstairs and get some air. Come on.”

My friend didn’t have to be told twice. He left quickly and quietly as if this sort of thing happened all the time.

I played a little while longer (uneventfully) until I started to get hungry. I finished a song as a B train was approaching, threw my guitar in the case on top of my loot, and headed for home. When I got there I took out the guitar and counted my earnings. Eight dollars and fifty-three cents.

No, I must have made a mistake. I demanded a recount.

$8.53. What! What? There had to have been more. Alas….there wasn’t. I had worked for two hours at an approximate rate of $4.27 / hour.

Now, I don’t want to sound too harsh on the bum. I had fun talking to him, but he did interrupt my playing at the busiest time of the night. Sure, he gave me a couple nickels and a good story to tell, but he also gave me the creeps. Just to give an idea of how much he interfered with business: I returned to Gov Center two weeks later and in 2 hours I made $26.98, without his help. But maybe the difference in earnings was because I performed on a Friday instead of a Monday, or I played better and I had more songs, or maybe it was because in the 20 minutes that I talked to that guy, he taught me everything he knew about the business.

Kyle’s suggestion: “We don’t need to buy one. We snare one.”

Why smell like person when you can smell like an axe?

Fortunately, the consumer reach of Axe products has moved beyond smelly spray cancers and into the territory of smelly hair products. Even more fortunately my local dapper gentleman’s shoppe, the White Hen Pantry, was handing out free samples. After a co-worker gave them to me as a ‘gift’, I planned to use them for the forces of evil, and then I realized: I occassionally write for an Internet Blog®.

Axe "Whatever" Hair Garbage

(Yes, you heard right, it’s actually called “Whatever”. The chosen word of a generation of sloppy, vloggy, ne’er-do-wells. That just-washed, soft hair look? Psshh, whatever, Gramps.)

To be frank, my hair has been getting a little unruly, and so maybe there was a part of me that figured that this ‘messy’ look solution would offer some hope to my do-nothing-mop. Maybe I’d be stunned and shocked at just how wrong I was in my initial sarcastic, holier-than-you judgement. You probably see where this is going.

Making Great Decisions

Results? This stuff looks like dry gum. Consequently, it feels like dry gum too, which is not something you should ever then put in the stringy, fragile material connected to your scalp. It feels like rubbing glue on your head, and it smells like the backseat of a car without wheels. And it does this to your hair:

Ready For Prom!

To quote my girlfriend, Meredith, “You smell like an armpit.” Mission accomplished.

]]> http://plaidforever.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/the-best-damn-hair-goop-for-the-worst-12-year-olds-of-2009/feed/ 3 Kyle Scandanavian Forest Axe WHATEVER hair Photo 381