More listing

Starting this at 1:30 (I woke up at 1, I haven't done that in a really long time) and it will probably be all day or more before I finally get it published, because I'm just so easily distracted.

First of all, I'm taking it back and I am actually going to make a Favorite 10 of the Decade list. No explanations, because this list is really so obvious it's almost embarrassing. But I went through allmusic's best of each year lists and realized there were some things I really liked that were worth noting. I didn't include reissues though, and I limited myself to one album per artist (thus meaning no Furnace Room Lullaby or Milk-Eyed Mender on here, though they easily could have been). So I guess it kind of ends up being a 10 favorite artists of the decade as much as albums. First of all, honorable mentions to M. Ward's Transistor Radio, Brian Wilson's SMiLE, A.C. Newman's The Small Wonder (really wanted to put that on there but I had New Pornos and felt like I was double dipping) and Calexico's Scraping.

So here's what I decided was my decade top 10.
(10) Jazzanova - Of All The Things
(9) Cat Power - The Greatest
(8) The New Pornographers - Electric Version (hard one to choose from their first three)
(7) Robert Belfour - What's Wrong With You
(6) Bob Dylan - Love And Theft
(5) Erykah Badu - New Amerykah Pt. 1: 4th World War
(4) ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - Source Tags & Codes
(3) Arcade Fire - Funeral
(2) Neko Case - Blacklisted
(1) Joanna Newsom - Ys

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My top 5 bands that get a lot of attention I don't think they should:
(5) Iron & Wine (even when I was way into nothing but new folk music, I hated this guy. King of the weakly whisperers.)
(4) The Walkmen
(3) Kings of Leon
(2) The Mountain Goats
(1) The National
and I would just like to shout out here to the Black Keys, Modest Mouse, Deerhoof, and Malkmus/Silver Jews/reunited Pavement. And I would really really love to put The Decemberists on here, but it's a little disingenuous considering how much I used to like them. It makes me want to cut myself.

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Top 20 Albums That Had A Major Effect On Me This Decade (not necessarily from this decade). I can't really try to order these. They mattered to me for such different reasons, it would be kind of impossible to compare them.

Television - Marquee Moon: Hard to overstate what a big deal discovering this album was for me. Heard about it on that VH1 Top 100 Albums show, the one line I could make out from the feature was stuck in my head for days before I downloaded it and fell in love. In a weird way, it broke the stranglehold that guitar-based classic rock had on my listening habits, by being a guitar-based rock album. The songs were just so different from anything else I'd been listening to, the guitar was new to me, although the working relationship of Lloyd and Verlaine wasn't all that different from a lot of classic rock bands I'd listened to, what they made of it was.

The Flaming Lips - Transmissions From The Satellite Heart: Also hard to overstate. Another monster guitar album for me. I spent a lot of time trying to figure how Ronald made the sounds on this album and loved the fact that the band came up with songs to support them. This first, then with help from Clouds Taste Metallic, forced me to fall head over heels in love with this band.

Neutral Milk Hotel - In The Aeroplane Over The Sea: The language, the melodies, Mangum's unhinged jaw, instrumentation that ran the gamut from an acoustic guitar to everything plus horns made this the album that for years after I heard I was not hesitant to call my favorite album ever.

Elvis Presley - From Elvis In Memphis: I had been into the typical Sun Session Elvis for a long time before. But when I finally listened to this album, over and over and over, I realized there was way more to Elvis than I had ever thought. Not my fave of his anymore, but the major one in my fandom.

Bob Dylan - The Basement Tapes
The Band - Music From Big Pink: I'm putting these two together since they kind of overlap and I was obsessed with them at about the same time and for similar reasons. I fell in love with the idea of making music for no other reason than because. And fell in love with Richard Manuel's voice.

Charles Mingus - The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady: Fave jazz album, fave instrumental album, at a time when I was falling out of love with guitars this album let me fall in love with horns.

Joanna Newsom - Ys: Just plain my favorite album released this decade. For a period of a couple months after this was released, I would go for a walk everyday and listen to this in its entirety.

of Montreal - Coquelicot Asleep In The Poppies: I gave these guys a lot of attention as what seemed like the last of Elephant 6 and because they were this little indie band with seemingly limited resources that managed to make what sounded like really involved records. Have a hard time listening to it now though because of the cute factor.

V/A - Golden Apples Of The Sun: Comp that made me fall in love with neo-folk, which lasted for a pretty good amount of time.

The Sonics - Here Are The Sonics: Fueled my garage love more than anything

The Hives - Veni Vidi Vicious
The Shins - Oh Inverted World
The Strokes - Is This It?
The White Stripes - White Blood Cells: Putting these all together because they were from that first summer when I first started putting a little credence into semi-indie rock that was getting hyped like mad, which seems to have become a major trend in popular music. The Hives, I don't remember where I heard them first, probably MTV, so reminiscent of The Sonics that I couldn't avoid them. The Shins, good singing, and learned about them from a stamp of approval from Zach Galifianakis. The Strokes, too catchy and pretty too ignore. And The White Stripes, gimmick after gimmick after gimmick that all worked and all supported songs with a lot of Zeppelin in them.

(about 7 hours between when I wrote that last one and when I've come back to this. These descriptions are going to get much shorter.)

Magic Sam - West Side Soul: Started the decade with this. First band we put together, this is all I wanted to play.

Robert Belfour - What's Wrong With You: My favorite blues album released this decade, and the one that made me want to play acoustic blues with itches.

Erykah Badu - New Amerykah Pt. 1, 4th World War: I went crazy for the "Honey" single when I first saw the video, thought it was one of the best new songs I'd heard in a long long time. The album was just as good, though completely different from the single, and it made me realize neo-soul was something that was worth checking out.

Sonic Youth - Daydream Nation: This gave me the itch to check out all those years of indie I had no idea existed. Informed what I listened to for a good three or four years.

The Velvet Underground - White Light/White Heat: Mostly side two. As much as I wanted to be Ronald Jones, side two of White Light/White Heat was just as much of an aspiration.

My Morning Jacket - At Dawn: Someone sent me "If It Smashes Down" on a mix. Loved the voice. Jim James completely changed what I was looking for in male singers. Being that that is basically a solo performance, I wasn't prepared for the interplay of the band when I heard the whole album, and the variety of performances that ranged from gorgeous "I Needed It Most" to balls-out "Honest Man" and a mix in "Strangulation," creating this mix of several of my beloveds including Brian Wilson and Gram Parsons and even my old classic rock tendencies. I do think they kind of stepped it up with It Still Moves, but At Dawn was always my favorite.

The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds: Nothing to say.

Bruce McCulloch - A Shame-Based Man: How much did I love this? The greatest mix of hilariousness, surrealism, and not horrible music.

Neko Case - Blacklisted: Exactly what I wanted at the time that I found it. Her voice is still one of my absolute favorites, and I think this collection of songs is still her best. Sparing instrumentation that still shimmers, and her voice can often make you see things in vibration. And these songs sound timeless to me, I'd stack them up against anything.

Honorable mentions: Randy Newman - Sail Away, The Stooges - Fun House, Mitch Hedberg - Strategic Grill Locations, various comps from Charley Patton, Blind Willie McTell, and Elmore James. There's probably a lot of stuff I should add to this list that I'm not thinking of, but what kind of list would it be if there wasn't? Not one of mine! Probably a few more than 20 too. So if I wasn't sticking to a set number, why did I end up with honorable mentions? This must be why the professional list-makers at Rolling Stone get paid millions upon hundreds of dollars.

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These are my top three guilty pleasures of the decade. Guilty pleasures are not something I usually recognize, usually if I like something I know why and I consider it a good reason. But, there was that one year where I had the MTVHits channel, with its videos OnDemand, and I watched it a lot. And in particular I became enamored with these three.

(3) Beyonce - "Get Me Bodied": I especially liked the second half of this. I'd walk around my apartment going "Do the scissor leg. Touch your heel touch your toe," in a really quiet voice. And for some reason I deemed it awesome that she had gotten the former Destiny's Child members to be in the video. Why did I think that was so great? I never cared about Destiny's Child before.

(2) Lil Mama - I was pretty sure I was supposed to hate "Lip Gloss" but there was no way I was going to. I liked that it was this big fake drum in space with a vocal on top that was the 00s equivalent of Kris Kross. And even though it was all big fake drum, Lil Mama felt the need for a "no music" section. Ironically, if I was younger at the time, say high school age, I would have hated it, because I would have hated the people it was pandering to (or representing, however you want to look at it). But maybe because I'm way too old to be listening to it, I had the reaction of "Oooo, Lil Mama! What are the 'mac-mac brushes'?!" And then I loved the follow up "G-Slide" just as much, because it reaffirmed the Kriss Kross association. Lil Mama tour bus might ride through your town. Any chance that's the same bus Kriss Kross missed? What's weird is that I saw these videos and there was no album. For the longest time there was no album! I looked and looked and it just had not come out. Kept getting pushed back. Then the album finally came out and I didn't hear anymore from Lil Mama. Then I find out she's on some dancing show and otherwise is just trying to make Jay-Z's life hard. One other thing, her head is enormous. Her head to body ratio is something like a Pep Boy or Mars Attacks. That's a little intriguing.

(1) Paramore: This one is really pretty embarrassing. I work with this guy who is always talking about Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift and how he's always watching what they're up to. He just sounds like a statutory rapist. I do not want to sound like that, so I would never bring up how much I listen to Paramore, which I swear is strictly a musical thing. I saw their videos on MTVHits and for some reason they just struck a chord with my like button. Even though they look like the most annoying brats of all time, I got sucked into what sounded like a lot of enthusiasm for a young band. It's weird, because they have no musical similarity whatsoever, but whenever I saw them I got this Katrina and the Waves vibe. Because it was a band that sounded like they were excited to be playing with a girl singer that didn't mind shouting at the top of her lungs. I write that out now and I look at it and I STILL don't totally understand why I think that's such a good thing. But, here's the embarrassing part, it didn't stop with those videos. Checked out the album, listened to it multiple times, two years later their next album comes out, and I'm all over that one too. Maybe even enjoying it MORE than the first one.

And I'm ending there. For today. I may put a couple others up later, I'd at least like to get my resolutions up there, hoping that if I make them public I'll feel more pressed to stick with them.