While I was working on my list of favorite albums of 2013, I reminded myself of what I’d been listening to by skimming through the stuff that had been added to my iPod over the year, and saw a lot of worthy music that it seemed a shame to exclude simply because none of it had been released in 2013. It was all new to me! And so I made this other list. It’s numbered but not actually in any particular order. I kept it limited to things I could add to a Spotify playlist, but even so it got kinda long. Oh well! Here we go!

1) The Lifeguards, “Paradise Is Not So Bad” (from “Waving at the Astronauts”)

Robert Pollard’s output is exhausting and I only really love a fraction of it, so I don’t make a big effort to follow it all. But I was reminded this year of how much I enjoy Doug Gillard’s guitar work, and so when I learned Gillard had written all the music for this album, I got interested.

2) Bonnie Hayes With the Wild Combo, “Shelly’s Boyfriend” (from “Good Clean Fun”)

This song was one of a bunch I heard this year for a sad reason: the great songwriter Scott Miller died. I rode out the dark feelings brought on by that by reading his book of year-by-year music lists (much like the one I’m writing right now), “Music: What Happened?”, a book which I mentioned in the Agony Aunts entry on the previous list without explaining what it was, because I forgot the other reference to it was on a different list. That’s what comes of writing two lists simultaneously, I guess. Anyway, this, which Scott Miller called “a shining example of power and intelligence behind a veneer of simplicity”, was his favorite song of 1982.

3) Phoebe Snow, “Love Makes a Woman” (from “Never Letting Go”)

This could’ve been from any number of albums, because I’d never heard any of them and they’re all pretty great. She sounds to me like the soul music version of Joni Mitchell.

4) Emmanuelle Parrenin, “Plume Blanche, Plume Noire” (from “Maison Rouge”)

An idiosyncratic French folk album with psych elements and even a song noted for predicting the sound of trip-hop decades in advance (that would be “Topaze”). Lovely throughout.

5) Raymond Scott, “Suite for Violin and Piano (2nd Movement)”

I had no idea Raymond Scott had written a classical piece. I wish he had written more! It’s pretty different from his manic jazz compositions, though the through-line from there to here is audible.

6) Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan, “At Midnight (My Love Will Lift You Up)” (from “Ask Rufus”)

This was a recommendation taken from Questlove’s “Mo Meta Blues”. I had pretty much only remembered Chaka Khan as the woman that some guy wanted to be allowed to rock in the 80s, but man, I was missing out on a lot. I particularly like this track because it’s a little proggy.

7) Stackridge, “Fundamentally Yours” (from “The Man in the Bowler Hat”)

Speaking of prog.

8) Martha and the Muffins, “World Without Borders” (from “Danseparc”)

Another band I only knew from one song, “Echo Beach”, and even that one I never heard until well over a decade had passed since its original release. Took me long enough to listen to the rest of their albums (of which there are many, all pretty uniformly good).

9) Lusine, “Two Dots” (from “A Certain Distance”)

I think I heard this song on This Is My Jam before I gave up on that website because the music streams kept skipping. The lyrics are Platonically simple: “Two dots joined by a line / Might be detached by a crime / Who is responsible when the line is stretched? / Who is responsible when it becomes a triangle? / How irresponsible when the line is stretched / How irresponsible when it becomes a triangle.” I read it as a quiet musing on romantic infidelity but I’m sure other interpretations abound.

10) Jon Auer, “City of Sisterly Love” (from “Though a Faraway Window: A Tribute to Jimmy Silva”)

I would’ve posted the original Jimmy Silva version, but Spotify ain’t got it (and the version they do have is mistitled, but whatcha gonna do). I feel like I should’ve known about this guy, since he ran with the Young Fresh Fellows and I was very into them back in college, but nope. I am belatedly very angry with the universe for the fact that Silva died in his 40s from chicken pox.

11) The Blue Ox Babes, “Pray Lucky” (from “Apples & Oranges”)

Every so often I get on a Dexys Midnight Runners kick, but for some reason it wasn’t until this year that I discovered the Blue Ox Babes, a band that spun off from Dexys when Dexys was still pretty much a Philadelphia-style soul band, and whose Celtic folk-soul sound Dexys completely and blatantly stole for their breakthrough album, “Too-Rye-Ay”, after bandleader Kevin Rowland heard the Blue Ox Babes’ demo tape. He managed to get the jump on them, release-wise, and then they got tarred as Dexys imitators, which, ugh, it’s killing me just thinking about it. Anyway, you can buy pretty much everything they ever recorded in one go and it’s quite good.

12) Joan Armatrading, “Eating the Bear” (from “Walk Under Ladders”)

Much as with Phoebe Snow, I had way too many excellent albums to choose from here. I went with this song because XTC’s Andy Partridge contributes the electric guitar.

13) Arnold Hammerschlag Group, “Swish” (from “Sailing Neptune’s Water”)

Well, Arnold is a friend of mine, but I promise, his appearance here is not nepotism. He’s a trumpeter and jazz composer and I find this track of his particularly easy on the ears.

14) Kit Hain, “Awaking Again” (from “Looking for You/Spirits Walking Out”)

A criminally overlooked 80s singer/songwriter. I’m considering getting a turntable that can convert to mp3 just so I can hear her non-album singles. This album was produced by Mike Thorne, also the producer of Wire’s best album (“154″…as I think I’ve managed to mention in like three different blog posts now, and I don’t even post a lot) and “Tainted Love”, and also a Roger Daltrey solo album on which Daltrey covers a couple of Kit Hain songs. Who fans hated that album, but I like it quite a bit. It also features an obscure Bryan Ferry composition, in case you ever wanted to hear what late-period Roxy Music would have sounded like with Roger Daltrey singing.

15) The Parachute Men, “Sometimes in Vain” (from “The Innocents”)

I’m not sure there’s anything particularly distinctive I can really point to about this band, but it presses a lot of key buttons, ’80s-music-wise, and sometimes that is all one really needs.

16) Philippe Cauvin, “Comme un Miroir d’Echo” (from “Memento”)

This was a recommendation from a Russian music fan of my online acquaintance (as were Kit Hain, Judie Tzuke, and Li Garattoni). Two of his favorite genres are cheesy 80s AOR and French prog rock. A fine combination. This is on the prog side but is more like experimental solo classical guitar.

17) Shugo Tokumaru, “Katachi” (from “In Focus?”)

This album is from late 2012, so maybe I should have just fudged things and put it on the 2013 list. Anyway, I got super into a whole bunch of obscure Japanese acts this year (well, obscure here, anyway), and almost none of them are on Spotify. This fellow came up on amazon.co.jp as a related recommendation when I was looking up one of those other acts. He’s one of those people who plays every instrument (and uses a lot of instruments), and makes wild, busy, supermultitracked pop songs.

18) Penetration, “Shout Above the Noise” (from “Coming Up for Air”)

I really wanted to include a song from the self-titled album by Pauline Murray & Invisible Girls, an uncannily great post-punk album featuring killer songs enhanced by the perfect guitar of Vini Reilly, among other luminaries — but Spotify wasn’t having it (though there’s always YouTube), so I went with this instead, from her first band, which also rules. I see the AllMusic reviewer hates this album. Screw that guy.

19) Judie Tzuke, “New Friends Again” (from “Welcome to the Cruise”)

Another fine example of “how had I never heard of this person?” I think she’s better known in England, despite what seems like the plum promotional situation of opening for megastar Elton John on a North American tour (his label also released her first three albums). She’s got an extensive discography and is still releasing albums, though I’m less into her late-90s-and-onward output, which is very “grown-up and tasteful former rocker”-type songwriting. They’re still not bad albums by any means, but I don’t find much occasion to bother with them when there are nine others that are way better.

20) Ea Philippa, “Hestenes Sang” (from “Fjerne Himle”)

Sometimes I will wander over to rateyourmusic.com and look for people who have given 5-star ratings to my favorite albums, and see if they have anything in their list of high-rated albums that I haven’t heard of. That’s how I ran across Ea Philippa, who’s got a little Bjorkiness going on, though is much more in a chamber-pop/Nordic folk vein. Her albums are available as downloads, but if you like her enough to purchase, you might consider shelling out for the physical CDs, which are packaged in origami-like fold-out cardboard flowers.

21) Three Minute Tease, “Thanks for Lifting My Leg” (from “Three Minute Tease”)

This band is wack-folk singer-songwriter Anton Barbeau backed up by Robyn Hitchcock’s Egyptians (Andy Metcalfe and Morris Windsor). I like Anton Barbeau pretty well but usually think he needs an editor, and I think having bandmates of their caliber both inspired him to step up his game and helped make sure that what got onto the album was actually the best material. (And they really are an ace rhythm section.)

22) Nona Hendryx, “Problem” (from “Nona Hendryx”)

I was listening to some Labelle and realized that most of their original songs besides “Lady Marmalade” were written by Nona Hendryx, and so I started working my way through her solo albums. Which are … a mixed bag! A bunch of them consist pretty much entirely of underwritten dance-y 80s stuff (“Nona”, “The Art of Defense”, “Female Trouble”). But then there’s the jazzy “It’s Time” (with Kahil El’zabar’s Ethnics), the drifty-synthy “Skin Diver”, and the protest-rocking “Mutatis Mutandis”, all quite good, and my favorite, her self-titled solo debut, the most straightforwardly rocking-out of her albums. (And if you only know the song “Winning” from the 1981 Santana version, as I did, you might be surprised to discover Nona recorded her own cover of it four years earlier.)

23) Devine & Statton, “In the Rain” (from “Cardiffians”)
24) Weekend, “The End of the Affair” (from “La Varieté”)

In another story of discovering a band in a somewhat roundabout way, I was listening to an old Rough Trade compilation which featured Belle & Sebastian covering Young Marble Giants’ “Final Day” (another great song), and I thought maybe it was high time I actually listened to Young Marble Giants, a band that I barely knew but was cited as a major influence by lots of acts I’m a fan of. So anyway, I liked them, but their low-fi aesthetic makes them the kind of thing my ears get tired of in high doses, and I ended up getting more interested in some of the acts that vocalist Alison Statton worked with after YMG broke up, including Devine & Statton and Weekend, all of which have a breezy European feel I enjoy (a bit like early Style Council).

25) Jenny Scheinman, “The Careeners” (from “Crossing the Field”)

I noticed violinist Jenny Scheinman’s name cropping up regularly in the credits of Bill Frisell albums and started getting curious about her solo albums. This is a wonderfully diverse instrumental collection that I had a hard time selecting a song from — you might also try out the Thelonious Monk-ish “That’s Delight” or the groovy syncopated African-influenced “Song for Sidiki” — but I went with this one as being a particular showcase for the violin.

25) Chance, “Dead Medley” (from “In Search”)
26) Honey Ltd., “No, You Are” (from “The Complete LHI Recordings”)

A coworker recommended Chance’s “In Search” to me; I’d never heard of it, but it’s a legendary oddity, pressed privately and mostly impossible to find until this recent reissue. Chance Martin was a friend of Johnny Cash (and worked in various roles as one of his crewmembers for many years), but while Chance and Cash both work under the umbrella of whatcha might call country music, Chance is waaaaay way way off from anything traditional. More like drunk psychobilly blooze-prog country. Wild stuff. Meanwhile, the Honey Ltd. reissue was just sitting there on the front page of the website when I went to order the Chance album, and there was something about it that rang a bell … turns out I’d heard their second album, though they were going by a different name then (Eve, having changed the name after the departure of one member). Anyway, Honey Ltd. features a sort of dreamy lite-psych sound with lovely, unusual harmonies. They didn’t have a lot of success with either incarnation of their band (sounds like a lot of acts on Lee Hazlewood’s label met the same fate); a shame, but good that their stuff is available again.

27) Alessandro Alessandroni, “La Metropoli” (from “Inchiesta”)

Another genre I’ve been listening to this year is “library music”, which is to say, albums meant to be used as stock music to score films and TV and such. There’s a lot of it out there, and of course not all of it interesting by any means, but several composers are pretty reliable, and Alessandroni is one of them. (Piero Umiliani is another; see #30 below.)

28) Matia Bazar, “Io Ti Voglio Adesso” (from “Berlino … Parigi … Londra”)

Also from Italy comes Matia Bazar, another band I discovered by poking around rateyourmusic.com; in this case, several albums of theirs appeared on one user’s lists of favorite 80s albums by year surrounded by more usual suspects. Matia Bazar’s earliest stuff is more in a straightforward 70s pop-rock vein, and then around this album they started adopting new wave trappings (even more so on the next two albums, “Tango” and “Aristocratica”). Singer Antonella Ruggiero sounds a little Kate Bush-esque on this track.

29) Happy Rhodes, “She Won’t Go” (from “Find Me”)

Speaking of singers who are (sometimes) reminiscent of Kate Bush, here’s Happy Rhodes, whose vocal range is so wide that some listeners wonder who the male singer on her albums is. Her earliest albums feature a Fucking Scary Monster on the cover which might make one mistakenly assume she is actually an 80s metal band, but I am informed that the monster is a childhood imaginary friend and personal guardian, so, okay then. She has an interesting tension between beautiful melodies and dark subject matter (as one might suspect from someone who once dreamed up a Fucking Scary Monster as an imaginary protector).

30) Piero Umiliani, “Caravan” (from “Ode to Duke Ellington”)

The aforementioned Piero Umiliani has written a lot of music, one piece of which I guarantee you know very well: “Mah Na Mah Na”. I suspect you could wake up one morning, decide to listen to nothing but Piero Umiliani during your waking moments, and still be at it a week later. Anyway, I selected his version of “Caravan” because “Caravan” rules and I dig his retrofuturistic electronic arrangement.

31) Stump, “Charlton Heston” (from “A Fierce Pancake”)

Stump is the band Primus wishes it was … which I realize doesn’t sound like much of a recommendation. But they share many traits — big elastic bass lines, goofy lyrics, quirky vocal delivery. “Charlton Heston” isn’t the song that most embodies their sound to me (that would be “Buffalo“), but it’s a good one and more importantly for the purposes of this post is the only Stump song on Spotify. I was made aware of the existence of Stump via a remarkable one-man cover rendition of their “Ice the Levant” by Rhodri Marsden (of Scritti Politti and multiple other bands).

32) Patrick Zimmerli and Octurn, “Morning” (from “The Book of Hours”)

I’m a fan of jazz pianist Brad Mehldau, but he puts out a lot of music and I don’t do the best job of keeping up with all of it. One that I recently got around to was “Modern Music”, an album by Mehldau and Kevin Hays of two-piano compositions and arrangements by Patrick Zimmerli, who was new to me, but walks a half-classical-half-jazz line very well. “The Book of Hours” is sort of chamber jazz — layered, tightly composed when it’s not loosening up to let the players stretch out, and covering a wide range of moods. Also good is Zimmerli’s “Phoenix”, which tries to integrate electronics into acoustic jazz as smoothly as possible and does a nice job of it.

33: Li Garattoni, “Find Out What I’m Dreaming” (from “Find Out What I’m Dreaming”)

This delicate avant-pop album is mostly out of print, though for some reason four songs from it appear on a new-agey compilation. Time was you could find a rip of the LP online (which I know for … reasons), but now I think you would have to hie yourself to a file-sharing service and cross your fingers. Or, you know, ask someone who has a copy, if you can think of such a person.

Does the world really need another best-of-2013 music list? Of course not (which is why my sense of urgency was low enough that I didn’t get around to finishing it until just now), but I wrote one anyway. It’s a top-28 list, because that was where I decided I was done.

I’ll start with #1 momentarily, but first, here’s a Spotify playlist to listen to while you read (or to listen to instead of reading, if you want, I’m not your mom).

1) Janelle Monae, “The Electric Lady”

I appear to be a sucker for eclectic funky-soulful-jazzy ladies (see also #10 and #18). Many friends had recommended her earlier album “The Archandroid” to me, but I still managed to miss it (I think I was underwhelmed by “Tightrope” when I heard it on the radio and so didn’t go out of my way to hear more). Anyway, this album is all over the map in the best way, and I liked it so much I even overlooked that it has SKITS, usually a guaranteed demotion. It’s also possible Janelle is the beneficiary of my having bought her entire oeuvre all at once, leading me to overrate this album slightly based on my collective enjoyment of all 2.5 albums … but what the hell, this isn’t an exact science.

2) Prefab Sprout, “Crimson/Red”

Prefab Sprout have been mostly on hiatus for a while, and the last album they did release was a spruced-up unreleased album, so hooray for this one, which is all newly recorded but sounds like it could’ve been released alongside any album from their prime and fit right in. Some of these tracks feel like little master classes in how to write songs, particularly “The Old Magician.” Not available on Spotify, so you’ll have to head over to YouTube to hear samples.

3) Eleanor Friedberger, “Personal Record” / Wesley Stace, “Self-Titled”

I hadn’t been following Eleanor Friedberger’s solo career because I’d tried out her former band, the Fiery Furnaces, and never much liked them. On paper, the Fiery Furnaces seemed like just the sort of brainy overcomplicated thing I usually love, but despite multiple attempts, only a few of their songs stuck with me. But then I heard that Eleanor’s new album entirely consisted of collaborations with one of my favorite songwriters, Wesley Stace (formerly known sometimes as John Wesley Harding), so I had to give it a shot — and holy crap, what an album (and what great 70s-sounding production). Later I looked into it a bit more and realized that most of the Fiery Furnaces’ songs were by Matthew Friedberger, So, apparently I only like one Friedberger sibling. Meanwhile, two of the Stace/Friedberger collaborations appear in alternate versions on Wesley Stace’s first album under his own name, another excellent album in a recent string of same (“Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead,” “The Sound of His Own Voice”). His album also shares her 70s-radio ambience and confessional subject matter, solidifying all the more my brain’s opinion that these two albums ought to get filed together.

4) Paul McCartney, “New”

Well, Paul McCartney, he’s pretty good, I suppose. “I Can Bet” reminds me of something from “Press to Play” but I haven’t figured out what.

5) Neko Case, “The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You”

Neko Case’s voice is pretty much always transcendent, but sometimes her albums shoot me right in the heart (“Fox Confessor…”) and sometimes they glance off (“Middle Cyclone”). This is in the first of those groups, and has the added benefit of rocking out a little more than usual (on “Man”), something I’d been hoping to hear.

6) David Bowie, “The Next Day”

After the dead zone that was Bowie albums for a long time (“Earthling,” “Outside,” “Hours” … meh), “Heathen” and “Reality” were a huge relief, proof that he hadn’t lost it. Going back to them now, they’re still good, but I find them a little unexciting. Especially compared to this one, which is (let’s all say it together) the Best Bowie Album Since … “Black Tie White Noise!” (Oh, sorry, I probably ruined the unison there, because I’m pretty sure I’m in the minority in loving that one.) There are a couple of sleepy tunes here, and it’s tempting to downgrade this for the asshole move of releasing a special bonus disc edition mere months after the original release (which itself had a regular version and a deluxe version), but I can’t do it, it’s too good.

7) Bryan Ferry Orchestra, “The Jazz Age”

What’s that? Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry songs rearranged for 20s-style jazz band, recorded on vintage equipment? You would have to lock me in a box and bury it deep underground to keep me from acquiring that. I hope this stuff is making the rounds on the swing dance circuit.

8) The Dismemberment Plan, “Uncanney Valley”

A critically unloved comeback by a critically beloved band. I don’t really get what’s not to like here, really. Sounds like the Dismemberment Plan to me! I suppose there are a couple of places that have a little feel of “we’re trying to figure out exactly how we used to do this” that’s probably going to be inevitable when you have a group that used to do this for a living ten years ago and is now doing it on the side in between having regular jobs, but come on. At least half of this is great and the rest is certainly all songs I would much rather have existing in the world than not.

9) Ghost Train Orchestra, “Book of Rhapsodies”

I discovered Ghost Train Orchestra by happenstance, while looking up the Raymond Scott Orchestrette to see what they were up to — which turned out to be opening for the Ghost Train Orchestra at a CD release show. I wasn’t able to make it to that show, so I just bought the CD instead, which, I reasoned, was a lot like a concert that didn’t require standing up for two hours. Anyway, this album features a few Raymond Scott tunes, but also the works of some lesser-known eccentric bandleaders not far from the Raymond Scott aesthetic, played to perfection. Those pieces were the main attraction for me but I was also pleasantly surprised to find the Raymond Scott pieces to be inventively reinterpreted (particularly “Celebration on the Planet Mars,” stretched out to like four times its usual length).

10) Alice Smith, “She”

Alice Smith’s 2007 debut, “For Lovers, Dreamers & Me,” was a great, eclectic soul album that made me look forward to what she would do next … but unfortunately, what she would do next would apparently be “have record label troubles,” leading to a six-year hiatus before her follow-up emerged. But hey, better late than never. At first it didn’t grab me quite as immediately as the first album, but it’s been growing on me steadily. Now I’m ready for more again. One option: everyone buy this album and make Alice Smith a huge success, and maybe the unbelievable asshats at Sony will change their minds and decide to release the completed but inexplicably shitcanned Alice Smith album they’ve been sitting on for years.

11) Julia Holter, “Loud City Song”

This is either as eccentric and jazzy as you can get while making dreamy pop, or as dreamy and poppy as you can get while making eccentric jazz. Reminds me a little bit of Kate Bush, but reminds me more of one of my favorite albums of last year, Mimi Goese and Ben Neill’s “Songs for Persephone.”

12) Daughn Gibson, “Me Moan”

This is one of those albums where if you describe its contributing elements, it does not quite sound like a thing that should work. Country music riffs sampled, chopped, and spliced in a sorta-hip-hop way, plus a deep-voiced singer who kind of sounds like he’s doing a caricature of a country crooner’s vocal tone (or maybe it’s more like Ian-Curtis-as-country-singer). You made your own genre, sir! Good show.

13) Robyn Hitchcock, “Love from London”

Well, if you know Robyn Hitchcock, you kinda know what to expect from any new album. You know it’ll be, at the very least, decent, and it will probably mention fish at some point. I tend to prefer (lately, anyway) his more acoustic, harmony-heavy releases, like “Spooked” or this one.

14) Elvis Costello & the Roots, “Wise Up Ghost”

I’d like to extend a personal thank-you to Questlove for helping to make Elvis Costello interesting again (a service Elvis Costello has himself provided to other songwriters in his day).

15) Johnny Marr, “The Messenger”

Johnny Marr has one of the greatest guitar sounds ever, so while I’ve enjoyed plenty of his post-Smiths work (Electronic, his guest appearances with Pet Shop Boys), it’s been odd how rarely his guitar has really been front and center. I mean, what was that shoegaze crap he was doing with the Healers? Yeesh. Anyway, this album sounds very Smithsy-sans-Morrissey, and although Morrissey’s entertainment value is undeniable, I am kind of sick of his pissy shenanigans, so it turns out Smithsy-sans-Morrissey is juuuuuust right for me right now.

16) Ethan Lipton, “No Place to Go”

This is a jazz song cycle about a company relocating to Mars, and the plight of the workers who don’t want to relocate to Mars and are left behind, jobless and drifting. One of the songs is from the point of view of the last sandwich left over from a catered meeting. That probably gives you enough information to know if you want to hear this.

17) Rhye, “Woman”

This is kind of a retro-80s new-wave-meets-yacht-rock kind of thing. Some bits remind me of Fleetwood Mac, or Sade, or maybe a little Bronski Beat. Anyway, it’s solid enough to be well worth hearing on its own merits, nostalgia value aside.

18) Laura Mvula, “Sing to the Moon”

The livelier songs on this are what got my attention at first (“Green Garden”, “That’s Alright”), but there are some amazing arrangements and harmonies throughout (“Like the Morning Dew”, “Make Me Lovely”). There are still a few tracks where my attention wanders, but this is quite a debut album.

19) TMBG, “Nanobots”

They Might Be Giants! Still great! Still throwing a ton of stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, just the way I like it!

20) Agony Aunts, “Big Cinnamon”

A band I discovered via Scott Miller’s “Music: What Happened?” — though it would be more accurate to say that’s actually how I discovered the Corner Laughers, of whom the Agony Aunts are a more psych-influenced alter ego. I enjoy the lyrical constraint of the verses in “Family Drugs”, where lines recur with syllables dropped out (“You disregard what I say / I guard what I say”).

21) Mike Keneally, “You Must Be This Tall”

I love Mike Keneally, a prog-rocker who can seemingly do just about everything; he’s equally impressive on guitar and keyboards, and is a highly inventive songwriter who can somehow make a song catchy and fun despite it being ridiculously complicated. That said, this album isn’t my favorite of his, though it’s still quite good; it just feels kind of like an odds-and-ends collection, which it basically is. Really you should go hear “Wing Beat Fantastic” (his collaboration with XTC’s Andy Partridge), “Dancing”, or “Wooden Smoke” first.

22) John Grant, “Pale Green Ghosts”

It’s possible this one is underrated here just because I only discovered it very late in the year and haven’t listened to it much. Skimming it again for the sake of this list, I’m realizing how good these lyrics are — dark, funny, and unexpected.

23) Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, “Brooklyn Babylon”

Another late discovery (but hey, that’s a benefit of not finishing this list until the end of January). If you think big-band jazz should be more influenced by Steve Reich, here is the album for you.

24) Analog Birds, “No-Knock” (single)

I heard about this band (which, like a lot of music on this list, falls into the “oddball but catchy” category) on an mp3 blog. Their entire oeuvre-so-far is available for free download. Mixed feelings! Yes, it’s crappy that a band this good seems to have no non-tip-jar-based income, but hey, at least they exist and you can hear them!

25) Wire, “Change Becomes Us”

The current incarnation of Wire goes back and reworks some uncompleted songs from around the breakup of their first incarnation, which is to say, their prime. This isn’t quite the second coming of “154” (it would be #1 with a bullet if it were), but it’s definitely a big step up from their last few albums, which have sounded pret-ty samey to me.

26) My Bloody Valentine, “mbv”

The fact this exists at all is pretty impressive given how long the universe has been waiting for a new My Bloody Valentine album. Honestly I’m not a megafan — I agree “Loveless” is great, but it’s the kind of thing I listen to and am basically satisfied with that amount of that kind of thing instead of wanting to shout to the skies UNIVERSE GIVE ME MORE OF THIS — so I reacted to its announcement not so much by passing out from shock and joy but more by being like “oh, huh, whaddaya know…I reckon I oughta buy that thing there.” And yeah, it’s good! Now I have another thing to listen to when I want to hear this kind of thing!

27) Masami Tsuchiya, “Swan Dive” (EP)

At the same time I’ve been working on this “favorites of 2013” list, I’ve also been working on a “favorite things I heard for the first time in 2013 that did not themselves get released in 2013” list. Masami Tsuchiya, a Japanese guitarist/singer/songwriter who has worked with David Sylvian and Arcadia, among others, was on that list, and while I was looking on Spotify to figure out which of his songs to include, I saw that he actually released this EP, which I’d had no idea existed, in 2013. Well, okay then!

28) Grant Hart, “The Argument”

I’m more of a Bob Mould fan when it comes to Husker Du boosterism, but hey, other guy from Husker Du, gotta say I did not expect you to come up with a half-decent concept album based on “Paradise Lost”! This might have appeared higher on the list, but when I say “half-decent” I am being fairly literal; there are a lot of songs on here I don’t much like at all. But the good songs are very good, so. Here it is.

Here’s an installment of my old webcomic, Six Things, which features a guest appearance by the off-panel voice of Lou Reed. RIC (Rest In Cantankerousness), sir.

In the hours before going to see Cheap Trick play Coney Island on Friday, I was giving “Surrender” a quick listen as a sort of vaccination against disappointment just in case they didn’t play it (which, I mean, what was I thinking? Of course they were going to play it, it was their closing song) and this got me contemplating my other favorite songs of that era and then, the next thing I knew, I was working on a list of my 20 favorite songs of the 1970s. Which is often how these things go with me. (It could also have turned into a mix CD.) This list is not me trying to weigh in on the “Greatest Songs” of the 70s in some tendentious Rolling-Stone so-it-is-written-by-the-hand-of-the-rock-god kind of thing (hence no “Long and Winding Road”, because not only is that really a 1969 song that snuck in on a technicality, but when you get right down to it, I’d rather listen to most Wings song than that song). It is just a chronicle of personal affection for these songs, which for all I know I may be good and sick of in a few years. All right then.

#20+: Various

Yes, I had more than 20. Way more. Nearly making the cut (in no particular order): “Night Fever”, Bee Gees; “What Is Life”, George Harrison; “In the Street”, Big Star; “Wuthering Heights”, Kate Bush; “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant”, Billy Joel; “September”, Earth, Wind & Fire; “Seven Seas of Rhye”, Queen; “Got to Give It Up”, Marvin Gaye; “Lust for Life”, Iggy Pop; “Draggin’ the Line”, Tommy James and the Shondells; “Sail On, Sailor”, the Beach Boys; “Lady Marmalade”, Labelle; and then there’s Genesis, which mostly didn’t make it because picking one Gabriel-era Genesis song is a weird thing to try to do. I go to Genesis more when I’m in the mood for “that kind of thing in general” rather than any specific song. I guess it would’ve been “Firth of Fifth” if I’d picked one, maybe?

#20: “Velvet Green”, Jethro Tull

I almost said “Thick as a Brick”, but that feels like cheating. That’s a bunch of songs smooshed together into one 40-minute “song” but you’re not fooling anyone, guys. I prefer the “Songs From the Wood”/”Heavy Horses” era anyway, that being one of the rare times where Jethro Tull were choosing an identity that doesn’t make me want to wince too much. I mean, I like their old bluesy stuff too but at that moment they were basically being the Mumford and Sons of their day.

#19: “Trampled Under Foot”, Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin is a band I’ve overlistened to, but this song is the one that, for a while, would make me go “Oh right, this song, I forgot about this song!” when I trotted out the “Physical Graffiti” album. Eventually I started remembering I liked it.

#18: “Is It a Star”, Hall and Oates

Todd Rundgren was gonna be on this list somewhere, and here he is. His songs “Hello It’s Me”, “Couldn’t I Just Tell You”, and “I Saw the Light” are all songs that define the sound of the 70s, but (as with Led Zep) I’ve kind of worn all of them out from overlistening. But Todd tends to pour his sound into his production work, and this combination of Rundgren-style progginess plus Hall & Oates hooks is just my cup of tea.

#17: “Feelin’ Stronger Every Day”, Chicago

Oh the perfect horn charts of Chicago, mmmmmm, yes. They actually titled this “Feelin’ Stronger Everyday” but I had to do a Fixed That For You above because that is WRONG WRONG WRONG, “everyday” with no space is an ADJECTIVE as in Sly and the Family Stone’s “Everyday People” (which I was so ready to put on this list but it’s from 1968 whaaaaaat? That dude was ahead of his time), but when it is used in the sense of the adverb “daily” it is a PHRASE. Looks like Chicago should have consulted the … Chicago Manual of Style. *drops mic as waves and waves of applause, cheering, and laughter break out*

#16: “The Thrill of It All”, Roxy Music

Obviously “Country Life” is the best Roxy Music album when I’m playing it instead of 1982’s “Avalon”, which is the best Roxy Music album when I’m playing it instead of “Country Life”. When I’m not playing either one they exist in a quantum state of mutual bestness.

#15: “I’m Not Down”, The Clash

One must have rules when one sits down to make a list like this because, well, because only People Who Make Rules for Themselves are the kind of people who make lists like this. One of my rules was “one song per act”, which makes things difficult when you’ve got the Clash and “London Calling” and one of the greatest track listings ever. I could’ve picked “Hateful”, “Lost in the Supermarket”, “Rudie Can’t Fail”…but this was the one I liked best today.

#14: “Say You Love Me”, Fleetwood Mac

Fleetwood Mac in the 70s is kind of a case study in “Greatest Songs That We’re All Tiredest of Hearing”. “Don’t Stop”? “You Make Loving Fun”? “Rhiannon”? I’m looking for a new radio station to switch to just thinking about them. And this song sorta seems like it should be in the same category, but nope, can’t get enough of it. The only thing I don’t like about it is the use of the word “woo”. “You woo me until the sun comes up”? Is it just me on this? I feel like wooing is what happens before the all-night love session, the start of which is the signifier of having wooed successfully. This has been the first and presumably only installment ever of the Fleetwood Mac Usage Panel Report.

#13: “Rats”, The Kinks

From the album with “Lola” on it, this is a Dave Davies song instead of one of Ray’s. I mean, Ray Davies is legendary — who’s gonna argue with “Waterloo Sunset” — but his music-hall-style larking about gets tiring sometimes (of course it was later in the 70s that it really got intolerable) and anyway that’s not even important, the point is jeez I love the guitar in this song.

#12: “Jet”, Wings

This would probably be a few places higher but the constant string of great hooks in this song is undermined slightly by lyrics that make no sense and were clearly composed in a haze of pot smoke. And wow, I don’t remember ever seeing this NSFW artwork used for the single.

#11: “Mystery Achievement”, The Pretenders

Why hasn’t this song been resurrected? I think about it every time I’m playing a video game and see the array of “secret achievements”. (Also, it’s great, but I guess that’s sort of a given since that’s the whole premise of the list.)

#10: “Surrender”, Cheap Trick

Honestly I had kind of forgotten the existence of this song completely (and could not have told you who performed it if you’d played it for me) until it cropped up in Guitar Hero II and it was like eating a fucking electric madeleine.

#9: “See No Evil”, Television

Television’s two-guitar interplay tickles the same part of my brain as listening to Steve Reich. Runner-up song from this album was “Elevation”, with its outrageously awkward-yet-therefore-perfect overly sudden guitar accent, but “See No Evil” is more fun (if a song with lyrics that I tentatively interpret as “a hyper-intellectual expression of understanding the drive behind wanting something and not caring who gets hurt or what gets damaged in the process of getting it” can be described as “fun”).

#8: “Rosalita”, Bruce Springsteen

I’m not really even a Bruce Springsteen fan — I mean, he’s fine, nothing wrong with him — but cripes, this song. Between the total exhilaration of pre-superstar Bruce shouting “The record company, Rosie, they gave me a big advance!” and Clarence Clemons playing what I’m gonna say is alllllmost the best saxophone on this list, I just, come on.

 #7: “Close to the Edge”, Yes

This doesn’t make any more sense than “Jet”, of course, but to me the lyrics function just fine as the imagistic component of a great composition for electric chamber rock orchestra. Unlike the aforementioned “Thick as a Brick”, this is 20 minutes that’s definitely just one damn song, and a fine one it is.

#6: “Map Ref. 41°N 93°”, Wire

Hardest-to-remember song title ever, from a band of brainy post-punk provocateurs, so how is this so goddamn catchy? Here’s one thing that delights me about this song — after a convoluted, dense verse lyric about how mapmaking affects reality, Colin Newman brightly announces “Chorus!” right before the main hook lands.

#5: “I Zimbra”, Talking Heads

I’m a little surprised with myself that this is Brian Eno’s only appearance on the list (cowriting the music with David Byrne). These lyrics are also nonsense but this being a setting of a Dadaist poem that’s just how it is. This was Talking Heads’ first time doing the New Wave take on Fela-style African funk, done more expansively on “Remain in Light” (eternally duking it out with Kate Bush’s “The Dreaming” for the position of my favorite album ever), but I love how tight and concise this is. I sort of want to arrange this for four ukuleles.

#4: “Baker Street”, Gerry Rafferty

Some primal part of me wants to pick a fight with the rest of me for not putting this at #1. I mean, it has that saxophone, obviously the best saxophone riff of the 70s. Although what the hell, hang on, I just looked at Wikipedia and that riff is basically straight out of this Steve Marcus song (written by Larry Coryell), although I guess the argument-slash-reason nobody sued anybody is that both riffs were based on an old blues riff or something? Aaagh this new information is changing my whole universe … I don’t … HA HA HA HA THE SHOCK HAS WEAKENED FRANCIS, LETTING ME, HIS PRIMAL SELF, ESCAPE! THIS BULLSHIT DOESN’T MATTER! STOLEN RIFF SHMOLEN SHMIFF! “BAKER STREET” IS STILL THE BEST SONG! THE BEST I TELL YOU!!!!

#3: “Beauty and the Beast”, David Bowie

Must…regain…control…gnnnnnn…whew, okay, I’m back. Oh, and wait, I lied, Brian Eno plays synthesizer on this, so he is on the list twice. Anyway, David Bowie … well, obviously, picking just one David Bowie song from the 70s is the worst. The fucking worst! You could pick, oh, I don’t know, “Joe the Lion”, “Breaking Glass”, “Sound and Vision”, “Golden Years”, “Stay”, “Suffragette City”, “Oh! You Pretty Things”, “Queen Bitch”…and I’m being picky. This is the one that most makes me want to thrash around all over the room though.

#2: “Sir Duke”, Stevie Wonder

Meanwhile, although Stevie Wonder’s catalog also contains a megafunkazillion great songs, this is not even a contest. “Sir Duke” is so obviously the best one, and is probably the best song ever written on the topic of “Isn’t music great? I fucking love music.” (Though Prefab Sprout did later try to step it up a notch with an entire album on that subject, “Let’s Change the World With Music”, featuring the thesis-statement song title “I Love Music”.)

#1: “Car on a Hill”, Joni Mitchell

I have no power against this song. If it comes up on shuffle, I always, always play it a second time after it’s finished. Sometimes a third time. It’s got so much going on — clusters of celestial jazz harmonies, easygoing horn-and-woodwind grooves that turn into rhythms so intricate I still get lost in the middle of them, evocative lyrics about emotional entanglement and distance — that there’s more than I feel I can ever actually absorb in the three minutes it takes the song to play. I have been listening to it several times while writing this paragraph and I am about to listen to it again.

HA HA HA! WHILE FRANCIS IS HYPNOTIZED BY JONI MITCHELL HIS DEFENSES ARE LOWERED, ENABLING ME TO ESCAPE ONCE AGAIN! THIS LIST IS ALL BULLSHIT! THERE IS NO CHOICE BUT “BAKER STREET”! WHAT IS THE POINT OF TRYING TO DENY IT WITH ALL THESE FANCY WORDS AND JUSTIFICATIONS??? LET ME RECAP THE REAL TOP 20 FOR YOU RIGHT NOW!!!!

#20: BAKER STREET
#19: BAKER STREET
#18: BAKER STREET
#17: BAKER STREET
#16: BAKER STREET
#15: BAKER STREET
#14: BAKER STREET
#13: BAKER STREET
#12: BAKER STREET
#11: BAKER STREET
#10: BAKER STREET
#9: BAKER STREET
#8: BAKER STREET
#7: BAKER STREET
#6: BAKER STREET
#5: BAKER STREET
#4: BAKER STREET!
#3: BAKER STREET!!!
#2: BAKER STREET!!!!!!!!
#1: BAKER STREET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

Blogging, man, who has the time anymore? Pretty much anything longer than 140 characters looks alien to me nowadays. And yet it seems that now and again you just need a place to put things on the internet, and so then there you are. I used to blog quite a bit, but much of it is half-baked commentary on then-current events and when I reread that stuff, I realize how much more pleasant it is to have such tediously tendentious matters relegated to the Warner-Bros.-cartoon-assembly-line generator of ephemera that is Twitter. However, there are some good bits in there too, and so I hope to relocate all of those in one place, and hopefully, henceforward, add only things that also qualify as good bits. Excelsior.