Best Music of 2009 – Songs

With my picks for best album out of the way, lets move on to songs.  This is usually the toughest thing to come up with – to limit your self to ten or so songs and rank them in order of goodness.  So, here again I’m going to do something a little different this year.  Obviously, the best albums of the year are going to have a lot of the best songs of the year.  Therefore, to minimize redundancies and to maximize the amount of great music shared by all, I will limit my list to the best songs of 2009 not included in any of my picks for best album.

Best Songs of 2009 (in alphabetical order):

“Blood Bank” – Bon Iver.  Bon Iver (Justin Vernon) put out one of my top 5 albums of last year and quickly followed it with an EP.  It came as no surprise to me when it contained an incredibly beautiful track like this.

“Charlie Darwin” – The Low Anthem.  If you’ve been bored enough to follow our blog closely in the last couple months, you’ve already heard this one.  Beautiful. Sad.

“Cleo’s Song” – JBM.  Jesse Marchant has an resonant voice that reminds me of… someone.  I’ve listened over and over, trying to remember where I’ve heard something like it before.  I know I have, it’s on the tip of my tongue, but it evades me.  In the process, the song pulled me in.

“Coast of Carolina” – Telekinesis.  I would say that one of the things the ’00 decade should be most noted for is the trend in absorbing much of the best independent music into mainstream advertising.  Here’s this year’s best success/victim.

“French Navy” – Camera Obscura.  I feel a little weird about having this song on my list.  It’s way more shmaltzy and romantic then I generally go for but I must be honest and admit that I couldn’t help but go back to it repeatedly.  There’s something about Tracyanne Campbell’s voice that I find incredibly unique and sexy.

“Home” – Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros.  Unfortunately, I heard an interview with Edward Sharpe and came away with the impression that he’s an insincere whanker.  Maybe he is.  Or maybe it was a bad interview.  Either way, this song is undeniably fun and sure comes across as purely joyful.

“One Wing” – Wilco.  Many people were disappointed with Wilco’s album this year and I have to admit I agreed with them to some degree.  It lacked the consistency needed to set it up there with past favorites, but Jeff Tweedy is still one of the best (or the best) songwriter of our time and “One Wing” is a stand-out example of his work.

“Optimist vs. the Silent Alarm” – Casiotone for the Painfully Alone.  There’s a line in this song that goes “raise a little family on Schlitz and Mickey Mouse.”  How could you not love that?

“Take a Minute” – K’naan.  The studio version of this track is great, but when I heard K’naan perform this acoustically for NPR (see video here) I was blown away.  He’s gotten a lot of attention this year and it’s well deserved.

“The ’59 Sound” – The Gaslight Anthem.  The Gaslight Anthem get a lot of comparisons to Bruce Springsteen and I think this is valid for good and bad.  They run right on the edge between Springsteen’s heartfelt, gritty rock-n-roll and Springsteen’s cheese-o-rama rock-n-roll – and it’s a slippery slope.  For my money though, this song falls well on the side of heart-pumping rock anthem.

“What You Do to Me” – Blakroc.  My favorite track from what I knew would be a great album; take a handful of the best rap/hip-hop artists, give them music written and played by a great blues-rock band (The Black Keys).  It’s like “Walk this Way,” but with talented rock musicians instead of a crappy hair band.

“Wolves” – The Accidental.  With the heartbeat like drum, the pulsing hum of the cello – this song sucked me in from the very first listen.  It’s soothing and ghostly all at the same time with a surprising groove.