music

back on track(s) – kynthia’s year in music, 2009

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

As promised (and much discussed as a concept) in my previous post, I present the soundtrack for my year. I prefer this approach to tromping you through a verbal summary, and hopefully, so do you. I tend to do a lot of verbal tromping during the rest of the year. :)

So go listen to some music and drink some cider and make snow angels, if you are fortunate enough to have the cooperation of mother nature to that end.

Yo ho ho.

<3 Kynthia (click below to download)

Part One
Part Two

    [hanging out in the Springs and Boulder]

  1. Up Up Up Up Up Up – Ani DiFranco
  2. Disappearin’ Ink – Stephen Brunette
  3. Chicka Chicka Boom Boom
  4. The Cartoon Song – Jack
  5. [off to San Diego, at last!]

  6. Fidelity – Regina Spektor
  7. Say You Will – Kanye West
  8. Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box – Radiohead
  9. Naked As We Came – Iron & Wine
  10. Theme from Battlestar Galactica (2007)
  11. Will You Be There – Michael Jackson
  12. Pizzahut Tacobell – Das Racist (Guy Michael-Barletta Remix)
  13. Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked – Cage the Elephant
  14. L O S T
  15. In or Out – Ani DiFranco
  16. [brief northern interlude/water, wine, and a wedding]

  17. Me Gustas Tu – Manu Chao
  18. Comes Love – Billie Holiday
  19. [the twin spirits of crisis and opportunity nudge me away from San Diego sooner than expected]

  20. Apres Moi – Regina Spektor
  21. Chicago – Sufjan Stevens
  22. Born of a Button – Erik Pukinskis
  23. Evolve – Ani DiFranco
  24. All I Want – Joni Mitchell
  25. [wherein I was saved from a foul mood in Black Rock City by an unexpected meeting and had the chance to see the city through virgin eyes]

  26. God Only Knows – The Beach Boys (Aeroplane Remix)
  27. [soaking in hot water, pine trees, starlight, and slide guitar]

  28. On the Radio – Regina Spektor
  29. Hummingbird – Wilco
  30. The Sailor’s Grave on the Prairie – Leo Kottke
  31. White Summer/Black Mountain Side – Led Zeppelin
  32. [writing 50,000 words]

  33. Violin Concerto in E Minor Op. 64/Allegro molto appassionato – Itzhak Perlman/Daniel Barenboim (Felix Mendelssohn/Sergey Prokofiev)
  34. [the hanged/burning man means surrendering to flow]

  35. Teardrop (Theme from House, M.D.) – Massive Attack
  36. Wishful Thinking – Wilco
  37. Birds – Kate Nash

back, by popular fiat — kynthia’s year in music, 2008

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

after a one year hiatus, i am pleased to announce the return of “kynthia’s year in music,” a project that i began in 2006, repeated in 2007, and heretofore hope to continue as a year-end tradition.

i figure it’s way more fun for all of us than if i try to write a straight holiday letter, and way more durable than tissue-paper snowflakes.

since i missed last year, this post is actually a bonus edition of sorts – the songs below are for 2008, and 2009 is still coming.

i felt compelled to complete last year before moving on to this year, because as it turns out, i really enjoy the process of making these mixes, and i also enjoy having them around to listen to as a memory device. it’s like looking at old pictures, but pictures that i can dance to, or sing along with while driving. so i’d rather not be missing a year, when i look back on the series later.

speaking of driving: i spent a lot of time in the car in 2008, and my musical experience was therefore heavily skewed in favor of what happened to be in the car with me. i bought my current car at the end of 2007 from a friend of mine who had installed a stereo system that plugs into an ipod, and he left an ipod attached, so i kind of inherited a random sample of someone else’s music collection, and a fair number of songs came from my exploration therein.

the basic arc of my year went like this:

  • i rang in the new year in florida, where my mom was serving as the interim minister for the UU church in west palm beach. i had arrived there shortly before christmas, after driving from LA to Bloomington in 40 hours (30 driving, 10 sleeping), and then relying upon wonderful friends to forgive me for missing a party the night before, shove food in my mouth, load me into a car, and take me to the indy airport in time to make my flight. i was very, very tired.
  • from mid-january to july, i was in bloomington, where i couchsurfed and housesat and finagled enough web work out of my old job at IU to get by while trying to teach myself to spin other webs of my own. i also went to bonnaroo for the third time, and i was a volunteer for the pod program, which means i got to get in early AND for free, which was fun.
  • for most of july i was on the road, first to colorado by myself, and then to california with erik, because erik is awesome and agreed to fly out to visit his brother in boulder and then join me. we took our time and wound through new mexico and arizona, and then went to vegas, where we won tickets to the dance show at the tropicana. it was a trip.
  • i spent august in san diego, los angeles, and black rock city, where i ran the cafe kitchen for the first time, and introduced my dad to burning man.
  • in september, i drove back to bloomington for lotus.
  • in october, i returned to colorado, where i continued to finagle web work (now, with telecommuting!), reconnected with my dad, visited the bourlands in boulder a lot, thought about kwerk, and used netflix to catch up on tv shows i had been ignoring for 5 years — turns out, the part of me that went to film school is still in there somewhere, and it likes tv now!

i was in colorado until early 2009, but for now, we are only concerned with 2008.

basically, these are the songs that spoke to me, for one reason or another, over the course of that year. i listened, and sometimes sang along or spoke back, and as a result, the moment or moments that make up those musical conversations are saved as a sort of montage in my mind. when i hear the songs, i see the memories, like when you smell cinnamon rolls and remember grandma’s house. or maybe the mall. depending on how suburban your upbringing, and the ethnicity and domesticity of your grandmother.

in other words, if i were to make a movie telling the story of my year, this would be the soundtrack, and i leave it to you to imagine the actual plot.

or, you know, you can ask me about it sometime, and buy me a beer.
:)

the songs have been zipped into three bundles to maximize your download experience.

they are presented in roughly the order of the memories they trigger, with certain adjustments made for the sake of pleasant song transitions, and they are intended to be listened to in sequence. at least once. :)

the next course will be served once 2009 has ceased providing fresh ingredients.

you are encouraged to purchase the songs you like best directly from their deserving creators, one of whom (see track 26) happens to be my father.

the third bundle is kind of a bonus bundle, and can be seen as separate from the rest of the mix – track 30 is 30 minutes long, and is an example of binaural entrainment, which means that it will induce brainwave patterns that are consistent with meditative states if you listen to it with stereo headphones, and will simply sound like rain if you don’t.

it’s great for power naps.

track 31 is included because it is what the car ipod would play whenever it reset, so i heard the first few bars a lot, and it amuses me to preserve that memory, and it amuses me even more to do so by placing it after the meditation track, because i kind of think of meditation as pushing the reset button for my brain.

as a bonus, beck is also way better with stereo headphones, so positive reinforcement wins!
:)

bon apetit.

Part One

  1. Dani California – Red Hot Chili Peppers
  2. Gamemaster – Paul Oakenfold
  3. Looking at the World from the Bottom of a Well – Mike Doughty
  4. God Put a Smile Upon Your Face – Coldplay
  5. Cha Cha – Balkan Beat Box
  6. Frank Sinatra – Cake
  7. Little Plastic Castle – Ani DiFranco
  8. Marching Bands of Manhattan – Death Cab for Cutie
  9. Dead – They Might Be Giants
  10. Wonderboy – Tenacious D
  11. Snow ((Hey, Oh)) – Red Hot Chili Peppers
  12. U Can’t Hold No Groove – Victor Wooten
  13. Yeah. – Jake Shimabakuro
  14. Think About the Way – Ice MC
  15. She’s Electric – Oasis

Part Two

  1. I Fought in a War – Belle and Sebastian
  2. Fixing Her Hair – Ani DiFranco
  3. Seek Up – Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds
  4. Cast No Shadow – Oasis
  5. Magic Trick – M Ward
  6. Horn Into – Modest Mouse
  7. The World at Large – Modest Mouse
  8. Float On – Modest Mouse
  9. Ocean Breathes Salty – Modest Mouse
  10. No Surprises – Radiohead
  11. My Guitar Went to Burnin’ Man – Stephen Brunette
  12. My Old Man Boogie – The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band
  13. Choose Life – PF Project featuring Ewan McGregor
  14. Extraordinary Machine – Fiona Apple

Part Three

  1. The Dive – Centerpoint Research Institute
  2. Loser – Beck

little big distinctions

Friday, December 4th, 2009

and to continue our series in: “use your blog as a personal repository of memories, and let others read it and not read it as they will,” i present, a chat snapshot of me and erik, fly on the wall perspective.
Feel free to skim or click on through if you are not amused by semantic tomfoolery.

(more…)

a tradition in the mixing, volume two

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

um, hi there…
i have no excuse for not keeping everyone updated on my exploits over the past month, apart, i suppose, from the exploits themselves, which have kept me rather busy.

but that’s pretty lame.

i am writing today from palm beach gardens, FL, where i have spent the holidays with my mother and grandmother, and actually, i don’t have any updates for you beyond that skeletal announcement, sooo… maybe i should skip this part and go with more of a distraction-oriented technique…

is that a new sweater you’re wearing? because the color really suits you. you look ten years younger. i hardly recognize you. in fact, have we met? i think you need to send me your bank account information and the last four digits of your SSN, just so i can be sure you’re really who you say you are… and by the way i’m going to tahiti next week, can i send you a postcard?

:)

(don’t really send anything, grandma…

…but i’ll still send a postcard)

ok so anyway, a year ago i wrote a post describing a potential new end-of-year tradition – the compilation of a playlist; a soundtrack of sorts for the year gone by; a record, as i put it at the time, of “the songs that happened to stand out for me in a given year, be they new discoveries or old favorites that are somehow heard anew.”

i like this idea for lots of reasons, not the least of which that i have always found the compilation of mixes to be hella fun, and it turns out that picking out songs that trigger memories of the key events of the year gone by is a very enjoyable activity with quite a bit of reflective potential, so… good new year’s game! i did it again!

this year, however, i finally abandoned all pretense of ever intending to actually burn the finished product onto CD, and as a result there was no very strong incentive to limit my choices to a number that would fit easily within the memory requirements of antiquity. whether that led to a bloat of laziness or a blossoming of potential i shall leave for you to decide, but, whatever the verdict, if you decide to play along i shall increase your mp3 collection by 44 units, so i hope that there are at least one or two selections that help you kick off the year with a smile.

fwiw, 6 of the songs are actually the movements of one cello suite, so that kind of skews the tally, and in a few cases there are several songs in a row because they have been inseparably fused together in my memory as components of some pastiche of imagery and sound that i heard in my head at one point or another during the year, but have not yet fully discovered how to translate into this shared domain we know as the physical world. that is quite possibly a project for the year ahead, so… stay tuned for volume 3! :)

as it is, i offer you my year in music, 2007, zipped up for less frustrating downloading (but still passively time-intensive… go read someone else’s blog! drink tea!), ordered with one ear to a rough chronology and the other to pacing and flow. whether any of it shines through the cracks of my tinkering or not, i hear a story when i listen to these songs, and i am privileged to have the chance to share that story now with you.

enough words.

  1. Ain’t Got No/I Got Life – Nina Simone
  2. Superman – REM
  3. Sneakin’ Out the Hospital – The Beastie Boys
  4. Chapter 24 – Pink Floyd
  5. Babe I’m Gonna Leave You – Led Zeppelin
  6. Look at Miss Ohio – Gillian Welch
  7. The Gloaming – Radiohead
  8. The Only Difference Between Martyrdom and Suicide is Press Coverage – Panic at the Disco
  9. Lotto – First Coat
  10. Suite No. 1 in G: 1. Prelude – Johann Sebastian Bach/Boris Pergamenschikow
  11. Find the River – REM
  12. Suite No. 1 in G: 2. Allemande – Johann Sebastian Bach/Boris Pergamenschikow
  13. Intermission – Panic at the Disco
  14. Suite No. 1 in G: 3. Courante – Johann Sebastian Bach/Boris Pergamenschikow
  15. delicate – damien rice
  16. Suite No. 1 in G: 4. Sarabande – Johann Sebastian Bach/Boris Pergamenschikow
  17. Hook – Blues Traveler
  18. Suite No. 1 in G: 5. Menuett I + II – Johann Sebastian Bach/Boris Pergamenschikow
  19. Fourth Time Around – Bob Dylan
  20. Suite No. 1 in G: 6. Gigue – Johann Sebastian Bach/Boris Pergamenschikow
  21. smaller rivers – Sam Prekop
  22. I’m Free – The Who (Tommy)
  23. Where Do They Make Balloons? – They Might Be Giants
  24. Measuring Cups – Andrew Bird
  25. cold water – damien rice
  26. Chinese Translation – M Ward
  27. April Come She Will – Simon and Garfunkel
  28. Alpenglow – Victor Hanson Smith
  29. Weatherman – First Coat
  30. Singin in the Rain – Gene Kelly
  31. Across the Universe – The Beatles
  32. Saturday Sun -Nick Drake
  33. Nude – Radiohead
  34. Greetings in Braille – The Elected
  35. It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) – Bob Dylan
  36. Is It Wicked Not To Care? – Belle and Sebastian
  37. volcano – damien rice
  38. I Am The Walrus – The Beatles
  39. Such Great Heights – The Postal Service
  40. Ramon – Laurie Anderson
  41. Life in a Glasshouse – Radiohead
  42. Fuel – Ani DiFranco
  43. Blackbird – Bobby McFerrin

happy new year.

does anyone else use itunes like this?

Friday, July 13th, 2007

so for a long time i was annoyed with itunes because there was so much more i wanted to do with playlist management… and there still is.

but recently i find myself doing something very interesting that i must grant is only possible with the ginormous always-there library that is itunes trademark, and that is this:

i think of a song or album i want and type in a keyword to trim the list down – like “river” or “hotel” – and then i listen to the song i was after, but when it’s done i listen to all the other songs that came up, too. it’s kind of like getting a themed shuffle playlist, but the theme can be like “songs with the letter ‘g’ in them.”

once i realized i was doing this, i started having fun with it, and sometimes i just type in a random word, or i take the word i was going for and erase a few letters to see what happens. like just now i typed in “great” because that’s my new favorite way to get all of david’s gift of the greatest jazz recordings of all time while also getting other good songs for kicks, but then i scaled back even further to “gre”, and as a result my playlist now has songs, albums, and artists with “green” in their name and, for some reason i don’t understand, all of OK Computer.

people wonder how we will slice and dice our music when we are perpetually confronted with a full lifetime library. so there’s my random data point for the anthropological record. :)

bonnaroo highlights

Friday, June 22nd, 2007

i took very few pictures at bonnaroo.

sorry.

my camera was running low on batteries, they didn’t want them inside centeroo (where the musics was) anyway, and i was focused on other matters, so…

here’s the view from our tent when i woke up friday morning:

Over the city skyline Friday morning

those are just a handful of the homes of the 80,000+ people who descend upon the otherwise deserted tennessee farm for three days of chaos and music.

and here’s me, after walking around all day friday, and acquiring a new piece of headwear to protect me from the sun. because no one wants to put on as much sunscreen as would be required to actually prevent blistering. so i decided to enlist material support. by sunday? i was wearing long sleeves. place was like a desert. heat and dust and tons of people higher than kites and in desperate need of hydration. fun times.

Me, new hat, old glasses, long day

here’s my short list of highlights from the weekend:

  • meeting our underage friendly neighbors from connecticut, one of whom used “phatty” at least ten times a sentence, as a general descriptor of the awesomeness of the universe entire.
  • being able to loan an extra tent to the people a few cars down from us who were missing their poles. good karma from hour one.
  • seeing richard thompson and feeling time stop and texting jeff when vincent black lightning was playing.
  • john paul jones came out and played mandolin with gillian welch and david rawlings. it was an awesome moment. but honestly? she was super cool all on her own.
  • renee taught me to play some card game with gold involved, and i could do it!
  • regina spektor and damien rice both kept me wrapped around their adorable, beautiful, charming, subtle, sweet, nuanced fingers, even though some would say i should have gone to hear ziggy marley and ben harper. i don’t regret it.
  • sting on a big screen with 50,000 screaming onlookers is indeed impressive.
  • the flaming lips are a joy to behold. and dance to. with no restraint. and bonnaroo is brilliant because there are so few places on this earth where one can walk from the flaming lips to gov’t mule to sasha and john digweed all within the space of a night and then strike back to your tent with the sun coming up and the world feeling like a glorious marvel.
  • at one point some jokester walked by us muttering under his breath “plutonium!! weapons-grade!! depleted uranium!!” as a commentary on the black market. it was amusering.
  • bobby weir was there, and a bunch of hippies who came only for him. it was awesome. he played come together. and we did.
  • many of the not hippies were there for widespread panic, about whom i knew very little. they put on a damn fine show. consider me schooled by the younguns. ;)
  • i made two new friends of rather different stripes, but i hope to remain in touch with them both.
  • as we were packing the car, we learned that our neighbors had never heard of hair. the musical i mean. we played it. they laughed. it was the campiest scene Ever. and awesome.
  • on the way out, we groundscored a baby pool for jarien, a couple buckets, a sleeping mat, a decent pair of boots, a bunch of stuff i did not even process but renee found room for somehow, and, i kid you not, a four-foot tall red stuffed animal with a cardboard sign around it’s neck that proclaims: “Feed the Dragon!”

so quite the weekend, eh?
:)

on with the show!

musical postlude

Sunday, May 13th, 2007

right after i published that last post, the crystal ball that is shuffle offered up one of my favorite ani difranco songs, a song that speaks of both mothers and moving beyond anger, and the fact that it has already been a musical day here at the K-log and this one is offered up (up, up, up…) by one of the most well-known icons of feminism in the musical world, well…

it seems a fitting way to put the day to bed.

Ani DiFranco – Angry Any More

now really, i’ll shut up for a bit.

free association

Sunday, May 13th, 2007

since many of you probably didn’t get to the bottom of my rambly year in music post, today i am going to relink to one of the songs, because i clicked on it in my itunes this morning because of the name, and then i remembered how happy it makes me, and now i want everyone to run around the house making trumpet noises with their mouths and half-whispering “he gets a little jumpy when the PHONE rings!”

because if that doesn’t make your day, then i’ve got nothin else to offer.

Hey Momma – Kay Kay and His Weathered Underground

Go a little crazy and love both your momma and yourself.

woah

Tuesday, March 20th, 2007

this is the kind of high-quality sap that youtube was made to deliver to a wider audience.

it’s a cover of coldplay’s “fix you” by the Young@Heart chorus, a group in Northampton, MA that is composed entirely of senior citizens and apparently tours around and gets NEA grants and stuff.

talk about schmaltzy, but i am always interested in things that are good schmaltz, because knowing what pulls our heartstrings can teach us a lot.

let’s just say this song was very well chosen.

for the curious, this link was brought to me via this blog, which, fwiw, is the blog that most makes me wish that feedreaders imported stylesheets. it’s purty.

kynthia’s year in music, 2006

Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007

so a few years ago i made a cover song compilation that has since become somewhat notorious amongst my friends. its notoriety is not because of its contents, but because i totally dropped the ball on delivering it, even though i had hyped the whole thing up quite a bit, so for most people it was a rather vicious tease.

the trouble was that i got sucked into grand plans of liner notes and cover art that made the whole project take much longer than necessary, and then when it was finished the poor thing had to contend with me looking up addresses, finding packaging, and going to the post office, which are all activities that i tend to find difficult in a degree that is far out of proportion with reality.

my resistance was hopefully understandable, therefore, when in the midst of this cover project i conceived of aNother cd project – not of cover songs, but of the songs that happened to stand out for me in a given year, be they new discoveries or old favorites that are somehow heard anew.

it seemed like a fun alternative to a christmas letter, since it would be a similar sort of “year that was”, but it would then also have the bonus of performing a function other than the justification of the existence of the refrigerator magnet.

not that magnet support is not a noble function; it’s just already a pretty full market.

it was a masterstroke of procrastination, really, even though it was trying to sneak by in generosity’s clothing. my brain wanted to prolong the fun of picking and ordering songs indefinitely, so it decided to conceive of a lifelong ambition rather than admit that the first cd was done and prepare it for mailing.

i really am rather insane.

i scolded myself and put the idea aside with the intention of returning to it later, but since the cover story fizzled out and thinking about it makes me tired and guilty, the “year of songs” idea has suffered by association.

this year, however, i started considering it again while i was traveling, and probably because overseas postage made my desire to avoid a massive mailing seem reasonable rather than embarrassing, i kept thinking about it, and decided that i would just make it a blog post, and then maybe there will be enough momentum that i will be motivated to make a cd version next year.

or maybe cds won’t exist next year…

heh heh

as it happens, given the combined impact of lucy’s amazing card sending habits and the fact that i got a christmas card from jeff and shaowen and i didn’t even give them my address, i am considering making the hanging up of my postal hangup into a new year’s resolution, so perhaps those cover cds will be on their way yet.

while me and the resolution board sort that one out, though, the “just put it out there” action committee is proud to offer you kynthia’s year in music, 2006.

despite their longing to be free, a concession to the unresolved nature of the intellectual property debate will lead me to return the songs to the captivity of private ownership after ONE WEEK ONLY – that is through January 9, 2007, after which only the links endorsed by the artists themselves will remain, and you’ll have to ask itunes or napster or some music getting elves if you missed the train.

that means i’m taking the songs down next tuesday, a’ight?

if you made it on time, and you’re using firefox like a good monkey, you might want to check out the flashgot extension if you don’t have it already. it downloads all the links on the page, so you don’t have to.

once it’s installed, i recommend going to tools->flashgot->more options->downloads and putting mp3 in the box, because then it will only get the mp3 files, which saves you the hassle of deleting a bunch of crap that you really don’t want.

if that sounds too complicated, just do whatever makes you happy. :)

happy listening, and happy new year!


Kynthia’s Year in Music, 2006

In January I decided that I wasn’t allowed to ride my bike with my new mp3 player and super-duper headphones. I knew that I was smitten when I then found myself walking to class even when the roads were clear and dry.

  1. This Heart is a Stone – Acid House Kings
  2. Say – Cat Power
  3. Blow – Lincoln

In February, at F&L, David sang scat with his eyes shut tight and his hands in the air, Erik built a dance party out of mad skillz and honeybells, and the Beatles revealed new secrets to me early in the morning. Each of them reminded me in turn of why and how much I love them.

  1. Minnie the Moocher – West End Orchestra and Singers (Blues Brothers Soundtrack)
  2. Let’s Get Retarded – Black Eyed Peas
  3. Carry that Weight/The End – The Beatles

In the spring and early summer I stared the reality of graduation in the face and buckled down to conjure a capstone from the scattered trail of post-it notes, sketches and grandiose visions that had been accumulating in my wake all year. In the midst of the whirlwind, Moby mysteriously became the soundtrack for Dunn Woods at dusk, Josh Ritter centered me as I floundered in the effort to express something so big that I could barely glimpse how it held together, Fiona Apple was a gift from Erik as we made our pact to present something every day even when we sounded like lunatics, and, before it was anywhere and everywhere, Crazy secured its place in my memory as a video in I107 as we procrastinated, a joyous shout from Lucy as we shared 1/2 price wine, and a drunken singalong anthem on moonlit backroads and train tracks leading home from the Vid as spring bled into summer and we struggled valiantly against the weight of what was to come.

  1. Stop Whispering – Radiohead
  2. Underwear Goes Inside the Pants – Lazyboy TV
  3. Freshman Thesis – Thee More Shallows
  4. Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad – Moby
  5. Thin Blue Flame – Josh Ritter
  6. Waltz – Fiona Apple
  7. Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part One) – Pink Floyd
  8. Crazy – Gnarls Barkley

Summer hit full force, but it took a while for the idea that I had finished a Masters’ Degree to sink in. In the meantime, I went to St. Louis to eat ribs and climb on old airplanes, and drove to Tennessee to go desitively bonnaroo. Then I set off on my solo trek down the eastern seaboard that would lead eventually to Scotland and 6 months across the sea.

  1. Fake Plastic Trees – Radiohead
  2. Bastard – Ben Folds
  3. Masterfade – Andrew Bird
  4. Another Mystery – Dar Williams
  5. And it Rained All Night – Thom Yorke

In Edinburgh there was a lot of music, but it was such a whirlwind that the only thing that really sticks in my mind is some guys with didgeridoos and bagpipes, and I don’t have a recording of them. The Hollytree, on the other hand, was a dive into the pop charts as we sought ways to fill the hours and connect to the world from which we were otherwise isolated by miles that might as well have been oceans. Tania took this more seriously than the rest of us by singing something ALL of the time, even if words or spoons were thrown in her direction. Some things will never leave our heads as a result. :)

  1. Mr. Jones – Counting Crows (“caught up in kentallen… show me some of that ceilidh dancing…”)
  2. Hips Don’t Lie – Shakira
  3. America – Razorlight
  4. Falling Stars – Sunset Strippers

I’m rounding the year off in London, with a lot of alone time. It has given me the chance to catch up on 3hive recommendations from the past few months, and, as always, a few of them are like old friends I am overjoyed to finally meet. In true “one is silver and the other’s gold” fashion, however, Michael Stipe made his way onto the playlist by chance and stayed there, so he gets a nod as well.

  1. You are the Everything – R.E.M.
  2. You Never Got Me Right – Frida Hyvonen
  3. George -First Coat
  4. Hey Momma – Kay Kay and His Weathered Underground
  5. Words – Evan Duby

In many ways, Andrew Bird is the artist of my year (buy this whole album!), so he deserves another even if it disturbs my roughly chronological ordering, which I am honestly surprised that I followed, but it’s fun and actually flows quite well.

Luckily, this song strikes me as a very fitting theme for the year as a whole, so I can think of no better way to wrap things up.

  1. Tables and Chairs – Andrew Bird

Enjoy!