I Actually Waited until the End of the Year
I find that falling in love with music is never straightforward. A song might exist in the trivia of your periphery the first few times you hear it – at a house party, the last verse and chorus as you skim radio stations while driving, in the blur of The Hype Machine's Popular playlist for a certain day, as the soundtrack to an emphatic TV moment. But then one morning you somehow wake up with it in your head and realise you don't have it in mp3, you download it and play it several times like you're cramming for an exam on it. And all of a sudden you're in love, trying to find out if there's an album or when it's being released, reading the band's Wikipedia page, loving it on Last.fm. Other times a song you just know can become a song that you love when a third party is involved, like hearing it at some balanced moment during terrific times with friends or someone special, or at the peak of a bottle of whiskey.
I'm not sure how other people in the internet feel when someone recommends them a song. When someone tells me about a song they think I'd like, I instinctively want to reject whatever it is without even listening to it. Especially when they say something like:
'Hey Brad, you like The Shins and Big Country, right? I bet you'd dig Frightened Rabbit. Listen to The Modern Leper, you'll love it!'
I want to reply 'No! I'm not that simple! My musical tastes are inimitable, inspired by nothing but serendipity and insight. Don't treat my ears like some Prolog subroutine. I'm a unique snowflake motherfucker! Get out of my brain!'
With that said, I've made a list of songs from 2010 which I think are good. And I've posted them online, arranged from "best" to "best and listened to the most", pretty much. I haven't bothered with streaming links or anything because I figure most people are smart enough to know how to search on Grooveshark and YouTube and The Hype Machine if the vague sentence describing each song piques any curiosity.
I have also uploaded all the songs posted tonight into a zip file that you can download here, in case you feel the urge to immerse yourself in my recommendations for an hour or so.
The list is as follows...Continue Reading Best Songs of 2010...
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The woman with the fake tan stepped into my office, sat across from my desk and lit a cigarette.
At least, she would, sometime in the next 20 minutes. Smelling the future has advantages, but precision isn’t one of them.