Then:
Now:
What I Say And What I Mean is a fantastic song, sure, but their new 60s girl group style makes for a fantastic ALBUM. Release Me easily earned a place on my “Best of 2010″ playlist after only a handful of listens.
I like to make the occasional mix CD, for a few reasons:
I also have a few rules for making a mix CD that treat me well:
I was inspired to make a new mix tonight after hearing the absolutely fantastic theme song from HBO’s new show, How To Make It In America. It’s a song called “I Need A Dollar” by Aloe Blacc, and – wonder of wonders – Stones Throw has a free download of the song on their website. Run, don’t walk (digitally, of course) and get to downloading.
As for the mix, it’s called “She Can Say“:
I may continue tweaking it, but for now I think that it is at least presentable. If nothing else, it has some of my most favorite songs of the moment on it. Also, Lala may not let you listen to the whole thing, so let me know if you want to hear the rest of it.
It’s a bit late, but I’ve decided to finally throw together my “best albums of 2008″ list. I spent too long thinking about it, and then spent some time procrastinating after that, and now it’s March of 2009 and I feel a bit silly. To make up for that, I’ve dug up representative videos for each album, some of them offical and some of them fan made (but interesting). All of these albums are still in heavy rotation on my iPod. 2008 was a good year for music.
2008 was also a good year for buying music on Amazon Mp3, which has become my digital music destination of choice simply because of the daily deals they have. For example, the newest Lily Allen album was $3.99 on the day it came out. I’ve also bought several pretty great albums for $1.99 a pop when they were on sale. Everything in the list below is available on the site, and a decent number of the albums are less than $10 to purchase.
My list and a collection of music videos follows after the jump…
I haven’t even heard the music yet, and already it’s genius.
A bit of background: although I enjoy Rilo Kiley’s music, I’ve never been a huge fan. They are a nice little indie band that does quirk and usually does it fairly well. I have several of their albums, but I haven’t listened to them much recently.
The first time I heard their most recent album, “Under the Blacklight“, I was turned off pretty quickly and ended up deleting it from my hard drive. From that first impression, it seemed clear that they had decided to jettison everything intimate and quirky about their sound in an effort to make it big in the mainstream, and I found the results lacking.
As for Jenny Lewis, I enjoyed her first album under her own name, thought it was a nice change of pace, but, again, I didn’t think it was anything earth-shattering. It seemed more like Neko Case-lite with a girl group spin. It’s one of those albums that I appreciate but never listened to that much or that often. However, when her second album, “Acid Tongue“, came out, I listened to a few samples and was immediately hooked. I bought it pretty promptly and it’s not only in heavy rotation, it’s easily one of my most favorite albums of the year.
After listening to Acid Tongue a few dozen times, I started wondering if I had written off Under the Blacklight unfairly, so I decided to give it another spin and see if there were any hidden gems I missed the first time around. To make a long story short, there are definitely some pretty amazing songs on the album, but they’re the exception to the rule. Although my first impression was harsh, it wasn’t too far off base.
