9. Ben Kweller, “Old Hat”

- Official website.
- From the 2009 album Changing Horses.

Surely Ben Kweller had been threatening to do this from the start. For almost every power-pop slacker anthem he writes, particularly on his first solo album after the Radish days, Sha Sha, there was an unabashed bid for piano-based singer-songwriter greatness, placing him in the company of people of contemporaries like Ben Folds (which he would later collaborate with, along with another Ben (Lee) in 2003). But there’d also be one or two country/folk tracks that would seem suspiciously out of place, like “Family Tree” or “On My Way”, almost as if Kweller was winking at his listeners and nudging them with a flannel-covered elbow.

His 2009 album Changing Horses – as if the title didn’t holler the fact out loud enough – makes good on that wink and nudge; any closer to country and this would be his Tumbleweed Connection. (It’s probably because he’s moved back to Texas; I guess the 78704 zip code brings out good things in people.)

“Old Hat” is the standout track for me – an achingly beautiful ballad, where the central metaphor (an old hat) is a little shopworn but comfortable, and it works. The live footage on YouTube doesn’t quite do justice to the song – you’re missing out on a lovely pedal steel guitar solo by Kitt Kittermann – but check out this love letter of a song, which begins “Hello, sweet friend of mine” and ends with:

My tornado, love, tore it all down
Now I’m face down in all this muddy guilt
You know I wanna make you smile again
Warm your heart again like an old worn out quilt

Now listen
I’ll be your glove, I’ll be your scarf, I’ll be the cross that covers your heart
But I don’t want you to get tired of me honey after such a good start

I never want to be the old hat you put on your pretty head

Perhaps there’s something liberating in writing in the country genre; there’s a plainspokenness in country lyrics (and by extension, Kweller’s new album) that renders emotional truth less opaque than anything by emo bands out there. But there’s something about his yearning delivery that belies his words: you know in the end he’d settle for old-hat status for this girl anyway.

—–

The rest of the list so far:

10. Ida Maria, “Oh My God” (2007)
11. Anna Fermin’s Trigger Gospel, “How Do You Judge Me” (2003)
12. The Phenomenal Handclap Band, “15 to 20″ (2009)
13. Speech Debelle, “The Key” (2009)
14. ComaR, “I Want You D.A.N.C.E.” (2008)
15. Michael Jackson, “Happy” (1973)
16. Wonder Girls, “Nobody” (2008)

Popularity: 1% [?]

10. Ida Maria, “Oh My God” (2007)
- Official website.
- From the 2008 album Fortress Round My Heart.

Yes, it’s one of last year’s big songs, and it was on a bunch of 2008 year-end lists already, but hey, I’m not one of the Pitchfork cognoscenti or Sasha Frere-Jones, so it took a while before this song made its way through a hundred other bloggers and the occasional TV show and Time and finally to my happy ears. “Oh My God”, as the video captures quite literally, is a power pop anthem infused with agitation: the demand to “Find a cure for my life,” the jittery punk guitars, and that quaver in her hoarse voice early in the song just before she erupts into the bug-eyed intensity of the last third. “Is this fun for you?” she asks toward the end; it almost sounds like a threat, but oh, how much fun it is indeed. Probably Norway’s greatest musical export since Darkthrone, and with a better sense of humor about God too.

—–

The rest of the list so far:

11. Anna Fermin’s Trigger Gospel, “How Do You Judge Me” (2003)
12. The Phenomenal Handclap Band, “15 to 20″ (2009)
13. Speech Debelle, “The Key” (2009)
14. ComaR, “I Want You D.A.N.C.E.” (2008)
15. Michael Jackson, “Happy” (1973)
16. Wonder Girls, “Nobody” (2008)

Popularity: 1% [?]

11. Anna Fermin’s Trigger Gospel, “How Do You Judge Me”

- Official website.
- From the 2003 album Oh, The Stories We Hold (eMusic link).

The Chicago-based singer-songwriter Anna Fermin has one of those expressively elastic voices that sounds like it belongs to an older generation of singers; she’s partly husky and intimate on one track, then belting it out Grand Ole Opry-style on another. While “country” is the dominant musical idiom in which Fermin writes her songs, it seems like a narrow label for the expansiveness of her band’s styles, like the lilting, jazzy nature of this tune that haunted me all year. “How Do You Judge Me”, is from her band’s 2003 album produced by the late Jay Bennett and was, the liner notes read, “recorded live around Jay’s kitchen table.”

It’s a shame that I couldn’t find longer sound samples or YouTube footage – and I would have loved for people to hear Frank Kvinge’s beautiful guitar solo as well – and that the CD looks out of print and unavailable either on CD Baby or their own website or as downloadable mp3s in the usual places (Lala, Amazon, iTunes). What gives? And why isn’t Anna Fermin an alt-country superstar?

I don’t know what the song means, though I have a guess. Here’s the first stanza and the refrain:

Is it the color of my hair?
Is it the darkness of my skin that keeps you frozen in your tracks?
Is it the clothing on my back?
Is it the unfamiliar drawl of my tongue that makes me small in your eyes?

How do you judge me?
How is it that you know me so well?

—–

The rest of the list so far:

12. The Phenomenal Handclap Band, “15 to 20″ (2009)
13. Speech Debelle, “The Key” (2009)
14. ComaR, “I Want You D.A.N.C.E.” (2008)
15. Michael Jackson, “Happy” (1973)
16. Wonder Girls, “Nobody” (2008)

Popularity: 1% [?]

12. The Phenomenal Handclap Band, “15 to 20″

- Official website.
- From the album The Phenomenal Handclap Band

The Phenomenal Handclap Band is a music collective / supergroup of sorts from Brooklyn – jeez, aren’t they all from Brooklyn now at this point? – and their debut album is a happy mishmash of different genres, psychedelic soul jammed together with funky proto-disco. “15 to 20” is the knockout single for obvious reasons, but let me digress.

I remember one day trying to convince my friend Luna about the real reasons Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” became such a big hit: not just because of the amazing Bob Fosse-inspired video, but because “Single Ladies”, at heart, was a sped-up jump-rope song, and therefore appealed to people on some subliminal childhood level. I don’t think she was convinced. (For the record, though, one of my favorite things about the song, iffy gender politics aside, are the incongruous synth squiggles running throughout the whole thing.)

Speaking of incongruity (bad segue, I know), “15 to 20” operates on the same principle: take a chorus straight from Schoolhouse Rock (cf. Justice’s “D.A.N.C.E.”, already mentioned earlier), plant it on top of a ridiculously funky ‘70s detectives-with-sideburns movie groove, and see if you can get the damn thing out of your head. I couldn’t. That’s Lady Tigra on guest vocals, barely keeping up with the band (especially in the second stanza) – not that her lyrics amount to much more than babble, really. There’s something about the local police, and a savings and loan, and arms and thumbs – whatever. It’s all about that retro-groove and that elementary school chorus. “So what’s it gonna take to get through to you?” A refrain from a multiplication table was all it took.

—–

The rest of the list so far:

13. Speech Debelle, “The Key” (2009)
14. ComaR, “I Want You D.A.N.C.E.” (2008)
15. Michael Jackson, “Happy” (1973)
16. Wonder Girls, “Nobody” (2008)

Popularity: 1% [?]

13. Speech Debelle, “The Key” (2009).
- Official website.
- From the album Speech Therapy.

This was my summer anthem of 2009, via a (still!) free mp3 from Amazon back in June. To be frank, it took a while for me to figure out the Cockney lyrics the lyrics websites to publish their iffy transcriptions, and even then I had to google the definition of the word “armshouse”. All I could really go on was the unassailable argument of a chorus “Overstanding is the key, key” — a mantra I associated in my head, somehow, with “What did you want to see / What did you want to be when you grew up?” from Atlas Sound’s “Walkabout”.

It’s a lot easier to enumerate what Speech Debelle isn’t about, which is basically the usual material obsessions of most hip-hop nowadays; there’s a little bragging on “The Key”, but still she addresses her absent listener, “truthfully you bright like me / The only real difference is you slyer than me.” One realizes quickly that Speech Therapy was, indeed, speech therapy; her lyrics sometimes read like slightly rambling journal entries written at the breakfast table, or confessional letters never sent, and it’s all part of the song’s utter charm:

I’m getting older now starting to make sense of it,
Seeing the signs, reading minds like hypnotist,
Understand the figures like arithmetics and my guess is,
People are bad, man,
Insecurity breeds hate it’s a fact find,
In fact I’m sure it’s uncurable,
Some people positive while some people are negative
and totally oblivious to the harm they cause

Alas, the backlash against her began immediately after she won the Mercury Prize later this year — inevitably, by people whose favorite bands didn’t win — and disappointing record sales and apparently poorly attended concerts didn’t help.

But listen to the song! A joyful declaration of independence on a bed of clarinets and oboes, like it emerged from a Tribe Called Quest album circa 1991. The sound of swinging South London.

—–

The rest of the list so far:

14. ComaR, “I Want You D.A.N.C.E.” (2008)
15. Michael Jackson, “Happy” (1973)
16. Wonder Girls, “Nobody” (2008)

Popularity: 1% [?]