6. Ximena Sariñana, “Vidas Paralelas”
- from the 2008 album Mediocre.
- Official website.
Sigh – two years of Spanish classes in college have sadly failed me for this song, but my lack of comprehension hasn’t stopped me from loving it anyway. (Parallel lives – I got that, at least, but I never did figure out the...
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7. Thomas Tantrum, “Work It” (2008)
- Official website.
- From the 2008 album Thomas Tantrum.
From the best album I heard in 2009 – though it’s actually a photo-finish with Song #5 – comes the sassy, saucy, quirky “Work It” – words that should never be used in a dating profile, but are eminently applicable to Thomas...
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8. The Zombies, “I Want Her She Wants Me”
- Official website.
- From the 1968 album Odessey and Oracle (Amazon mp3 link).
I fell in love with the Zombies only a few years ago – to think I’d lived so long without ever really hearing them, “She’s Not There” notwithstanding! — and it’s a relationship that...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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