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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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