Elizabeth Bear's Music Picks

2007 is notable as the year that Emma Bull bankrupted me on music through the more or less simple expedient of sending me mix CDs. Not all of the following is her fault, but a significant fraction of it is. I do comfort myself that I gave as good as I got, however, since I subjected her to Iron & Wine, Chris Smither, and Dar Williams, among other things.

So without further ado, here's what I played to death this year, that I wasn't playing to death already.

Chris Smither - Leave the Light On (2006)

Smither has been doing the traveling musicman thing for over forty years. He's in his early sixties now, and still hitting the road and turning out the occasional high-quality record. _Leave the Light On_ is vintage Chris: fancy fingerpicked blues guitar with sarcastic, self-aware lyrics peppered with savage or trenchant observations. I'm particularly fond of the title track--a poignant song about love and getting older--"Diplomacy" (a political satire aimed squarely between the eyebrows of the current administration," and "Origin of Species," which takes on the doctrine of Intelligent Design.

Richard Thompson - Sweet Warrior (2007)

Thompson's first major-label release in a good long time is a solid album that doesn't necessarily break a lot of new ground--but does deliver a lot of joy. Good juicy guitar, Thompson's trademark instrumental and lyrical cleverness, and a few really standout songs that can rank with the best in the Thompson catalog. There may not be a "Beeswing" on this album, but "Dad's Gonna Kill Me," is about as perfect a character portrait of a desperate soldier as exists this side of _All Quiet On The Western Front_, and "I'll Never Give It Up" is a classic Thompson insult song. Add a rolling cover of "Johnny's Far Away" and the heartbreaking "She Sang Angels To Rest," which reminds me of his classic "Jenny," and you have the makings of a CD I keep in the car for long-distance driving.

Peter Mulvey - The Knuckleball Suite (2006)

Okay. "Shirt" is still my favorite Mulvey song. But "The Girl In The High-Tops" has officially knocked "The Trouble With Poets" out of second place. Mulvey has been getting stronger and more consistent with every release since the album on which "Poets" was the title track, and this one is no different. Eclectic, varied, showcasing Mulvey's resonant voice and percussive guitar-playing and trademark erudition, this is another one I tend to put in on repeat until the neighbors start to complain.

Vienna Teng - Dreaming Through The Noise (2006)

In case you start to think all I ever listen to is guitarists, well--only mostly. This is Teng's third album, and it's sweet and startlingly wide-ranging and a little bit underproduced. Her voice has gotten a bit buried in the mix, which makes me sad, but the album makes up for it with songs as savage as "Whatever You Want" and as hopeful--and humorous--as 1br/1ba. (I got divorced this year. I listened to that last one a lot.) Also, on the topic of marriage, "City Hall"--her hopeful and melancholy song about the experience of same-sex couples waiting to be married in San Francisco--never fails to make me tear up a little.

Iron & Wine - Our Endless Numbered Days (2004)

Iron & Wine is a guy named Sam Beam, and whoever else he's invited this week. I bought the _Woman King_ EP after hearing the title track on Radio Paradise ( <http://www.radioparadise.com>www.radioparadise.com), and only just finally got around to picking up a second album--not the newest one, either. However, having heard this, several more just went on the list. Beam is a grizzly bear of a guy, bearded and shaggy, but he has the voice of a somewhat hesitant, out-of-breath angel. And he sings the wickedest little songs--a little bit abstract, a little bit vicious, a little bit tragic, and often creepily dissociated. I keep emailing friends about this one and saying, "You gotta hear this song!" Standout tracks include "Free Until They Cut Me Down," a song about a hanging from the point of view of the guest of honor, "Cinder and Smoke," in which a family tragedy might come as a relief to some, and "On Your Wings," which might be about God and might be about losing faith.

Andrew Bird - Armchair Apocrypha (2007) and The Mysterious Production of Eggs (2005)

Bird is one of the ones that's Emma's fault. He's a multi-instrumentalist who's prone to whistling sweetly into the microphone, plucking his violin like a guitar, and using words like "mitosis" in his lyrics. He also wrote a song about tardive dyskinesia ("A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left"), which alone would be enough to endear him to me forever. I'm really not sure what to say about this guy. He's weird, he's unsettling, he's obviously smart as a whip, and some of the harmonics in this stuff make my neck hairs stand up on end. Standout tracks on _Armchair Apocrypha_ are "Imitosis" (a paen to the neurochemical impossibility of love, and the first song by him I heard, to which my reaction was an instant _sold_!), "Heretics," and "Plasticities." Standouts on _The Mysterious Production of Eggs_ are the abovementioned song about tardive dyskinesia, "MX Missiles," and my absolute favorite on the album, "Skin Is, My" which might be a love song, after a fashion: "my skin is/cold as her toes on the bathroom floor/run back to bed and slam the door/oh what a lovely sound."

Crooked Still - Hop High (2007) and Shaken By A Low Sound (2006)

Also Emma's fault. Crooked Still is a not-particularly-trad bluegrass quartet comprised of cello, banjo, upright bass and vocals. (They've now added a fiddle, also.) The banjo player, Greg Liszt, is one hot musician: if you think you don't like banjo, give the cover of Gillian Welch's "Orphan Girl" off the new album a try. This is the good stuff, and I was also very taken by their version of "Little Sadie," which is probably the best version of that I've heard anywhere ever. I actually think the 2006 album is stronger. In addition to "Little Sadie," it offers absolutely stellar versions of "Come On In My Kitchen" (Not so very oblique blues euphemisms for a thousand, Alex?) and "Ain't No Grave."

Thea Gilmore - Harpo's Ghost (2006)

Gilmore is another one of those sharp, sharp lyricists I'm so addicted to. Also, her music has a driving insidious quality that keeps me slapping tracks on mix CDs to take with me on those twenty-hour drives. Standouts on this album are "We Built A Monster" and "Everybody's Numb."

Regina Spektor - Begin to Hope (2006)

My friend Stephen, who puts up with an awful lot of "Oh my god, you HAVE TO HEAR THIS!" from me, returned the favor with Ms. Spektor's album, which I am passionately in love with. A native Russian speaker, Spektor's songs are loopy and angry and philosophical. If anything, in terms of smartness and dance-mope get-up-and-bounce sensibility, as well as vocal brass, this reminds me of Meredith Brooks' debut album. It's not as folk-punk as Ani DiFranco, but it's just as smart, and perhaps more wide-ranging emotionally. If anything, something about her lyrical choices and arrangements reminds me a bit of Leonard Cohen, and his perspicacious little narrative knives in the gut. "On The Radio" is my favorite song on this album.

Stew - Guest Host (2000)

How did I go all these years and never hear of Stew? Gosh, he's marvelous, merrily banging away on profoundly subversive little songs about genderbending, the frequent uselessness of rehab, and what your grandmother got up to in 1926 that maybe you would rather not know about. The real attraction of these songs is the narratives, but Stew's voice has a lot going for it, too--it's buttery and seductive and deceptive, and I have more than once caught myself singing some of his raunchier lyrics in public places without actually intending to. The genderplay on this album alone would power the Revenant David Bowie for at least six months. Good times, good times. Standout tracks: "Re-Hab," "Into Me," "Man in a Dress," and "Bijou," though there's not a bad song on this album.

Patti Smith - Twelve (2007)

Smith's first studio album in several years--I'm too lazy to go look it up--got a lot of critical flack for not being deconstructive enough. It's comprised of covers, and some of them are Not The Sort Of Songs One Associates With Patti Smith, and she plays many of the arrangements pretty straight rather than reinventing them a la her infamous version of "Gloria." But I think the critics got it wrong on this one, and the clue is in the nigh-unto-Bluegrass version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," which is softened and rearranged for banjo and dulcimer and could have easily drifted into parody, rather than becoming the breathtaking little creature that she's made it. There's deconstruction in the breathy chick version, too (Frida Snell's cover of "Bullet With Butterfly Wings," available on her Myspace page, being maybe the Platonic example of this phenomenon) and it seems to me that at this point, sixty-year-old Smith is deconstructing herself. Not only can she sing--her voice has achieved a maturity and resonance I've never before associated with Patti Smith--and she brings a smoky subtlety (backed with a fair amount of the old Patti balls and growl) to tracks such as "Soul Kitchen" and "Pastime Paradise," that latter a song I never had much use for before, except maybe in the Weird Al version. And she's willing to take on some completely wacky choices: the commercial eighties pop of Tears for Fears and Paul Simon, for example. Other than the Cobain, though, the real standout is her cover of Dylan's "The Changing of the Guard," which she turns into an emotionally complex meditation on the futility of war and the inevitable heat-death of the universe, more or less.