Favorite albums of 2000-2009.
So Pitchfork did a huge P2K feature on the decade in music, and I’ve finally gotten around to posting my 100 favorite albums of 2000-2009. It’s been a few months since I submitted my list to my editor, so I’m sure things would change around a bit if I started my list from scratch today. There’d probably be more of 2009 albums on the list, although 2009 was by far not the least-represented year on the list (that would be 2004, with only 4 albums on my final list). Plus, this was a list submitted for tabulation with other writers’ lists, so there was some anticipation of others’ tastes going on (in other words, I would’ve put more than one Mastodon album on my list if I thought that more than one would make it onto Pitchfork’s final list).
It’s interesting to look back and see how my #1s did for each year; I don’t have my top 10 lists from before 2004, but here’s a summary of my #1s from 2004 through 2009:
2004: Joanna Newsom: The Milk-Eyed Mender (Drag City) - placed #16 overall on my decade list.
2005: Sufjan Stevens: Illinois (Asthmatic Kitty) - #3 overall.
2006: Mastodon: Blood Mountain (Reprise) - did not place, because I went with Leviathan instead.
2007: Iron and Wine: The Shepherd’s Dog (Sub Pop) - #5 overall.
2008: Earth: The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull (Southern Lord) - #8 overall.
2009: Mastodon: Crack the Skye (Reprise) - did not place (see 2006, above). This album also didn’t really sink in with me until much later in the year.
Favorite labels, based on their representation on this list: Sub Pop (7 albums), Touch & Go (6 albums), and Matador/ Merge/ Secretly Canadian (4 albums each).
There were a couple of really great years in this decade; I’m surprised at how many albums from 2001 still really hold up over time. A lot of those have personal significance (Girls Can Tell and Know By Heart remind me of living in Austin; the Argument reminds me of moving to DC; and Things We Lost in the Fire reminds me of going on tour with Low), but I think that music is always associative, and there are probably many albums from other years that I tie to significant moments in my life. Ever since I started writing about music (in late 2001), though, I began consuming and absorbing music differently, and it’s weird to reflect on the decade and see how my listening habits have changed over time.
NP: Codeine, the White Birch.