The 100 Best Songs of the 2010s (41-50)

We're now in the better half of the best songs of the decade…

(Click here for the whole list so far, with a Spotify playlist.)


50. Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros — "Life is Hard"

I cried at one part of this video.




49. Lorde — "400 Lux"

(Here's a fun cover with a new wave vibe by an Israeli group, the Young Professionals.)




48. Francesca Esmé — "Adult Things"

Full disclosure, the singer is a friend of mine. The song was written by David Safran from Chicago, Illinois; here's an Atlantic post about it.




47. Paul McCartney — "New"

After half a century of making music, Paul McCartney still keeps things "New." I love when this song seems to be ending but then there's a doo wop coda.

(Unplugged backstage.)




46. Ra Ra Riot — "Boy"




45. Chairlift — "Wrong Opinion




44. The Strokes — "Tap Out"




43. King Tuff — "Black Moon Spell"

Rock isn't dead.




42. Regina Spektor — "You've Got Time"

(Strings version.)




41. Prince — "This Could Be Us"




< — 51 - 60

31 - 40 —>

The albums I bought from eMusic this month: Ra Ra Riot, Belly, Aloe Blacc

I buy most of my music from eMusic, an excellent website with prices that are a tiny fraction of what you'd pay on iTunes or Amazon. You have to spend a certain number of "credits" per month (a credit is usually, though not always, equal to a track), or you lose them when the next billing cycle starts.

[UPDATE: My timing was terrible here. Very shortly after I posted this, eMusic sharply raised its prices and switched from a credit-based system to a more conventional system where each track costs the same amount of money for everyone.]

Here's what I spent my 35 credits on this month (that's about $12 — an amazing deal):

1. Ra Ra Riot - The Orchard (August 24, 2010)

I love their instrumentation: violin, cello, guitar, keyboards (sometimes), bass, drums.

Here's "Boy."



From their previous (debut) album, here's "Ghost Under Rocks":



Ra Ra Riot sticks to a fairly predictable formula. And they're great at it.


2. Belly - Star (1993)

I bought this because I listened to the song "Feed the Tree" over and over back when I put it on my list of the best grunge songs, and I had to hear the rest of the album. Not as good as the Breeders' Pod or Last Splash, but still worth having. (I make that comparison mostly because the two bands played in a similar genre around the same time, but they also had overlapping personnel: the leader of Belly, Tanya Donelly, was in the Breeders' early Pod incarnation.)

Here it is: "Feed the Tree" — good enough to embed twice!

And here's "Gepetto," which today sounds a bit quaint in its mid-'90s-ness:

3. Aloe Blacc - Good Things (September 28, 2010)

eMusic describes the album well: "Gold-standard, pitch-perfect soul formalism."

Here's "I Need a Dollar."



"Miss Fortune":




4. I had a few credits left over for this month, so I used them up on a few live songs by Regina Spektor. One of them is "The Ghost of Corporate Future," a clever but understated little song that has a wonderful humanity to it. This is one of those songs that I can't put on as background music and go do something else; it unfailingly compels me to listen straight through.



People are just people, people are just people, people are just people like you . . .

The 100 best songs of the first decade of the 2000s (30-21)

(Click here for the whole list.)


30. Ra Ra Riot — "Ghost Under Rocks"

This song has a great propulsive energy. There's some debate on the internet about the correct lyrics of the chorus, but I hear:

Here you are, you are breathing

Life into ghost under rocks

Like notes found in pocket

Coats of your fathers

Lost and forgotten

29. Yeah Yeah Yeahs — "Maps"

The kind of song that inspires graffiti.

(Unplugged.)




28. The Dodos — "Red and Purple"

This song has a personal resonance to me. I started listening to this song around the time, I was one of many people who had to say an emotional goodbye to someone important to us, and I kept finding parallels between that situation and this song. On one day when we said goodbye, many people showed up wearing this person's favorite colors: red and purple.




27. Rihanna — "Umbrella"

Possibly the youngest singer on the list: she was 19 when she recorded this song.




26. Arcade Fire — "Rebellion (Lies)"




25. MGMT — "Kids"

This song feels to me like a living, breathing creature on the prowl.

The instrumental interlude (starting about 3 minutes in) is outstanding. First, there's an adventurous and floridly Baroque keyboard solo — which is abruptly cut off and followed by a simple but effective drum passage, backed by just one relentlessly repeated chord. Then the bottom drops out for a moment, and we're back to the catchy chorus.




24. The Strokes - Last Nite

The Strokes and Tom Petty have admitted that this is derivative of Petty's "American Girl."




23. Esperanza Spalding — "Fall In"




22. OutKast — "Ms. Jackson"




21. Rufus Wainwright - I Don't Know What It Is

This is a masterful fitting of melody to chord progressions. He must have taken exquisite care to make this sound so effortless.