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 Best Songs of the 2010s: Runners-up

10 years ago, I posted a list of the 100 best songs of the decade, 2000 to 2009.

Now I'm doing it again with the decade that's coming to an end: 2010 to 2019.

But first, here are 100 runners-up — songs I like but didn't have room for in the top 100 — in no particular order. (The song title usually links to an album the song is on, and after that I embed or link to video.)

A Spotify playlist of these songs is at the end of this post.


Owen Pallett — "Lewis Takes Off His Shirt"



Zola Jesus — "Dangerous Days" — WATCH (official video)

Broken Bells — "Good Luck" — LISTEN

The face of evil is on the news tonight

We see the darkness over light

But have we ever really lived in better times?

The Naked and Famous — "Young Blood" — WATCH

Robyn — "Ever Again" — WATCH

The Goo Goo Dolls — "Miracle Pill" — WATCH

Frances Quinlan — "Rare Thing" — WATCH

I only managed to stay small by making giants out of strangers

Regina Spektor — "Small Town Moon" — LISTEN

The Tragically Hip — "In a World Possessed by the Human Mind" — WATCH

Estelle — "Wonderful Life" — WATCH

Wye Oak — "Glory"

How do 2 people make so much sound? Look at the drummer: he's playing keyboard at the same time!



I Don't Know How But They Found Me — "Nobody Likes the Opening Band" — WATCH

Daft Punk (feat. Pharrell Williams) — "Get Lucky" — WATCH (acoustic cover)

Sophie Ellis-Bextor — "Come with Us" — WATCH

Feist — "How Come You Never Go There" — WATCH 
 
Faded Paper Figures — "Information Runs On" — LISTEN

Willie J Healey — "Polyphonic Love" — WATCH

David Bowie — "Sue (or in a Season of Crime)" — WATCH (rock version)

Lorde — "Tennis Court" — WATCH

Joanna Newsom — "Easy" — LISTEN

Hiatus Kaiyote — "Breathing Underwater"



Cults — "Always Forever" — LISTEN

Sky Ferreira — "You're Not the One" — WATCH (live)

Florence and the Machine — "Hunger" — WATCH

Marian Hill — "Down" — WATCH

Emeli Sandé — "Next to Me" — WATCH

Cage the Elephant — "Trouble" — WATCH

Rise Against — "Lanterns" — LISTEN

The Strokes — "80's Comedown Machine" — LISTEN

Wilco — "Art of Almost" — LISTEN

Aloe Blacc — "Loving You Is Killing Me"

I like the raw energy of the live version below, but here's the more polished recording.



Hot Chip — "Spell" — WATCH

Phantogram — "Fall in Love" — WATCH

Belle and Sebastian — "Party Line" — WATCH

Tame Impala — "The Less I Know the Better" — WATCH  

P!nk — "Blow Me (One Last Kiss)" — WATCH

The Stepkids — "Art of Forgetting" — WATCH

Grizzly Bear — "Losing All Sense" — WATCH 

Rose Windows — "Native Dreams" — WATCH

Red Hot Chili Peppers — "The Hunter" — LISTEN

Kimbra — "Come Into My Head"

Check this blog later for a very different Kimbra!



Gregory Porter — "Don't Lose Your Steam" — WATCH

Frank Ocean — "Thinkin Bout You" — LISTEN

Alvvays — "Dreams Tonite" — WATCH

Daedelus (feat. Inara George) — "Penny Loafers" — LISTEN

Snarky Puppy (feat. Knower & Jeff Coffin) — "I Remember" — WATCH

U2 — "The Blackout" — WATCH

Caribou — "Odessa" — WATCH

Imogen Heap — "Lifeline" — WATCH

Bon Iver — "Holocene" — WATCH

Fleet Foxes — "Helplessness Blues"

I was raised up believing

I was somehow unique

Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes

Unique in each way you can see

And now after some thinking

I'd say I'd rather be

A functioning cog in some great machinery

Serving something beyond me…

Sharon Van Etten — "Seventeen" — WATCH

Jenny Lewis — "Wasted Youth" — WATCH 

Kacey Musgraves — "Follow Your Arrow" — WATCH 

Paul McCartney — "Alligator" — LISTEN

White Rabbits — "Heavy Metal" — WATCH

Raury — "God's Whisper" — WATCH

Cherri Bomb (later known as Hey Violet) — "Shake the Ground" — WATCH

nine inch nails — "find my way" — LISTEN

Oh Land — "Doubt My Legs" — LISTEN

Björk — "Notget"



Becca Stevens — "Queen Mab" — WATCH

HAIM — "The Wire" — WATCH

Anderson .Paak — "Put Me Thru" — WATCH

Sleater-Kinney — "Reach Out" — LISTEN

FKA twigs — "Two Weeks" — WATCH

Lady Gaga — "Judas" — WATCH

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers — "Red River" — LISTEN

Weezer — "Beach Boys" — LISTEN

Pearl Jam — "Sleeping by Myself" — LISTEN

Snarky Puppy (feat. Laura Mvula & Michelle Willis) — "Sing to the Moon" — WATCH 



MGMT — "It's Working" — WATCH

of Montreal — "Nursing Slopes" — LISTEN

Carly Rae Jepsen — "Call Me Maybe" — WATCH

The Kooks — "Junk of the Heart (Happy)" — WATCH

Keri Hilson — "Pretty Girl Rock" — WATCH

Pale Waves — "There's a Honey" — WATCH

M83 — "Midnight City" — WATCH

Beck — "Morning" — LISTEN

Labrinth & Zendaya — "All for Us" — WATCH

Mark Ronson (feat. Bruno Mars) — "Uptown Funk"



Norah Jones — "Say Goodbye" — LISTEN

Well, it ain't easy to stay in love

If you can't tell lies

So I'll just have to take a bow

And say goodbye

The Horrors — "Still Life" — WATCH

The Smashing Pumpkins — "Panopticon" — LISTEN

Melissa McMillan — "Keep Coming Back To You" — WATCH

Parcels — "Overnight" — LISTEN

BØRNS — "Past Lives" — WATCH

Santigold — "Disparate Youth" — WATCH

Rival Sons — "Soul" — WATCH

Snarky Puppy (feat. Chris Turner) — "Liquid Love" — WATCH

Angel Olsen — "Lark"

This song has a stunning climax starting about 4 minutes in.



Spoon — "Do I Have to Talk You Into It" — LISTEN

Esperanza Spalding — "One" — WATCH

Kitten — "Like a Stranger" — WATCH
 
The Dodos — "Black Night" — WATCH

Intervals — "Moment Marauder" — LISTEN

Paul Gilbert — "Adventure and Trouble" — LISTEN

Death Cab for Cutie — "Codes and Keys" — LISTEN

Justin Timberlake — "Mirrors" — WATCH

Jónsi — "Sinking Friendships" — LISTEN

*

Thanks to all who offered suggestions for the list, including Akponoluo, Alex, Ariel, Brit, Chris, Francesca, Jamie, John, Matt, and Nick.

*

Here's a Spotify playlist of all the runners-up, except two songs that aren't on Spotify ("Easy" by Joanna Newsom, and "Nobody Likes the Opening Band" by I Don't Know How But They Found Me):




Click here for the full list of the best songs of the decade.

This is why we need Okkervil River and Regina Spektor.

19 of the worst lyrics from last year.

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 top 10 songs of the first decade of the 2000s

After almost 200 songs, we've finally made it to the top 10 of the past 10 years.

(Click here for the whole list.)


10. Gnarls Barkley — "Crazy"




9. Sufjan Stevens — "Chicago"

Summer Anne, ranking this the 10th best song of the decade, says:

[I]f I ever made a church, my kind of church, we would worship outside, and this song would be our "Amazing Grace."

8. of Montreal — "Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games"

Let's have bizarre celebrations!

7. Dresden Dolls — "Coin-Operated Boy"

This is an ingeniously constructed song. It starts out jaunty and full of innuendo for a few verses. The singer, Amanda Palmer, then takes the song deeper into her psyche by describing the songwriting process itself:

This bridge was written

To make you feel smitten-er

With my sad picture

Of girl getting bitter-er

The shift in the lyrics and music here (flowing arpeggios instead of percussive chords) seems to tell us we've left the physical world and entered her stream of consciousness. The bridge culminates with an obsessively repeated "I want it —," then "I want you —," then "I want a —," while the whole band mimics the repetitive, jerky movements of a wind-up toy (a lyrical and musical transition back to the verse). When Palmer finally finishes the sentence with the same words and melody that started the song ("... coin-operated boy"), her delivery has lost its previous childlike quality. She sounds weary from the one-sided relationship. At the end, the band winds down like a toy running out of batteries. Not only does Palmer's voice slow down along with everything else, but she sounds unexpectedly meek, as though it were dawning on her that she doesn't quite believe everything she's been singing.




6. St. Vincent — "Paris Is Burning"




5. The Postal Service — "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight"

I remember sitting in a cafe a few years ago, hearing this chorus for the first time — "You seem so out of context / In this gaudy apartment complex" — and thinking, "Hm, that's a pretty clever hook." Since then, I've probably listened to this song 100 times, and it still sounds startlingly new.




4. Franz Ferdinand — "Take Me Out"

The rock anthem of the decade.




3. Imogen Heap — "Hide and Seek"

Here's Imogen Heap's description of how this song came to be:

My favorite computer blew up on me. ... But I didn't want to leave the studio without having done anything that day. I saw the [DigiTech Vocalist Workstation] on a shelf and just plugged it into my little 4-track MiniDisc with my mic and my keyboard and pressed Record. The first thing that I sang was those first few lines, "Where are we? What the hell is going on?" I set the vocalist to a four-note polyphony, so even if I play 10 notes on the keyboard, it will only choose four of them. It's quite nicely surprising when it comes back with a strange combination. When it gets really high in the second chorus, that's a result of it choosing higher rather than low notes, so I ended up going even higher to compensate, above the chord. I recorded it in, like, four-and-a-half minutes, and it ended up on the album in exactly the structure of how it came out of me then. I love it because it doesn't feel like my song. It just came out of nowhere, and I'm not questioning that one at all.

The result sounds like a 21st-century version of a Renaissance madrigal.

Have you ever thought to yourself: if God is watching me and has to choose the single greatest 5 minutes of my life, what would they be? For Imogen Heap, the answer just might be those 5 minutes when she was creating this:




2. Arcade Fire — "No Cars Go"

The songwriting is almost embarrassingly simple, yet this is some of the most exciting music to come along in recent memory.

Between the click of the light and the start of the dream...

1. Regina Spektor — "Fidelity"

Spontaneous but refined, sincere but quirky, simple but complex. No song more beautifully encapsulates the spirit of this decade of music.




Regina alone, live:

The 100 best songs of the first decade of the 2000s (20-11)

(Click here for the whole list.)


20. Spoon — "The Beast and Dragon, Adored"




19. Radiohead — "How to Disappear Completely"




18. Rilo Kiley – "Does He Love You?"

(Live.)




17. Beyoncé (feat. Jay-Z) — "Crazy in Love"

Credit is also due to the Chi-Lites; the brass-section hook is sampled from their 1971 song "Are You My Woman? (Tell Me So)."




16. Björk – "Hidden Place"

A great introversion song. The build-up from the final verse ("Can I hide there too?") to the final chorus is quietly overwhelming. She gets so much feeling out of singing the words slightly off from the beat.




15. Regina Spektor – "Us"




14. Goldfrapp – "A&E"

When I said one of the criteria I used in deciding whether to include a song on the list was ...

Does the music have some sort of dramatic arc or development? (A bridge or other deviation from "verse/chorus/verse/chorus" is especially helpful.)

... this is one of the songs I had in mind. Wow!




13. The Flaming Lips — "Do You Realize??"

A song that gets great emotion out of stating simple facts, like: We're floating in space…




12. Frou Frou – "Let Go"

(Unplugged version by Imogen Heap, the singer of Frou Frou.)




11. Death Cab for Cutie – "I Will Follow You into the Dark"

The 100 best songs of the first decade of the 2000s (70-61)

(Click here for the whole list.)


70. Ambulance LTD — "Anecdote"

From this overlooked NYC band's only album.




69. The Futureheads — "Robot"




68. Sonic Youth — "Incinerate"




67. The Darkness — "I Believe in a Thing Called Love"




66. Dirty Projectors — "Stillness Is the Move"




65. Daniel Powter — "Bad Day"




64. Okkervil River — "Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe"




63. Hot Chip — "Ready for the Floor"

I can't stop watching this:




62. Regina Spektor — "Samson"




61. Justin Timberlake — "Cry Me a River"

Runners-up for the best songs of the first decade of the 2000s

As promised, I'm going to list the 100 greatest songs of the 2000s. But first, here are 100 runners-up, in no particular order…

(Click here for the whole list.) 


Goldfrapp — "Caravan Girl"



The New Pornographers — "My Rights Versus Yours" — WATCH

Grizzly Bear — "Southern Point" — LISTEN

The Weepies — "Nobody Knows Me at All" — WATCH

Solange — "I Decided" — WATCH

MGMT — "The Youth"— WATCH

Regina Spektor — "Better" — WATCH

Death Cab for Cutie — "Title and Registration" – WATCH

Esperanza Spalding — "I Adore You" — LISTEN

Dirty Projectors — "Cannibal Resource" — LISTEN

Radiohead — "Everything in Its Right Place"



The Thrills — "One Horse Town" — WATCH

Rilo Kiley — "I Never" — LISTEN

Lady Gaga — "Paparazzi" — WATCH

The Postal Service — "Such Great Heights" — WATCH (cover by Iron & Wine)

Rufus Wainwright — "Shadows" — LISTEN

The Apples in Stereo — "Energy" — WATCH

Phoenix — "Lisztomania" — WATCH

of Montreal — "The Repudiated Immortals" — LISTEN

Yeah Yeah Yeahs — "Runaway" — WATCH

Hot Hot Heat — "Talk to Me, Dance with Me"



Elliott Smith — "Son of Sam" — WATCH

The Notwist — "One with the Freaks" — LISTEN

Black Eyed Peas — "Boom Boom Pow" — WATCH

Alicia Keys — "Karma" — WATCH

Dido — "White Flag" — WATCH

The Dodos — "God?" — LISTEN

Spoon — "The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine" — WATCH

Death Cab for Cutie — "Tiny Vessels" — LISTEN

Lali Puna — "Small Things" — LISTEN

The Bird and the Bee — "Love Letter from Japan"



St. Vincent — "Your Lips are Red" — WATCH

Radiohead — "2 + 2 = 5 (The Lukewarm.)" — WATCH

Iron & Wine — "Boy with a Coin" — WATCH

Clue to Kalo — "Seconds When It’s Minutes" — LISTEN

Herbert (feat. Dani Siciliano & Shingai Shoniwa) — "The Audience" — WATCH

Sufjan Stevens — "All Good Naysayers, Speak Up! Or Forever Hold Your Peace!" — LISTEN

Christina Aguilera — "Beautiful" — WATCH

Bosque Brown — "White Dove" — LISTEN

Yeasayer — "2080" — LISTEN

The Dresden Dolls — "Good Day"



Modest Mouse — "Float On" — WATCH

Arcade Fire — "My Body Is a Cage" — LISTEN

Hanne Hukkelberg — "Ease" — LISTEN

Styrofoam (feat. Ben Gibbard) — "Couches in Alleys" — LISTEN

The Go! Team — "Ladyflash" — WATCH

Monsters Are Waiting — "Crazy Love" — LISTEN

1990s — "See You at the Lights" — LISTEN

Wilco — "I'm the Man Who Loves You" — WATCH

John Mayer — "Daughters" — WATCH

Camera Obscura — "Let’s Get Out of This Country"



The Shins — "New Slang" — WATCH

Psapp — "Hi" — WATCH

Cut Copy — "Feel the Love" — LISTEN 

Amerie — "1 Thing" — WATCH

David Byrne & Brian Eno — "Strange Overtones" — WATCH

Lenka — "Trouble Is a Friend" — WATCH

Decoder Ring — "Traffic" — LISTEN

Foo Fighters — "The Pretender" — WATCH

Beck — "Lonesome Tears" — WATCH

Andrew Bird — "A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left"



of Montreal — "The Party’s Crashing Us"— LISTEN

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings — "100 Days, 100 Nights" — WATCH

Spoon — "The Way We Get By" — WATCH

Goldfrapp — "Ride a White Horse" — WATCH

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah — "Is This Love?" — LISTEN

Estelle (feat. Kanye West) — "American Boy" — WATCH

Jason Mraz — "I'm Yours" — LISTEN

The Strokes — "Someday" — WATCH

Death Cab for Cutie — "Transatlanticism" — LISTEN

Norah Jones — "Sinkin’ Soon"



St. Vincent — "Actor out of Work" — WATCH

The Sea and Cake — "Left Side Clouded" — WATCH

OutKast — "B.O.B. — Bombs over Baghdad" — WATCH

Animal Collective — "Peacebone" — LISTEN

Sara Bareilles — "Bottle It Up" — WATCH

Jenny Lewis — "Black Sand" — LISTEN

nine inch nails — "all the love in the world" — LISTEN

The Postal Service — "We Will Become Silhouettes" — WATCH

Goldfrapp — "Monster Love" — LISTEN

TV on the Radio — "Dreams"



Ms. John Soda — "Hands" — LISTEN

The Temper Trap — "Sweet Disposition" — WATCH

Arcade Fire — "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" — WATCH

M. Ward (feat. Zooey Deschanel) — "Never Had Nobody Like You" — LISTEN

The Strokes — "Hard to Explain" — WATCH

of Montreal — "Forecast Fascist Future" — LISTEN

Rihanna — "Disturbia" — WATCH

Radiohead — "Optimistic" — WATCH

Death Cab for Cutie — "Soul Meets Body" — WATCH

Bruce Springsteen — "The Rising"



MGMT — "Electric Feel" — WATCH

Sophie Ellis-Bextor — "Murder on the Dance Floor" — LISTEN

Amy Winehouse — "Rehab" — WATCH

Franz Ferdinand — "Jacqueline" — LISTEN

My Brightest Diamond — "Golden Star" — LISTEN

Green Day — "Wake Me Up When September Ends" — LISTEN

Broken Social Scene — "Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl" — WATCH

St. Vincent — "Black Rainbow" — LISTEN

The Postal Service — "Brand New Colony" — LISTEN

Regina Spektor's new album, Far

You can listen to the whole thing here.

My opinion on first listen: a big step down from her last two albums. I'm not hearing any songs on the level of "Fidelity," "Better," "Samson," "The Flowers," or "Us." It's not bad, but you can hear her trying too self-consciously to recapture the magic that used to seem to flow effortlessly out of her, like this:

The 2 most overused chord progressions in pop music today

A list of 10 overused chord progressions -- and a manifesto -- in this post on everything2.com by "chrisjh," a music undergrad:

While certainly some of these chord progressions were revolutionary and are still key in reproducing some of today's most classic genres, we'd still like certain genres of music to move forward. . . . I have a feeling that although new chord progressions might sound weird at first, with enough use we'd easily attach an emotion or mood to them, just as we did to the blues and to the 50's bebop progression — I bet if the 4 chord blues were played in the 17th century, everyone'd think it was odd and dissonant crap.

Here are the two chord progressions that I think have become most worn-out in the popular music of the last few years (the first of which is in chrisjh's list):

Progression #1

 I - V - vi - IV. If you're in the key of C, this is C - G - A minor - F.

A classic example is U2's "With or Without You":




Someone asked about this progression in this AskMetafilter thread, which contains some detailed analyses (including mine). That thread links to this YouTube clip that brilliantly reveals the monotony of so much popular music:




The progression has its place — it's beautiful in "With or Without You" and "Let It Be." I also like it in the songs by Michael Jackson, Bush, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in that clip — all from at least 15 years ago. But recently, this chord progression and the next one have so thoroughly infected pop music that I find it hard to take today's top 40 seriously.

Progression #2

i - VI - III - VII. In the key of A minor, this is A minor - F - C - G.

Here's a whole article about it, which calls it the "Sensitive Female Chord Progression" and suggests that you can identify it by trying to sing Joan Osborne's "One of Us" over it:




Progressions #1 and #2 are closely related: you can play each one by starting halfway into the other one (i.e. starting with the 3rd of the 4 chords) and looping back to the beginning.

Between these two chord progressions, you can easily write a whole radio station's worth of hits -- as long as you don't mind if music stays in the same place rather than evolving. Even when an artist as eclectic as Regina Spektor relies on these progressions (#1 in "On the Radio," #2 in her new "Blue Lips"), the result can be wearying.

St. Vincent and Regina Spektor, part 2

I haven't been this excited about two upcoming albums in at least a couple years.

There's St. Vincent's second album, to be released May 5, and Regina Spektor's fifth album, sometime in June.

[UPDATE: You can hear the St. Vincent album streaming online, free at NPR's site, for two weeks starting on April 21.]

I blogged about both of them in my inaugural Music Friday post.

Here's "Actor out of Work," a song St. Vincent has pre-released from her upcoming album, Actor (via her website):



I'm glad to hear her trademark sound intact: lovely compositions reminiscent of Paul McCartney or Brian Wilson, incongruously overlaid with grinding dissonance.

Music Friday unplugged

Here are a few acoustic versions of songs I've blogged before:

Mika - "Grace Kelly." (Previously - MySpace - Wikipedia.)





My Brightest Diamond - "Inside a Boy." (Previously - MySpace - Wikipedia.)




Regina Spektor - "Fidelity." (Previously - MySpace - Wikipedia.)

If you play this performance back to back with the album version, you'll hear how she finesses each little piece of melody in the live version as if she were just creating the tune on the spot. She's never on autopilot.

25 random things about me

It's the craze that's sweeping Facebook:

In the past few weeks, a chain letter called "25 Random Things About Me" has wormed its way through Facebook at an alarming speed. The exhibitionistic format has remained surprisingly intact: In addition to rattling off 25 facts about themselves, "Random Things" authors are supposed to tag 25 of their Facebook friends, prompting them to write their own note and tag 25 more people, and so forth and so on.

[UPDATE: The evolutionary basis of "25 things."]

Here's mine, cross-posted from Facebook:

1. My first word was "happy." My first phrase was "Beach Boys." My first sentence was "I want it."

2. I haven't eaten meat since I was in elementary school.

3. I was baptized on Wall Street.

4. My favorite band is the Beatles. I used to say my favorites Beatles song was "You Never Give Me Your Money," but I can't decide anymore.

5. In the summer between 7th and 8th grades, I got an electric guitar and practiced about 8 hours a day.

6. The most famous people I've met are Al Franken, Christopher Hitchens, and Lorrie Moore, the last of whom is an old friend of the family.

7. I have a weird set of movies I watch over and over, while I haven't seen a lot of the most famous ones. I've never seen Forrest Gump, Titanic, etc. Movies I've seen a ridiculous number of times: My Dinner with Andre, Back to the Future trilogy, Annie Hall, Duck Soup.

8. I'm a pessimist and a skeptic, but I try not to be a cynic. I think the world is probably doomed, but I have confidence that a lot of individuals will make a good-faith effort to try to make things better along the way to our demise.

9. I spent a month in Rome but have never seen the Sistine Chapel's ceiling.

10. Since the beginning of 2007, I always wanted Obama as president and Biden as VP. I couldn't believe I hit the nail on the head.

11. I have a vivid memory of touching Courtney Love's bare shoulder when she was crowd surfing at a Hole concert, one of the emblematic moments of my teenage years.

12. When I was a law review editor I spent about half an hour on the phone with an author debating every single contraction in the piece, about 60 in all. He loved contractions, and I didn't want any of them, so we compromised and changed about half of them to full words.

13. People tell me I'm very "tech-savvy," but I'm actually technophobic. I waited as long as possible to switch to a cell phone and digital camera, and I still don't have any kind of iPhone/Blackberry/etc. because I prefer writing things down in notebooks.

14. I wish I'd been European instead of American; I think I'd fit in better in Europe.

15. When I was in middle school, I didn't cut my hair for a long time and I looked like this.

16. When I was 2, I played a game we called "do counter," which was getting up on the kitchen counter and recognizing spices. I knew each one by smell, or as I called it back then, "hmell."

17. This article accurately describes me.

18. The first time I acted in a play, there was a part at the end where the other actor ran up to me (per the script), but I accidentally struck her forehead with my teeth, causing her to bleed onstage. We were both fine, but I felt really bad. People in the audience didn't realize anything had gone wrong; they thought it was fake blood.

19. I cook myself dinner almost every night.

20. I used to sketch people's faces all the time, and I wish I still had the time or inclination to do so. One of my favorites is a drawing I did in 7th grade of Justice Scalia.

21. I can't whistle. But I'm really good at snapping.

22. I can't give you an answer about whether I'm a liberal or not. I often agree with them, but I also think they get too much stuff wrong.

23. I have a crush on Regina Spektor and Tracyanne Campbell, the singer from Camera Obscura.

24. I'm tired of being in my 20s; I can't wait till I'm in my 30s.

25. I started a blog last April. You should bookmark this link and read it on a regular basis.

Obviously, that last one was done for Facebook and is a moot point for you who are reading it here.