Artist	Song
Kings Of Leon	Milk [Aha Shake Heartbreak] (3:59)
The Mars Volta	The Widow [Frances The Mute] (5:50)
SinTad O'Connor	Downpressor Man [Throw Down Your Arms] (5:08)
Fast 'N' Bulbous	When Big Joan Sets Up [Pork Chop Blue Around The Rind] (3:48)
M.I.A.	10 Dollar [Arular] (3:59)
Kathleen Mock	Waiting On A Train [Songs From The Underground - Best of the NYC Subway compilation] (3:18)
Paul McCartney	Jenny Wren [Chaos and Creation in the Backyard] (3:49)
Robert Fripp & Brian Eno	Ankaa [The Equatorial Stars] (6:59)
Van Morrison	The Lion This Time [Magic Time] (4:55)
Bj÷rk	Storm [Drawing Restraint 9] (5:32)
Kanye West Feat. Nas & Really Doe	We Major [Late Registration] (5:21)
Neil Young	It's A Dream [Prairie Wind] (6:29)
Texas Slim	NYC Pride [I Have Arrived] (5:12)
John Cale	Satisfied [blackAcetate] (3:54)
Jodi Shaw	In The Fall Light [Snow On Saturn] (4:26)
Ry Cooder w/ Bla Pahinui	3rd Base, Dodger Stadium [Chßvez Ravine] (5:40)

Comment:

Deceptive... Though i suppose i'd very much enjoy creating a mix i could confidently state was my Best of 2005 mix, this is definitely not that one (might have to wait 30 more years and do a "Spirit of '75"-thing for that). But it's my 2005 mix, as far as it goes, or even more likely, my 2005 stop-time mix -- I was anxious to finish this before the end of 2005 itself, precisely in order to have a temporal souvenir of a time that'll be past-encased soon enough. So I've only included tracks here to which i have the entire albums (justifying Daft Punk's "Robot Rock" being cut out as a seventeenth track; *something* had to go); a few of these albums (lemme see... Kings Of Leon, SinTad, Van Morrison, and Neil Young) i bought on the day of their release, and in one case, Jodi Shaw's beautiful new album Snow On Saturn, *before* the release... and from Jodi herself...! okay, so Jodi Shaw isn't going to be filling up racks at Tower, but i love her music regardless. and that's that. Important thing to notice here: Fully four of these tracks -- "Jenny Wren", "The Lion This Time", "It's A Dream", and "3rd Base, Dodger Stadium" -- are absolutely drenched in nostalgia, and Kanye West's production for "We Major" is certainly edging in on that old quest for Utopia, too. Is 2005 the Most Nostalgic Year Ever therefore? Or do i detect a whiff of nostalgia in my own presence? Well, it is true that the artists who've made my favorite albums of 2004, 2003 and 2002 (at least that i can think of right now, umm) -- respectively Bj÷rk's Med·lla, John Cale's HoboSapiens, and Van Morrison's Down The Road -- are all acquitting themselves with rather inferior (though not at all bad) albums in my opinion this year, Drawing Restraint 9, blackAcetate, and respectively Magic Time, from each of which I've taken my favorite track for this mix. Of course, any falling-off this year shouldn't be more than a minor blip, especially for artists like these three. Whatever the facts may be, the purest nostalgic whiff on the mix is once again provided by the 40-year-reigning champion of the emotion, Paul McCartney; I'm proud to report that "Jenny Wren" can stand right next to "She's Leaving Home" among the theatrical-math-emotion summits. My song of the year for 2005, though, ends up being the Bla Pahinui-sung "3rd Base, Dodger Stadium", on Ry Cooder's roots-Latin-ethnomusicographical-politicized concept album, Chßvez Ravine. On that album, it's the next-to-last song, crossfading into a setting of an anonymous poem written on a plank in a Costa Rican forest; here it serves its purpose as an ending song. I'd never heard of Bla Pahinui before shelling out for the album (Ry Cooder loves his great forgotten guest singers) but he's a Hawaiian throat titan with range like taffy. Although Chßvez Ravine is possibly Cooder's lasting magnum opus, some of the songs take in too much of the story to stand on their own; others seem like period fripperies; but every once in a while you get something like "3rd Base, Dodger Stadium", which is sung in the simple resigned emotion of someone whose Los Angeles neighborhood was razed many years ago to plop down a baseball stadium on top of it, one of the diamond's corners perchance landing where his house used to be. If this song doesn't make it to end-of-year lists i'll be quite ticked off, or at least puzzled. But then again, that could just be another version of the question I raise (or that John Cale raises for me, in his "Satisfied" lyrics) about all these songs, and for that matter the year itself: "Will it stand the test of time?" And if 2005 doesn't, will this mix CD staunch the flow of time enough, once, for eighty minutes or so, for us to remember what it all used to be like?

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