Autumn Souvenir

Blind Pilot 3 Rounds and a Sound Hands down, the record I listened to most this year. Every song is great, with the highlights being "Things I Cannot Recall," "The Story I Heard" and the perfect "Two Towns From Me." This is straightforward Americana, and far superior to overhyped darlings the likes of Fleet Foxes or Avett Brothers. Alamo Square, San Francisco This neighborhood is the closest I've ever come to calling a place home. New Jersey never felt right, Connecticut was The Ice Storm minus the hot tubbing, Boston was fine for a few years, Myrtle Beach was hell on earth and Brooklyn had all the trimmings but lacked kindness and community. Alamo Square has it all: diversity, grit, a handful of halfway houses, a great dog park, spirit and a neighborly charm that somehow brings folks from different classes, races and ages together. Barack Obama It's a wonderful feeling to be proud of your president. He's not perfect, and boy does he look com...

On the flight back east, I finally got around to watching the Low documentary, You May Need a Murder . I was very late to Low, only discovering them after reading a review of 2005's The Great Destroyer , a record that unexpectedly floored me. I went back and picked up Things We Lost in the Fire, later 2007's Drums and Guns and then sort of lost interest. And then a neighbor recently offered to loan me the documentary. The film mostly centers around lead singer Alan Sparhawk's life on the road with his wife and two children. Having logged approximately "500,000 miles" on the road, Sparhawk lets us inside a mind that seemingly turned to religion over chemical dependence. According to Sparhawk, he recognized at a young age where alcohol would lead him and cut it off early. Whether that was substituted with his almost militant religious views is debatable, but this 70-minute films seems hardly enough to even catch a glimpse of all that swirls in his mind. Having su...

20 "Janey Don't You Lose Heart" (1998) How did this not make it onto Born in the USA ? 19 "Open All Night" (1982) Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Two-Lane Blacktop . "It's New Jersey in the morning, like a lunar landscape." 18 "For You" (1973) The rare early love song. And 35+ years later, maybe his best. 17 "Reason To Believe" (1982) Through it all, we still find a reason to rise each morning. 16 "Incident on 57th Street" (1973) Spanish Johnny had "bruised arms and broken rhythm and a beat-up old Buick," but was "dressed just like dynamite." Like many of his songs, there's good behind it all. 15 "Spirit in the Night" (1973) The first signs of Dylan. 14 "This Hard Land" (1985/1998) Dylan wasn't the only one largely influenced by Woody Guthrie. 13 "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)" (1973) Feels like the beginning of it all. 12 "Atlantic City" (1982) With ...

Probably the best Wilco show I've ever been to.

Despite music playing an integral role in my life, it's rare that a song comes along that buries itself in my soul. A song that hits me so hard that I simply can't stop talking about it. A song that has such a profound impact on me that it alters something. Or maybe just fulfills something in me. And as hard as I try, and I'm likely coming up short here, there's really just no way of explaining it. The closest feeling I can summon is that feeling of falling in love. Overcome, I guess. It's been a number of years since a song has hit me like Bruce Springsteen's "The Promise." A song recorded for the Darkness record, and evidently somewhat inspired by Bruce's troubles with longtime friend and one-time manager Mike Appel, Springsteen left this masterpiece off of Darkness due to the personal nature of the words. Most of Bruce's greatest song are stories about others. There's Johnny 99, Wild Billy and Frankie. However, this was one was about h...

In a subpar year, I can't seem to chronologically list these out. Nevertheless, here are my ten favorites from 2010: Bruce Springsteen The Promise I initially considered this ineligible given the usual re-issue rules, but the majority of these tracks are previously unreleased. Sure, they're over 30 years old, but "The Promise," the alternate version of "Racing in the Street" and the classic Iovine song are enough to land this in the top five. "Racing in the Street" is simply mind-blowing. An already perfect song, this uptempo version of despair and dreams on the Jersey-shore boulevards captures everything that is Darkness on the Edge of Town . "Tonight, tonight, the strip's just right. I'm wanna blow 'em off in my first heat. Well, now, Summer's here, and the time is right, for racing in the street." The remaining tracks prove that the Darkness sessions were possibly the peak of Springsteen's career creativity. Eels E...