The only good thing about winter—and I mean the only good thing—is the setting it provides for music. Somehow, these ugly days and endless nights provide a perfect ambient cathedral for certain types of sonics: lonely, angry, harsh, somber, spacious, wondrous, sad.
I’ve run out of space for new music, so I’ve got to cut ties with some of the old stuff. Understand, this is terribly difficult for me—I’m not one for goodbyes. So I’m forced to make some tough decisions, and for me, the best way to begin making those decisions is to take a good hard look at my library, at what I listen to and what I don’t.
For all intents and purposes, my actual CD collection stopped growing in 2005, when I realized I would never actually need hard copies of music anymore. So if you were to leaf through all those boxes of CDs—approximately 4,000 discs in all—you would find they stop dead, chronologically speaking, with, like, Common’s Go.
Call me crazy, but as far as I’m concerned, as far as writing about music is concerned, this is a great time of year. With the old year behind us—along with all its best-of lists and accompanied detritus—I am able to start fresh, to see an empty canvas to be filled. I do not yet know 2010, do not know where it’s going or what it is made of, so every album I hear now is shaping my year, creating its identity, providing its soundtrack.
I’ll make this quick—these are my favorite albums of the year. Needless to say, I also think they are the best albums of the year, but I recognize that I only heard a microfraction of the music released this year, and I missed out on a lot. And probably forgot a few more. But this is 2009, as I heard it—and as I heard it, 2009 was a very good year.
As I finalize my list of the 10 best albums of 2009—as well as what you have here, some of the best albums of 2009 that didn’t make my list—I recognize two things: (1) anything here could be in my actual Top 10, and anything in my Top 10 could be here, and I’d still like both lists just as much as I do now; and (2) these lists serve absolutely no purpose to anyone except (maybe) me. Next week is my Top 10 itself—which will be counted down with actual numbers and everything. Will you care about that, then? I imagine not. But just the same, I can’t help recommending this music, all of which made my 2009 a lot better.
