The eMusic Dozen: My Dozen

It's crazy to me that this record just came out this year. I have trouble imagining a world without it. I know a number of people for whom that will be their number one record of the year; nothing has come out this year that has topped it. Like Rook, the Bon Iver is one of those dramatic records. You know, it's very personal – he made this record when he was running away from a relationship, heading to the mountains to a cabin in Wisconsin alone, without necessarily the intent to make a record but certainly with the gear to do so. He wrote and produced an entire record on which he played every instrument. Then the record started getting some attention and he pulled this band together from some of his students. The poetry is fantastic; the singing is great. It's a very fresh but simple sound. It's amazing that songs that are so direct and unornamented, if they're contextualized, can still stir your soul.

This record has the same falling-apart feeling as Au – if they're not going to fall apart, they're going to at least explode into space and take everybody with them. The first time I heard the record, I started to giggle uncontrollably. The band was apparently put together by an art teacher, and whatever he saw in all of them, I'm not sure, because I haven't seen them play. But certainly, they're taking chances, and they're very frenetic. I'm not sure if I could listen to an hour and a half of them, but they're fascinating.

This record has a Terry Riley feel; it uses a little to get a lot. It's like listening to a Terry Riley record at a really weird psychedelic circus. It's one of those records where when these people sat down to make it, you can bet they had no idea what they were about to make. I like that. What you get out of those records is not great musicianship, necessarily, but surprises; you can tell the musicians are surprised as they play Sometimes things teeter on the edge of falling apart. I like all that.

I love their drama. What I mean by that is that they have a wide dynamic range that draws you in and then pushes you away. They do it both with their musical dynamics and with their imagery – lots of stuff about birds. John Meiberg was an ornithologist, and he uses birds metaphorically oftentimes and quite beautifully. He's a great poet and a good songwriter, both with Okkervil River and Shearwater. Rook is also one of those possible album-of-the-year records for me; I haven't spent enough time with it, but every time I do listen to it, I come away loving it more.

"Pretty Woman" was a song that was constantly on the radio when I was a kid. I didn't really understand and appreciate why I liked that song so much until I got a little older and realized how the hell he sang. When I started playing guitar, I would try to play his songs, and of course you can't play a song without trying to sing, and there was no way the average, or even above-average, human being can sing in the range he was able to sing in. It was so effortless; it just flowed right out of him. T-Bone Burnett, who produced Roy Orbison's final record, said that what amazed him about Roy was although that he appeared to be belting out a song, he barely opened his mouth. It must have all come from the belly.

John Doyle is for me the best living guitar player. He's fast and he's furious, and he brings new life to a lot of traditional and new Irish music. I was at a camp this summer – I play rhythm guitar and sometimes play Irish music. The camp was for my son; he's a fiddler. It was an Irish music week in the mountains of North Carolina, and Doyle was one of the teachers. I would see him at night, sitting on a chair in the middle of a field or something with a bunch of other people, and he's just astonishing. Sometimes, you see a musician and you can't believe that what you're hearing is coming out of their fingers. Liz Carroll is this Chicago fiddler who comes from an Irish family who is writing new music in the Irish tradition that is finding its way over to Ireland. She's a remarkable writer in the Irish form and just a spectacular player.

There's a chance that record will end up in Top Ten of the year for me. Most often, when I put on a record that calls itself electronic music that isn't dance music, I'm usually pretty disappointed by it. But this guy has a palette of sounds that is very rich, very adventurous and unpredictable, but at the same time it's short form. He understands how to have a beginning, middle and end -- which I think is very important in this kind of music. The downfall of the people who make this music is usually that you find a sound you like, you start with it and you end with it, and it doesn't travel much. I hope to see him live soon, to see how he pulls it off in concert.

This is a record that I've been in love with since it came out in 1971. I have always been a lover of Ray Davies' music. What Ray does best is write stories in songs. He grew up in a place called Muswell Hills, and created this record in which he imagines living in the American Appalachians. One of the great songs on the record is "Twentieth Century Man." It characterized our generation's fear of Big Brother. The lyrics really epitomized our distrust of computers and the fear that the government would watch you and keep track of you at every turn. Ray really hit the nail on the head with that one. "Alcohol" is another great one. One of the best lines is "Old demon alcohol/Sad memories I can't recall." It had this nice, vaudevillian feel. A great use of horns, which was something that really wasn't happening much in rock music at that time. It took the Kinks beyond their four or five-piece outfit and expanded their sound into English music hall and American vaudeville.

This is a band I rejected out of hand, simply because I hated their name. There are times when I see a band name and I say, "If they dreamt up this name, if this is the best they can do, I'm not gonna like their music." But then I was walking by one of the venues at SXSW and saw the last song and a half of their set, and they absolutely bowled me over. When I finally brought myself to face the CD, I was thrilled with it. It's incredibly percussive and pulsing. It's two people, and within the two-person form there's a lot of invention going on. Good strong songs. There's a level of hyperactivity that makes it charming.