Two-thirds of the tracks below are culled from two Spotify playlists originally posted at the end of 2012: Someone Who Looks Smashing In Athletic Wear (a lyric from Sinead O’Connor’s ferocious cover of John Grant’s “Queen of Denmark”) and You Enjoy Sucking On Dreams (a lyric from “Serpents”, the first Sharon Van Etten song I ever heard.) Scanning my music library, I came up with a dozen more tracks I encountered in subsequent years (many of ’em in 2013, like “Default”, “I’m Getting Ready” and “The Diaz Brothers”.) Also made a few substitutions (“Sovereign Light Cafe” a more enduring Keane song than “On The Road” (but not by much, really); “Dirty Paws” one of my favorite songs ever as opposed to the merely catchy “Mountain Sound”) and a handful of subtractions (Deep Sea Arcade, The Shins, Regina Spektor)–to keep this at forty tracks, process of elimination inevitably sets in.
Looking over what’s left, I sense a lack of cynicism and weariness I’ve cultivated in the years since—to me, this looks like an utopian ideal of an annual mix: career highlights from Saint Etienne and Stars (both of whom I saw in concert that year), great returns from such veterans as Aimee Mann, Dr. John, Fiona Apple and Patti Smith and a few oddities that continue to age beautifully: Claudia Brucken’s late-period Bowie cover, Emm Gryner’s cool Hall & Oates cover, Josephine’s out-of-time cabaret-pop ballad (discovered by me three years later on an episode of Quantico, of all places) and a cheeky, sublime novelty from The Ting Tings’s flop follow-up LP to their 2008 hit debut: “Next time I’m gonna get it right / I’m gonna paint my face like the Guggenheim,” yelps Katie White, incessantly. Fun fact: until I looked up the lyrics today, I thought she was singing “play my bass at” instead of “paint my face like.” Either way, it’s glorious gibberish.
Click here to listen to my 2012 playlist on Spotify.
- Saint Etienne, “Tonight”
- Tanlines, “All Of Me”
- The Magnetic Fields, “Andrew In Drag”
- Django Django, “Default”
- Diamond Rings, “Runaway Love”
- Stars, “Hold On When You Get Love And Let Go When You Give It”
- Jens Lekman, “Some Dandruff On Your Shoulder”
- Jessie Ware, “Wildest Moments”
- Hot Chip, “Let Me Be Him”
- Rufus Wainwright, “Bitter Tears”
- Sinead O’Connor, “Queen of Denmark”
- The Ting Tings, “Guggenheim”
- Aimee Mann, “Labrador”
- Imperial Teen, “Out From Inside”
- Miike Snow, “Bavarian #1 (Say You Will)”
- Twin Shadow, “Run My Heart”
- Martha Wainwright, “I Wanna Make An Arrest”
- Fiona Apple, “Hot Knife”
- A.C. Newman, “They Should Have Shut Down The Streets”
- Metric, “The Void”
- Calexico, “Splitter”
- Sharon Van Etten, “Serpents”
- Gossip, “Move In The Right Direction”
- Dr. John, “Revolution”
- The Gaslight Anthem, “Here Comes My Man”
- Keane, “Sovereign Light Cafe”
- Bat For Lashes, “Laura”
- Emm Gryner, “She’s Gone”
- Michael Kiwanuka, “I’m Getting Ready”
- Patti Smith, “April Fool”
- Andrew Bird, “Lusitania”
- Josephine, “House of Mirrors”
- Ben Folds Five, “Away When You Were Here”
- The Mountain Goats, “The Diaz Brothers”
- Bettye LaVette, “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”
- Of Monsters and Men, “Dirty Paws”
- A Fine Frenzy, “Now Is The Start”
- Field Music, “(I Keep Thinking About) A New Thing”
- Claudia Brucken, “Everyone Says ‘Hi’”
- Beth Orton, “Mystery”
Haunted Jukebox 