Many of these tracks were culled from two Spotify playlists originally posted at the end of said year: Someone Who Looks Smashing In Athletic Wear (a lyric from Sinead O’Connor’s ferocious (and not currently streaming) 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 (some of ’em in 2013, like “I’m Getting Ready” and “The Diaz Brothers”) and also made a few substitutions (“Sovereign Light Cafe” a more enduring Keane song than “On The Road”; Of Monsters and Men’s “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)—by limiting this to three dozen tracks, process of elimination inevitably sets in (although I now fully, properly appreciate “Call Me Maybe”.)
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, Leonard Cohen and Patti Smith and an excess of “rock” songs one can easily dance to, including Django Django’s Beach-Boys-on-Mars aesthetic, both Wainwright siblings (relatively) letting loose and Diamond Rings’ queered-up postpunk (which Marc Campbell at the time lovingly referred to as “Boy Division”.)
A few oddities here have continued to age beautifully: Claudia Brucken’s late-period Bowie cover, Fiona Apple’s round-robin that spectacularly closed out her fourth album 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: for a long time, I thought she was singing “play my bass at” instead of “paint my face like”; either way, it’s glorious gibberish.
2012: My Life Has Just Begun!
- Saint Etienne, “Tonight”
- Carly Rae Jepsen, “Call Me Maybe”
- 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”
- Rufus Wainwright, “Bitter Tears”
- The Ting Tings, “Guggenheim”
- Hot Chip, “These Chains”
- Aimee Mann, “Labrador”
- Imperial Teen, “Out From Inside”
- Twin Shadow, “Run My Heart”
- Martha Wainwright, “I Wanna Make An Arrest”
- Leonard Cohen, “Darkness”
- Fiona Apple, “Hot Knife”
- 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”
- Michael Kiwanuka, “I’m Getting Ready”
- Ben Folds Five, “The Sound Of The Life Of The Mind”
- Patti Smith, “April Fool”
- The Mountain Goats, “The Diaz Brothers”
- Bettye LaVette, “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”
- David Byrne and St. Vincent, “Optimist”
- 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 