There are a few bands that I am fanatical about. A quick look at my last.fm charts shows these bands to be Iron & Wine, Eels, Simon & Garfunkel, The Shins, and Ben Folds. When it comes to these musicians I will buy every track they put out, I will see them in concert, I will insist that friends listen to them, I will track down rare bootlegs, and I anxiously await their future releases. This last part, waiting for new releases, is the hard part.

For example, the latest Shins album isn’t a Shins album at all. It is a collaboration between Danger Mouse and James Mercer, the Shins frontman. They are going by the name, Broken Bells. I have known for months about the album, and waiting for it to come out in March is excruciating. Like most music, the Broken Bells album was leaked months before its release date and can be found on the Pirate Bay and other less than legal places. It is virtually impossible for a true fan to resist the urge to grab this music as soon as it becomes available. A true fan sincerely wants to give money to their favorite bands and the guilt that accompanies stealing music is extra heavy in this case.

I can only assume that the delay in the release of an album has to do with the music label wanting to reduce CDs on the same release date as digital files. The printing, packaging, and production of the CDs must delay the release.

I can tell you that the Broken Bells album is going to be worth the purchase. Here is a video of the first single:

If you can wait until March 9th, you can pre-order the Broken Bells album  from Amazon. I plan on buying it on Vinyl since I don’t really listen to CDs.

The Top Ten Albums of 2009

1. Manners, by Passion Pit
MP3: Sleepyhead

2. Song Up In Her Head, by Sarah Jarosz
MP3: Shankill Butchers

3. Around the Well, Iron and Wine
MP3: Belated Promise Ring

4. Merriweather Post Pavilion, by Animal Collective
MP3: My Girls

5. The Crow: New Songs for the Five-String Banjo, by Steve Martin
MP3: Pitkin County Turnaround

6. Hombre Lobo, by Eels
MP3: In My Dreams

7. Troubadour, by K’Naan
MP3: Bang Bang

8. Doves, Kingdom of Rust
MP3: Kingdom Of Rust

9. Fantasies, by Metric
MP3: Help I’m Alive

10. What Will Be, by Devendra Banhart
MP3: Angelika

Download zip file of all 10 songs.

Honorable Mention:
11. Keep It Hid, by Dan Auerbach
12. Grizzly Bear, by Veckatimest
13. Monsters of Folk, by Monsters of Folk
14. My Maudlin Career, by Camera Obscura
15. Sea Sew, by Lisa Hannigan
16. Divided by Night, by Crystal Method
17. Reservoir, by Fanfarlo
18. Veckatimest, by Grizzly Bear
19. God Help the Girl, by God Help the Girl
20. 11:11, by Rodrigo y Gabriela
21. Actor, by St. Vincent
22. Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, by Phoenix
23. It’s Blitz!, by Yeah Yeah Yeahs
24. Middle Cyclone, by Neko Case
25. Dark Night of the Soul, by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse

Albums On My List to Listen to:
White Water, White Bloom, by Sea Wolf
Mumford & Sons, by Mumford & Sons
Phrazes for the Young, Julian Casablancas
Ambivalence Avenue, by Bibio
Post Nothing, by Japandroids
Technicolor Health, by Harlem Shakes
Family, by Le Loup
Psychic Chasms, by Neon Indian
Time to Die, by The Dodos

The idea of recommendation engines is a wonderful concept. Netflix used to do a pretty descent job of recommending movies for me based on my rankings of past rentals. Unfortunately, after a couple years of Netflix it has gotten to the point where all the obvious recommendations have been exhausted. All that remains are the 3.5 star options. A recommendation of 3.5 stars is pretty much saying, “you might like this one, but don’t blame me if you give it 2 stars.” Thanks, for nothing Netflix. So I watch these 3.5 star movies hoping to find the gems and occasionally I find one.

A similar thing happens with music recommendation engines like Amazon and iTunes. Since I have a pretty large music library I am not interested in recommendations that are more mainstream, I am looking for the rare gems that I have never heard of before. If you tell Amazon that you like The Shins it will give you suggestions that point you in two dead end directions: either deeper into The Shins discography (which I already own), or toward more successful better selling musicians. Since I already own (or don’t care for) the albums they suggest, Amazon can’t make a single good recommendation for me. For example, Amazon will suggest Arcade Fire, The Postal Service, and maybe Death Cab for Cutie. Good bands to be sure, but you could get this same advice by consulting the top sellers at Target. Amazon’s goal is clear and the strategy is surely effective: the purpose of their recommendations is to sell as much as possible. They point consumers at the most popular options because they know they can sell more of those products more easily. This is bad news for a serious music treasure hunter.

So after you have exhausted the surface level recommendations of Netflix/iTunes/Amazon, how do you uncover great new music or movies? The only place to turn is to the people with similar tastes as you who also have a much deeper catalog of experience. If you are lucky enough to know someone like this, they might recommend lesser known artists like Great Lake Swimmers, Rogue Wave, or Nada Surf if you tell him/her that you love the Shins. And because this recommendation come from a trusted source you are more likely to take a risk on these “unknown” options because you respect this person’s opinion. Unfortunately, we don’t all have a friend like that.

The next best source is to go is online. There are so many music blogs out there that you should be able to find someone out there that shares your tastes. This person’s passionate praise and revelatory rants will be an amazingly more accurate recommendation engine than any automated system in existence. But how do you find the right music blog? That’s a tough question.

The best advice I can give you is to plug a band that you really like into Hype Machine. This will generate a list of music blogs that have posted music by this artist. Follow the links one at a time and spend some time surfing the various sites you land on. Chances are you will stumble upon some blogs with similar taste to you. Add these sites to your RSS reader and start following them. After you have followed the blogs for a while you can keep the good one’s and weed out the rest. Lather, rinse, and repeat.

With the end of the decade in sight I have enjoyed browsing the best-of-the-decade lists that are starting to circulate. I love discovering a new album that sends me down a new vein of musical exploration. Unfortunately, most of the lists contain largely the same albums, just with the rankings slightly jockeyed around. The exception came earlier this week when I stumbled upon a really great list from a music blog called RawkBlog. David Greenward ranks the top 100 albums of the 2000s and the list is amazing not because of the order, but because he has the guts to pick the albums that meant the most to him. There are so many albums on his list that I haven’t heard of that I feel like I have discovered a goldmine. Unlike Amazon where you get pushed to the bestsellers, a great music blog takes you deep down the rabbit hole.

I suppose the magic of RawkBlog’s list comes from the fact that he has similar taste as me. He describes his tastes like this: “I like acoustic guitars, scrawny dudes and odd voices; songs about girls; songs; girls; cymbal-heavy percussion; major 7th chords; harmonies; emotions; dynamic range; the production style of Jim O’Rourke; the early 1970s; the late 1990s.” I think I may have found my musical soul mate.

Perhaps someday the automated recommendation engines will improve to the point that they can make deep suggestions as well as the obvious, but for now, the blogs are the best place to discover new music. Even if the computers advance to that point, the blog will still win out because it is personal. And that’s really where the joy of music comes from – sharing the experience with people like us.

Top Ten Albums of 2008
1. The Shepherd’s Dog, by Iron and Wine
2. Orakular Spectacular, by MGMT
3. Lose Big, By Eef Barzelay
4. In Ghost Colours, by Cut Copy
5. Fleet Foxes, by Fleet Foxes
6. Silent Movie, by Quiet Village
7. Fate, by Dr. Dog
8. Carried to Dust, by Calexico
9. Dead Calm Horizon, by Ketch Harbour Wolves
10. Modern Guilt, by Beck

Older music, but new to me in 2008
This year I was introduced to some great older music. Here are the bands that just recently appeared on my radar:

Avalanches
Grin
Incredible String Band
Fairport Convention
Ladysmith Black Mambazo
Heatmiser
Nada Surf

New Music From Great Bands
Some of my favorite artists released new music this year. These didn’t make my top ten list, but they are good albums from my favorite bands.

1. Way to Normal, by Ben Folds
2. Distortion, by Magnetic Fields
3. Acid Tongue, by Jenny Lewis
4. Ode to J. Smith, By Travis
5. Attack and Release, by The Black Keys
6. A Mad and Faithful Telling, by Devotchka

Best of the Past
If you are interested in my “Best Of” lists from other years, check out these links:

Best of 2007
Best of 2006
Best of 2005
Best of 2004

Here are some of the ways that the iPhone has been sucking up my time so far:

Website optimization
This blog along with my other sites are now optimized for the iPhone browser. If you are a web designer, you should definitely check out the article at A List Apart for a good introduction to designing websites for the iPhone.

Email
I switched all my email accounts to IMAP from POP. This works better with the iPhone. I don’t want to get into the details, but if you are going to use email on your phone you should do some research on IMAP.

Portfolio on my phone
As a recent convert to iPhoto, I am just starting to realize how great that program is. One thing I can do is create a photo album in iPhoto of all my design samples. Then I can sync that album to my phone and I instantly have my design portfolio on my phone. Pretty handy, or at least I think it will be.

Twitter
I finally signed up for twitter and you can now follow my tweets in the sidebar of this blog.

Album Art
Now that I have an iPod that displays album art, it was time to update the music in my library that lacked album covers. A big chunk of my music wasn’t purchased through iTunes, or is somewhat obscure, so I had a big chore of updating my songs. A big help was an Applescript that creates a playlist of all songs without album art.

Wish list
An iPhone password application that syncs with my MacBook Pro. I use Steel currently. Pastor looks promising.

1. Lose Big, by Eef Barzelay
Mp3: The Girls Don’t Care

2. Fleet Foxes, by Fleet Foxes
Mp3: White Winter Hymnal

3. Vampire Weekend, By Vampire Weekend
Mp3: M79

4. LP3, by Ratatat
Mp3: Schiller

5. In Ghost Colours, by Cut Copy
Mp3: Strangers In the Wind

6. Smilers, by Aimee Mann
Mp3: Freeway

7. Pork and Beans, By Weezer
Mp3: The Greatest man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)

8. Lucky, by Nada Surf
Mp3: Weightless

9. Narrow Doors, by Death Cab for Cutie
Mp3: I Will Possess Your Heart

10. Distortion, by The Magnetic Fields
Mp3: California Girls (Alternate Version)

Bonus Tracks:
Fate, by Dr. Dog
Mp3: The Old Days
(This is a track from their upcoming album that I am really looking forward to.)

Spoon’s Daytrotter Session
Mp3: Peace Like A River (Paul Simon cover)

There is one major flaw, however, that you may or may not be aware of. When you delete a song from iTunes it asks you if “you want to move the selected song to the Trash, or keep it in the iTunes Music folder?”

By default iTunes will keep the file and just delete it from iTunes memory. Unfortunately, this creates an orphaned file somewhere in your Music Folder. ITunes no longer knows that it exists and unless you have the patience to manually go through your folders these files are doing nothing but taking up space. Even if you are pretty careful about clicking “Move to Trash” every time you delete a music file there will inevitably be times when you accidently keep the files.

It is pretty easy to see how much space the orphaned iTunes files on your computer take up. At the bottom of your iTunes screen you should see a line saying something like “14118 items, 37.6 days, 66.88 GB.” Compare that last number to the size of the folder where iTunes saves your music. Unless you changed your settings that would be in user/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/. If the size of that folder is larger than what iTunes is telling you then you have some orphaned files.

In my case, my music folder was 3 gigabytes larger than my iTunes library so it was definitely worth it to recover the disk space. Unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t have a built in way of fixing this problem. You could try moving your library then reimporting all the music. That will work, but you might lose your playlists and if you have a large library this will take a long time.

Luckily there is another solution. Doug’s Applescripts for iTunes is a great place to find scripts that extend the features of iTunes. The script that will help us consolidate our music library is called “List Music Folder Files Not Added v2.0.” Follow the instructions on Doug’s site to install the script. It will show up in the iTunes menu bar under the little script icon. Click on it to run the script and then follow the directions. If your library is pretty large it may take several minutes for the script to complete. When it is complete you will have a text file containing paths to all the orphaned file in your music folder.

Now that you have a list of orphaned files you can delete them. You can do that manually, but that could take a while. A better way to eliminate them is to add them all back into your library and the delete them. To do that, change the extension on the text document from “.txt” to “.m3u”. Next, double click on the file and it should open in iTunes and begin adding all the orphaned files to iTunes. Then all you have to do is go to “View” and click “View Options.” Make sure that “Date Added” is checked and click “ok.” This gives you an extra column with “Date Added” as the header. Click on this heading and your library will be listed with the most recent additions at the top. You should see all the orphaned files that you just re-added to your library. Now delete them and make extra sure that you click “Move to Trash.” Empty your trash and you are done.

I hope that helps you clear up some space on your computer. I am on a Mac, so if you are on a PC and find that this doesn’t work please add your advice to the comments. Good luck!

By the way, Sad Kermit has his own MySpace page. Enjoy.

House by the Sea
Live at Paradiso, January 27, 2008 (ripped from the FabChannel video)

He Lays In The Reins
This is from a “Mornings Become Eclectic” show on KEXP from November 29, 2007.

Resurrection Fern
This one was broadcast on NPR but I am unsure of the date or location.

Someday the Waves
This was broadcast on KEXP, but I don’t have any more info on it.

Upward Over The Mountain
Live at Messiah College, February 10, 2007

And if you just can’t get enough live Iron and Wine, then you might want to check out PlayedLastNight.com where there are a ton of Iron and Wine concerts that you can purchase. Last but not least is a video from FabChannel that can be viewed after the break.

First off is a live video from a performance a couple weeks ago from FabChannel:

1. The Shepherd’s Dog, by Iron & Wine
Mp3: House by the Sea

2. Wincing the Night Away, by the Shins
Mp3: Girl Sailor

3. Ongiara, by Great Lake Swimmers
Mp3: Your Rocky Spine

4. Boxer, by The National
Mp3: Fake Empire

5. Close to Paradise, by Patrick Watson
Mp3: Close to Paradise

6. All Hour Cymbals, by Yeasayer
Mp3: 2080 (also my vote for best song of the year)

7. Asleep at Heaven’s Gate, by Rogue Wave
Mp3: Fantasies

8. We Can Create, by Maps
Mp3: Lost My Soul

9. Under the Blacklight, By Rilo Kiley
Mp3: Close Call

10. Marry Me, by St. Vincent
Mp3: Now. Now.

Honorable Mention:
In Rainbows, by Radiohead
Mp3: Bodysnatchers

Icky Thump, by The White Stripes
Mp3: Icky Thump

Neon Bible, by Arcade Fire
Mp3: Black Mirror

I’m Not There (Soundtrack)
Mp3: You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere

Ears Will Pop & Eyes Will Blink, by Bodies of Water
Mp3: I Guess We’ll Forget the Sound, I Guess, I guess

Juiced, by The Cansecos
Mp3: Free download from website

Hopefully 2008 will be just as good as 2007. If you want to take a look back, here are my lists from former years: 2006, 2005 2004