So during yet another a brief hiatus from the December January Album essays I’m taking a few minutes to list my Favorite Albums from the first decade of the 2000′s.  If you want to get technical, I suppose this is a Best Of list for me, considering I liked these albums the best.  But really, it’s an opinion-based list; I don’t pretend to have listened to enough in the past decade to give an honest, all-encompassing Best Of list that’s 100 albums deep.  This list will reveal that I’m not pretentious enough to put out a list like Spin, not “Indie” enough to be “cool” like Pitchfork, and not mainstream enough to be in the class of Rolling Stone; I’m just a random schmuck from Rochester, NY who loves music enough to take the time to compile a Best Of list of Albums that he loved that were released from January 1st 2000 to December 31st 2009.  Unlike the Album Essays, these ARE the albums I liked listening to the best.  So, to that list, in no particular order:

1. Arcade Fire – Funeral
2. At The Drive-In – Relationship Of Command
3. Eminem – The Marshall Mathers LP
4. Flogging Molly – Swagger
5. Elliot Smith – Figure 8
6. Neil Young – Silver & Gold
7. Ani Difranc0 – Reveling/Reckoning
8. Bob Dylan – Love & Theft
9. The Strokes – Is This It?
10. System Of A Down – Toxicity
11. Aimee Mann – Lost In Space
12. Dredg – El Cielo
13. Flogging Molly – Druken Lullabies
14. Sigur Ros – ( )
15. Sparta – Wiretap Scars
16. A.F.I. – Sing The Sorrow
17. Kasey Chambers – Barricades & Brickwalls
18. Alkaline Trio – Good Mourning
19. Coheed And Cambria – In Keeping Secrets Of Silent Earth: 3
20. Bruce Springsteen – The Rising
21. Dropkick Murphys – Blackout
22. The Mars Volta – De-Loused In The Comatorium
23. NoFX – The War On Erroism
24. OutKast – Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
25. Lindi Ortega – The Taste Of Forbidden Fruit
26. Street Dogs – Savin Hill
27. The Strokes – Room On Fire
28. 50 Cent – Get Rich Or Die Tryin’
29. Action Action – Don’t Cut Your Fabric To This Year’s Fashion
30. Alexis MacIssac – Inspired
31. Jimmy Eat World – Bleed American
32. Jimmy Eat World – Futures
33. Keane – Hopes And Fears
34. The Killers – Hot Fuss
35. Killswitch Engage – The End Of Heartache
36. Madcap – Under Suspicion
37. Modest Mouse – Good People Who Love Bad News
38. Ray LaMontagne – Trouble
39. Regina Spektor – Soviet Kitsch
40. Bloc Party – Silent Alarm
41. Bright Eyes – I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning
42. Damian Marley – Welcome to Jamrock
43. Fiona Apple – Extraordinary Machine
44. Ludacris – Word Of Mouf
45. Franz Ferdinand – Franz Ferdinand
46. Weezer – Make Believe
47. Amy Winehouse – Black To Black
48. Angels & Airwaves – We Don’t Need To Whisper
49. As Tall As Lions – As Tall As Lions
50. Bob Dylan – Modern Times
51. The Decemberists – The Crane Wife
52. John Mayer – Continuum
53. Justin Timberlake – Futuresex/Lovesounds
54. Killswitch Engage – As Daylight Dies
55. M. Ward – Post-War
56. Mastodon – Blood Mountain
57. Nas – Hip Hop Is Dead
58. P!nk – I’m Not Dead
59. Pearl Jam – Pearl Jam
60. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Stadium Arcadium
61. Regina Spektor – Begin To Hope
62. The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band – Big Damn Nation
63. Silversun Pickups – Carnavas
64. Sparta – Threes
65. Tenacious D – Tenacious D
66. Thom Yorke – The Eraser
67. Johnny Cash – American III: Solitary Man
68. Against Me! – New Wave
69. Bad Religion – New Maps Of Hell
70. Bon Iver – For Emma, Long Ago
71. Clutch – From Beale Street To Oblivion
72. Coheed And Cambria – No World For Tomorrow
73. Down – Down III: Over The Under
74. Once Soundtrack
75. The Hives – Tyrannosaurus Hives
76. Kate Nash – Made Of Bricks
77. Lindi Ortega – Fall From Grace
78. Nicole Atkins – Neptune City
79. Radiohead – In Rainbows
80. Thrice – The Alchemy Index I-IV
81. Emma-Lee – Never Just A Dream
82. Lil Wayne – Tha Carter III
83. Metallica – Death Magnetic
84. My Morning Jacket – Evil Urges
85. Nas – NaS
86. Opeth – Watershed
87. Ray LaMontagne – Gossip In The Grain
88. Sarah Shafey – Tiny Music Box
89. Bat For Lashes – Two Suns
90. Dredg – The Pariah, The Parrot, The Delusion
91. Alkaline Trio – From Here To Infirmary
92. The Irish Tenors – Ellis Island
93. Johnny Cash – American IV: The Man Comes Around
94. The Postal Service – Give Up
95. Sigur Ros – Agastis Byrjun
96. Tom Waits – Alice
97. Jay Z – The Blueprint
98. U2 – All That You Can’t Leave Behind
99. Outkast – Stankonia
100. The White Stripes – Elephant

Ok, if listing them at random is a cop-out, here at least is my Top-10:

1. Flogging Molly – Drunken Lullabies
2. Dredg – El Cielo
3. Arcade Fire – Funeral
4. Emma-Lee – Never Just A Dream
5. Thrice – The Alchemy Index
6. Eminem – The Marshall Mathers LP
7. Sigur Ros – ( )
8. Bon Iver – For Emma, Long Ago
9. A.F.I. – Sing The Sorrow
10. Sparta – Wiretap Scars

So there’s that.

So I’ve been asked about the Album Essays.  I’m going to finish them soon.  I picked a bad month to try and knock them out.  The holidays were time consuming.  And I got sidetracked playing Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2.  I’m not going to lie.  But I’m having too much fun to give up on them now.  So, within the next couple of weeks, all 31 of them will be completed.  To write one of them takes longer than I thought writing 31 of them would take.  So far, 8 essays down, I’m just under 20,000 words invested.  That’s just under a third of the novel I wrote.  On 8 essays.  Yes.

To answer another question I’ve been getting since I started writing these essays, as I stated at the beginning, these ARE NOT the albums which I think are the best of the first decade of the 2000′s.  Some of these albums I’ve wrote about (or will soon) are ones I haven’t listened in years.  To me that doesn’t equate “great” but nonetheless all of the albums I’m writing (or plan to) essays about impacted me in some way or another.  Plain and simple.  Even if they were just background noise.  They were there.  In the next couple days I will have my ‘Best Of’ lists for both the decade and 2009.  So, if you want to debate my taste in albums, that’s the time, and this can be our place.

Until then…

When I was a kid I remember peeling decorative doors off the Christmas calendar.  Each peel meant I was one day closer to opening presents.  The anticipation was paramount; the end result could have been anything.  My imagination wasn’t spoiled by reality back then; the sky might have been the limit, but everything between the lines was fair game to want after.  And yeah, sometimes I wanted it all.  But it wasn’t always about the payoff.  From the moment you first start to grasp what’s behind that feeling called excitement, you realize the lead-up to the end result is where it’s really at.  Your expectations and your reality are hardly ever on the same page, even when they end up being the same thing.  Once you start expecting something everything else can only be a letdown; you’re only setting yourself up for a, “Yeah, but…” moment.

In thinking about ways to end up this decade in a blog/Tis the season combo fashion, my first thought was to talk about the best gifts I’ve ever received.  But the more I thought about that the more I realized that, for the most part, I don’t remember them; the gifts, the faces behind them.  The things that make you smile, sooner than later they’re replaced with something/someone else.  Something/someone new.  It’s a natural progression, growing in and out of spaces/places/people.  Faces blend together.  Bodies start to sag.  Memories start to blender themselves together into one fine mess.  Before you know it everything looks like a maraschino cherry Smoothie.

So I decided to do something else.  For the 31 days of December I’m going to write something about the 31 most important albums to me in this first decade of the 2000′s.  These are by no means the “best” albums from 2000 to 2009 if you were to ask the “critics”; some of them, to most, probably outright suck.  And they might not even feature my favorite songs from the past decade.  In fact there are really only two criteria: 1) they were released sometime between 2000 and 2009 2) something about them make me experience them and not just listen to them.  I scrolled through my iTunes this afternoon and made a preliminary list of albums that, for one reason or another, made me write the name down.  A lot of the albums I wrote down were ones I haven’t listened to in years, and in some cases, might never really listen to again.  But I suppose that’s part of it, and maybe, perhaps, a fun part of it.  We’ll see.

The preliminary list is as follows:

At the Drive-In – Relationship of Command

Eminem – The Marshall Mathers LP

Flogging Molly – Swagger

Dashboard Confessional – The Swish Army Romance

Linkin Park – Hybrid Theory

Neil Young- Silver and Gold

U2 – All You Can’t Leave Behind

Vertical Horizon – Everything You Want

Ani Difranco – Revelling/Reckoning

Bob Dylan – Love & Theft

Irish Tenors – Ellis Island

John Mayer – Room For Squars

Ludacris – Word Or Muth

NaS – Stillmatic

The Strokes – Is This Is?

System of a Down – Toxicity

Tenacious D – Tenacious D

Aimee Mann – Lost In Space

Andy Stochansky – Five Star Motel

Dredg – El Cielo

Early November – For All Of This

Eminem – Cleaning Out My Closet

Finch – What It Is To Burn

Flogging Molly – Drunken Lullabies

Goo Goo Dolls – Gutterflower

Howie Day – Australia

Jim Brickman – Love Songs & Lullabies

Kasey Chambers – Barricades & Brickwalls

Sigur Ros – ( )

Sparta – Wiretap Scars

AFI – Sing The Sorrow

Colin Hay – Going Somewhere

Alkaline Trio – Good Mourning

The Ataris – So Long, Astaria

Coheed & Cambria – In Keeping Of Secrets of Silent Earth: 3

Dashboard Confessional – A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar

Dropkick Murpys -Blackout

Howie Day – Stop All The World Now

The Mars Volta – DeLoused in the Comatorium

NOFX – The War On Erroism

Street Dogs – Savin Hill

The Strokes – Room On Fire

50 Cent – Get Rich Or Die Tryin’

Alexis MacIsaac – Inspired

Arcade Fire – Funeral

Chronic Future – Lines In My Face

D12 – D12 World

The Faint – Wet From Birth

Flogging Molly – Within A Mile From Home

Franz Ferdanand – Franz Ferdanand

Jimmy Eat World – Futures

Keane – Hopes & Fears

The Killers – Hot Fuss

Madcap – Under Suspicion

Modest Mouse – Good News For People Who Love Bad News

Ray LaMontagne – Trouble

Sparta – Porcelain

Against Me! – Searching For A Former Clarity

Bright Eyes – I’m Wide Awake And It’s Morning

Dredg – Catch Without Arms

Fiona Apple – Extraordinary Machine

Sigur Ros – Takk…

Angels & Airwaves – We Don’t Need To Whisper

As Tall As Lions – As Tall As Lions

Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova – The Swell Session

John Mayer – The Continuum

Justin Timberlake – FutureSex/LoveSounds

Killswitch Engage – As Daylight Dies

M. Ward – Chinese Translation

Nas – Hip Hop Is Dead

Pink – I’m Not Dead

Pearl Jam – Pearl Jam

Regina Spektor – Begin To Hope

The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band – Big Damn Nation

Silversun Pickups – Carnavas

Sparta – Three

Thom Yorke – The Eraser

Against Me! – New Wave

Bon Iver – For Emma, Long Ago

Clutch – From Beale Street To Oblivion

Once – Soundtrack

Kate Nash – Made Of Bricks

Lindi Ortega – Fall From Grace

Radiohead – In Rainbows

Thrice – The Alchemy Index (I-IV)

Emma-Lee – Never Just A Dream

Coldplay – Viva La Vida

Jimmy Eat World – Bleed American

Lil Wayne – Tha Carter III

Metallica – Death Magnetic

Nas – NaS

Dredg – The Pariah, The Parrot, The Delusion

M. Ward – Hold Time