odds & sods

• 2011-12-21

  My Favorite Music of 2011

  Here is some of the music I had on heavy rotation in 2011, in no particular order. I hope you discover something that you may have missed. What were you listening to this year?

  1. Radiohead - The King of Limbs

  2. Wilco - The Whole Love

  3. Joe Henry - Reverie

  4. The Civil Wars - Barton Hollow

  5. The Roots - undun

  6. Bon Iver

  7. Ryan Adams - Ashes & Fire

  8. Iron & Wine - Kiss Each Other Clean

  9. Nick Lowe - That Old Magic

  10. The Head and the Heart

  11. Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues

  12. Bright Eyes - The People’s Key

  13. King Creosote & Jon Hopkins - Diamond Mine

  14. The Decemberists - The King Is Dead

  15. Motopony

  16. Beirut - The Rip Tide

  17. Raphael Saadiq - Stone Rollin’

  19. Death Cab For Cutie - Codes & Keys

  20. Adele - 21

• 2010-12-02

  NPR Music's 50 Favorite Albums Of 2010

• 2010-11-22

  Changing Education Paradigms (via @theRSAorg)

• 2010-11-19

  A Slow Drag With Josephine

  Great performance of a great new song by Elvis from his new album. (Bonus: my doppelganger on harmony vocals)

  Source: http

• 2010-05-25

  Wilco - Country Disappeared | A Take Away Show (by La Blogotheque)

  Source: vimeo.com

• 2009-12-30

  Tennessee Jed - Elvis Costello (via deerfried)

  Elvis, Levon, Allen Toussant, Nick Lowe, RIchard Thompson…Amazing

  Source: youtube.com

• 2009-12-15

  Bon Iver — Flume (via 893TheCurrent)

  Source: youtube.com

• 2009-11-26

  Appreciate Your Life by Maezumi Roshi

  Source: shambhalasun.com

• 2009-11-24

  The Muppets sing “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Really.

• 2009-11-15

  Birches by Robert Frost (I was reminded today how much I love this poem)

  When I see birches bend to left and right
  Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
  I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
  But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.
  Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
  Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
  After a rain. They click upon themselves
  As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
  As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
  Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
  Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
  Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
  You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
  They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
  And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
  So low for long, they never right themselves:
  You may see their trunks arching in the woods
  Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
  Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
  Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
  But I was going to say when Truth broke in
  With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
  (Now am I free to be poetical?)
  I should prefer to have some boy bend them
  As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
  Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
  Whose only play was what he found himself,
  Summer or winter, and could play alone.
  One by one he subdued his father’s trees
  By riding them down over and over again
  Until he took the stiffness out of them,
  And not one but hung limp, not one was left
  For him to conquer. He learned all there was
  To learn about not launching out too soon
  And so not carrying the tree away
  Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
  To the top branches, climbing carefully
  With the same pains you use to fill a cup
  Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
  Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
  Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

  
  So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
  And so I dream of going back to be.
  It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
  And life is too much like a pathless wood
  Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
  Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
  From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
  I’d like to get away from earth awhile
  And then come back to it and begin over.
  May no fate willfully misunderstand me
  And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
  Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
  I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
  I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
  And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
  Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
  But dipped its top and set me down again.
  That would be good both going and coming back.
  One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.