I’m not interested in the argument over whether this new year’s marks the end of the decade-with-no-name. Since we celebrated the end of the millennium 10 years ago, I think we’re stuck. And you can bet that when 2019 rolls over to 2020 we’ll do the same.

My list, for your pleasure, is the decade in music — my personal bests. It will be no surprise to longtime readers here. This is the stuff that stuck with me through the years, that kept my body moving, my mind working and my heart opening. I’ve made most of these entries in pairs (or more) — because I can.

RUNNERS-UP:

• Beck: The Information (2006)
• The Decemberists: The Crane Wife (2006)
• The Gaslight Anthem: The 59 Sound (2008)
• Richard Thompson: 1000 Years of Popular Music (2003)
• Wrens: The Meadowlands (2003)
• XTC: Wasp Star (Apple Venus Vol. 2) (2000)

TOP TEN (IN ELEVEN):

(11) Garage Band and Rock Band: Apple’s software put remarkably high quality basement-taping music-making tools onto every Mac. Rock Band may be a toy, but it’s irresistible, and it schools young minds and bodies in the notion that music is to be made as well as consumed.

(10) Pernice Brothers: The World Won’t End (2001); Discover a Lovelier You (2005) — Definitely the sleeper in this bunch for me. When I first heard Joe Pernice’s work in 1998’s Overcome by Happiness I was impressed but a bit bored. Over time I came to appreciate, then crave, the combination of lush pop arrangements and astringent lyrics.

(9) They Might Be Giants: No (2002); Here Come the ABCs (2005)– For me this decade was all about raising a pair of twin boys. TMBG’s forays into children’s music were that process’s soundtrack — and frequent tonic. “No” offered my three-year-olds an early introduction to absurdism, and its charming animations proved an endless diversion. (“Robot Parade” introduced them to the term “cyborg” — and gave them a chance to misremember it as “borg-cy,” which we will never forget.) And even though, by the time “ABCs” came along, the alphabet had long been mastered, the music (and great accompanying videos) won over kids and grownups alike.

(8) The Long Winters: When I Pretend to Fall (2003); Putting the Days to Bed (2006) — Sharp tuneful alt-rock with an edge and a brain. My only complaint about singer/songwriter John Roderick? Low productivity!

(7) The Fiery Furnaces: Blueberry Boat — The Friedbergers, brother and sister, moved from the more forthright songwriting of their early tracks to the increasing obscurity of their more recent work. But along the way they created this masterpiece of baroque verbiage and extravagant music.

(6) Tobin Sprout: Lost Planets and Phantom Voices (2003) — Deep autumnal soundscapes and pop paintings from a maestro of gentle melody. The former Guided by Voices songwriter, far less profligate with his talent than that group’s leader, Robert Pollard, hasn’t put out an album since; he seems to be concentrating on painting these days. Too bad!

(5) Green Day: American Idiot (2004); and The Thermals: The Body, the Blood, the Machine (2006)– Two punk operas about Bush-era America. Green Day’s megahit album drafted Who-style song suites and hook-laden power-trio riffs in the service of a narrative about disaffected no-future youth; the Thermals channeled a Buzzcocks sound for their grim portrait of a young couple trying to escape a fundamentalist/fascist America.

(4) Mekons: Natural (2007) — These veterans kept producing challenging, creative work through the decade. Each album, from Journey to the Edge of the Night (2000) to OOOH (2002) to Natural, improved on its predecessor. Natural is the band’s version of pastoral — a contemplative, acoustic-heavy set of laments for the end of nature.

(3) Frank Black/Black Francis: Dog in the Sand (2001); Bluefinger (2007) — FB/BF has been as prolific with his songs as he is fickle with his stage name. These albums were his peaks of the decade. Dog in the Sand ranged from fierce Stones-style rockers to the almost unbearably beautiful “St. Francis Dam Disaster.” Bluefinger used the story of Dutch glam-rocker Hermann Brood as the spine for a memorable set of Black classics.

(2) The New Pornographers: Twin Cinema (2005), Challengers (2007) — I do not know how A.C. Newman and his cohorts do it, but each album adds to my respect for their genius. When I read somewhere in an interview that Newman is a big fan of Eno’s “Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)” it all made sense.

(1) The Mountain Goats: Tallahassee (2003), We Shall All Be Healed (2004), The Sunset Tree (2005) — Don’t think I’d have made it through these years without John Darnielle’s music. Thank you. Happy new year!

In early 2000 I got a call from a producer at Fresh Air, asking if I’d like to contribute some technology commentary. Fresh Air is, to my mind, one of the very best shows on radio, so yes, I was excited. For my tryout, I wrote a brief piece about this newfangled thing called MP3 that was just beginning to gain popularity. We’d been covering the MP3 scene at Salon since 1998, but it was still a novelty to much of the American public. I went down to KQED and recorded it. As far as I knew everyone liked it. But it never aired. I had four-month-old twins at home and a newsroom to manage at work. I forgot all about it.

In a recent file-system cleanup I came across the text of the piece and reread it, and thought it stood up pretty well. The picture it presents — of a future for music in which its enjoyment is divorced from the physical delivery system — has now largely come to pass. But at the time I was writing, the iPod was 18 months or so in the future; the iTunes store even farther out; the “summer of Napster” still lay ahead; and the record labels’ war on their own customers was still in the reconaissance phase.

Here it is — a little time capsule from a bygone era, looking forward at the world we live in today:

The phonograph I had as a kid played records at four different speeds. 33 was for LPs, 45 was for singles. There were two other speeds, 16 and 78, but I had no idea what they were for — they made singers on regular LPs sound like they’d sunk to the ocean floor or swallowed helium. Later I learned that the 78 speed was for heavy old disks, mostly from the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s; I’m still not clear what 16 was all about.

These old-fashioned playing speeds represented what, in today’s era of rapid obsolescence, we’d call “legacy platforms” — outmoded technologies that are no longer in wide use. The phonograph itself became a “legacy platform” in the 1980s with the advent of the compact disk. Now it’s the CD’s turn, as the distribution of music begins to move onto the Internet.
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For the past few years I have been making a pilgrimage to Villa Montalvo in Saratoga, through what are inevitably cold December rains, for solo acoustic shows by Richard Thompson. (I wrote about the trip back in 2005.) This year I picked up tickets way in advance for a Sunday evening show, figuring the traffic would be lighter than on a week night. Only later was this night declared on the calendar to be a special “theme” night, billed as a “first time ever” event: Thompson would perform “Work Songs, Ballads and Rallying Cries.” A little like his show of “1000 Years of Popular Music,” the set ranged from Renaissance ballads to punk. It was a bit rough around the edges, a rarity for this supremely skilled guitarist, but utterly engaging, and repeatedly surprising.

The show opened with Thompson’s own stirring “Time to Ring Some Changes,” and included several songs from his album “Industry,” one from his “Hard Cash” collection, and “Genesis Hall,” his Fairport Convention classic. The rest were covers — and what an eclectic collection.

I’m probably forgetting a few, but here’s what I remember: “Buddy Can You Spare a Dime”; “Minority” (Green Day); “Joshua Gone Barbados” (Rick von Schmidt); “Strange Fruit”; a hilarious 18th century song about lying, cheating merchants; a solemn, stirring anthem of the Diggers, that brief-lived collective during the English Revolution; “Get Up, Stand Up” (Bob Marley — minus the lines about Haile Selassie); “War” (Edwin Starr/Temptations); “I Ain’t Marching Any More” (Phil Ochs); “Little Boxes” (Malvina Reynolds); “Beds Are Burning” (Midnight Oil). Harmonica player George Galt accompanied on several numbers.

Thompson added a couple of updated verses to the Ochs march, placed his own spooky spin on “War,” and busted loose like a one-man rock band for the Midnight Oil number. Beyond an opening crack about the late conversion of George W. Bush to socialism, he barely alluded to the current state of the world and the woes of the economy. He really didn’t have to.

I discovered only by chance that Glenn Mercer, one of the key figures in one of my favorite bands of all time, the Feelies, put out a new solo album last year. This led me on a whole rediscovery-tour of the post-Feelies bands: Wake Ooloo, Wild Carnation (just ordered their 2006 Superbus), Speed the Plough, Yung Wu.

If you don’t know them, the Feelies started out on their first album with a sort of jittery New Wave hyper-strum (one song was aptly titled “The Boy With the Perpetual Nervousness”). Then the original rhythm section (including drummer Anton Fier) left, and with a new lineup they took a more pastoral turn on album two, The Good Earth, and finally settled into a Velvet-Underground-meets-Television groove for a handful of further albums before breaking up.

I loved pretty much everything they did, and when I pick up a guitar and idly strum, more often than not it’s one of their tunes. Their choice of covers was always spot on: you can find live recordings from the ’80s of them playing Jonathan Richman’s “Egyptian Reggae” and Wired’s “Outdoor Miner,” and Yung Wu, whose lineup seemed to include the entire Feelies, even recorded that wonderful Brian Eno/Phil Manzanera ditty, “Big Day”.

I don’t think they were capable of recording a bad track, and at their best (as on “Higher Ground”) the exquisite guitar leads are like a flight of angels. But their vocals were always modestly buried in the mix (I think this heavily influenced early REM) and they never found the following they deserved.

Now, according to the Feelies Myspace page, it appears the Feelies are reuniting to play some dates in NY over July 4. Too bad I won’t be there.

OK, this one is just for plain fun: it’s the first Wordyard playlist.

When I was planning my campaign of global domination for Dreaming in Code I had visions of a multimedia onslaught. I’d pull together video clips that epitomized the nightmare of software scheduling, from A Brief History of Time to Groundhog Day to Lawrence of Arabia (that quicksand scene, of course), and music that similarly reflected the themes.

Didn’t get too far…but I did compile a list of songs that might be the book’s soundtrack. (Tip of the hat to Largehearted Boy’s custom of inviting authors to assemble playlists for their novels, and to Josh Kornbluth’s loving selection of apropos tunes to precede his solo shows.)

(1) “Put Your Hand On The Computer,” They Might Be Giants — ‘Cause that’s how it always starts.

(2) “Bill Gates Must Die,” John Vanderslice — Certainly, most open source developers aren’t obsessive sociopaths like this song’s narrator. But they have always harbored a certain animosity toward the founder of Microsoft, and sometimes it gets a little personal. (Bonus rationale: This song once fried my motherboard.)

(3) “Source Tags and Codes,” And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead — “Spend half a life deciding what went wrong / Trying to find out what took you so long.”

(4) “Dot Dash,” Wire.

(5) “Systems Crash,” Guided By Voices.

(6) “I Want to Live on an Abstract Plain,” Frank Black.

(7) “Information Age,” Damon and Naomi.

(8) “Waiting for the Great Leap Forward,” Billy Bragg.

(9) “Raymond Chandler Evening,” Robyn Hitchcock — Chandler the software is named for the novelist. But the song’s last line (“And I’m lurking in the shadows / ‘Cause it hasn’t happened yet”) echoes my software epic’s in medias res ending, too!

(10) “Your Belgian Things,” the Mountain Goats — “The arteries are clogging in the mainframe / There’s too much information in the pipes.”

Earlier this week I received my (pre-ordered) copy of the new Mountain Goats CD, “Heretic Pride.” My enthusiasm for the music of John Darnielle now dates back four years, and this is one infatuation that has only grown deeper with time. I am, unabashedly, a fan.

And yet I think I’d love “Heretic Pride” even if I encountered it with no grounding in the Mountain Goats’ stuff. This is what passes for an upbeat album from Darnielle: it’s full of joy, but that’s joy in the face of terror. The title track, for instance, is a defiant hymn soaring out of the throat of some unspecifiedly nonconformist protagonist who has been dragged out of his house and through the streets toward his doom. Of this song, Darnielle writes: “Spoiler alert: The main character here will not live long after he gets done lauding his imminent demise.” (This commentary appears in notes to the album that were apparently provided in the press kit; an artist named Jeffrey Lewis took them and illustrated them in tabloid-comic strip form — the style of those salvation-in-six-frames handouts that evangelicals used to distribute, and perhaps still do.)

There are songs here (you can sample them at the 4AD site) about Chinese sea monsters and pulp novelists, murdered reggae singers and imaginary cults. Titles include “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” and “Marduk T-Shirt Men’s Room Incident.” The pace is livelier and more varied than on the Goats’ somber last outing, “Get Lonely”; superb drumming from Jon Wurster drives the faster numbers, and majestic string arrangements by Eric Friedlander bathe the slower ones.

If the album doesn’t sate you, you can also enjoy the satirical ditty about this year’s elections that Darnielle knocked off for a recent public radio show. Titled “Down to the Ark,” it imagines the whole civic process as the triumph of a satanic cult. You can listen to it here.

Three Mountain Goats shows are lined up here in the Bay Area next weekend. I intend to be at all of them! Come say hello.

LATE ADD: Darnielle dissects the characters in five of his songs in this interview on Emusic.

Some new music I’ve been enjoying from three artists/bands whose work I’ve been following since the mid or late ’80s:

The Mekons, “Natural”: Their last collection of new material, “OOOH,” was an exploration of religion and ritual; this new batch takes a turn to the pastoral. Rough-hewn even in this laid-back mode; mysteriously allusive as always; and worth heavy rotation as ever.

They Might Be Giants, “The Else”: I never fully warmed to their previous outing, “The Spine,” but “The Else” strikes me as a return to form. I’m enjoying it and — even though this is ostensibly a “grownup” album and not one of the band’s “children’s music” works — so are my seven-year-olds. Standout tracks: the patter-song “Bee of the Bird of the Moth” (is it an ode about genetic engineering? I don’t know, but I’ll remember the “Sleep of Reason Corporation”!) and “Contre Coup” (a song about phrenology, concussions and love), which introduced me to the obscure word “limerent.”

Black Francis, “Bluefinger”: Frank Black reverts to his old Pixies moniker for this new album, inspired (as the folks in the FrankBlack.net forum figured out and the official site confirms) by the life saga of Dutch glam rocker Herman Brood. Hard for me to see how all 11 tracks fit that template. But it’s easy for me to love the entire album, which marks a return to energetic form after Black’s previous duo of interesting but somewhat enervated discs recorded in Nashville. Standout songs: Beastie-Boys-style rave up “Threshold Apprehension,” in which Black shrieks and yowls like he hasn’t since Pixie days; “Lolita,” which sounds like one of the great numbers from the days of Frank Black and the Catholics (reminiscent of the Jonathan Richman tribute “The Man Who Was Too Loud”); the singalong “She Took All of the Money”; and “Angels Come to Comfort You,” which rises to the catchiest, sunniest chorus of death you can imagine.

I missed TMBG on their current tour — they swung through the Bay Area while I was out of town last week — but it seems that both the Mekons and Frank Black/Black Francis are performing over the next week at the Cafe du Nord. I expect to be there.

• Tipped off by a positive NY Times review by Kelefa Sanneh, I got “The Body, the Blood, the Machine,” the new album by the Thermals, a Portland band, and it has been steadily knocking me out. Musically it’s relatively simple — flawlessly executed classic pop-punk in the Buzzcocks-to-Green Day tradition. Lyrically it appears to be a narrative song cycle. At first I thought its Biblically infused verses (full of Noah’s ark references and titles like “Pillar of Salt”) might be about a Heaven’s Gate-style cult, but I read on the band’s Web site that “the album tells the story of a young couple who must flee a United States governed by fascist faux-Christians,” which makes things a little clearer. It’s as if someone took American Idiot, subtracted the teen anomie and the Tommy-style riffs on celebrity, and injected it with a little bit of the acid from the Dead Kennedys’ “Holiday in Cambodia.” I’m finding it irresistible.
• I’m also enjoying the new Mother Hips release, Kiss the Crystal Flake. This Northern California band’s sound — straying over the years from jam-band to country rock to folk and now neo-psychedelia — has always hovered on the edge of derivative cliche only to be rescued by great vocal harmonies, smart lyrics and a devotion to the sheer sonic pleasure of a well-played guitar well recorded.
• We got a piano for my sons to learn on a while back, which means I can pursue my half-baked musical noodling on multiple instruments now. The other day I started playing the old Eno chestnut “St. Elmo’s Fire” — the kids love it! — and realized, in a flash, that its chord progression is almost identical to that of Elvis’s “Burning Love.” This is the sort of realization you are in an especially good position to experience if your piano-playing, like mine, consists of sounding out simple triads, because you are stripping the music down to its chordal essence (a nice way of saying that you make most of what you play sound the same).

Steven Levy’s book about the iPod, The Perfect Thing, describes a transcendent moment the author experiences: In a funk one day in post-9/11 New York, with his iPod in shuffle mode, Levy hears the glorious opening chimes of the Byrds’ version of “My Back Pages,” and he has a Perfect Moment.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always loved that song, and would rather not wait for shuffle mode to surface it from my thousands of other songs. I continue to hand-pick my music, relying on shuffle only occasionally for novelty or distraction.

Still, iPod-fueled transcendence remains available even to us control freaks. This morning, for instance, I relieved a BART commute’s tedium by listening to the splendid live recording a fan made of a memorable Mountain Goats show I attended last month. (It’s posted here at the Internet Archive.) The set begins pensively with “Wild Sage’s” ruminations, makes its way to the equally melancholy “Get Lonely,” and then bursts into “Quito” — a defiant anthem of aspiring redemption and half-glimpsed rebirth. The song reached its visionary climax at the precise instant my train emerged from the tunnel into the morning Bay Area sun. Perfection! A film-editing wizard couldn’t have better synced sound and vision. I beamed; it made my morning.

It’s been a quarter century since the Walkman’s advent introduced us to the notion of provisioning our daily wanderings with a soundtrack of our choice. The iPod kicks this dynamic into a higher gear. (Levy ponders this and much else in his book; I covered his talk in Berkeley here.)

I’d argue that those of us who are not as shuffle-happy as Levy can feel a bit of extra pride: By virtue of our active personal DJ-ing, we become, instead of passive observers of serendipitous moments, more like coauthors of our own pleasurable juxtapositions. But either way, we’re having fun, and that’s what really matters.

I originally got hooked on the music of the Mountain Goats by listening to the first four tracks of the album “We Shall All Be Healed,” late one February night three years ago. The riffage of these low-tech rock songs reminded me of the Velvet Underground songs I grew up with, and formed memorable frames for the mysterious lyrics of John Darnielle — evocative, in songs like “Palmcorder Yajna” and “Letter From Belgium,” of sacred rituals, ancient science fiction plots, and David Lynch movies. (It was only later that I figured out that the whole album is a kind of memorial to doomed meth addicts Darnielle had hung with in his youth.)

As I made my way through the Goats’ voluminous back catalog I came to understand that these full-band song arrangements were the exception to Darnielle’s rule of recording mostly with an acoustic guitar, solo into a boombox mike — and touring, most of the time, as a duo, with bassist Peter Hughes.

All of which is by way of preface to a report from the last two evenings that I spent, enraptured, at the Independent (the venue I knew formerly as the Kennel Club), watching the Mountain Goats metamorphose into a rocking band. Yes, friends, the Mountain Goats are now a power trio, with a drummer joining Hughes and Darnielle and the latter trading in his acoustic for a natural-wood Telecaster after the first few songs of the set.

How did it sound? Wonderful. The last time Darnielle swung through San Francisco he gave a subdued show at the Bottom of the Hill; beset, apparently, by the flu, his set leaned heavily on the hushed falsetto of so many of the tunes on his most recent album, “Get Lonely.” (His voice was so shot he essentially turned over the vocal chores on “No Children” to the sing-along crowd — an event preserved in MP3 and celebrated in the blogosphere as an instance of band/audience bonding.) This week, those songs remained part of his set, but they have assumed their rightful place as the slow songs, serving as mood- and pace-changers rather than centerpieces.

The new full-band mode gave the Goats a chance to rearrange much of their catalog. Songs like “Jaipur,” “The Pigs That Ran…”, “The House that Dripped Blood,” “Quito,” “Lions Teeth,” and “See America Right” all emerged with extra-hard edges and careening speeds. Darnielle performed even more unexpected transformations on “Peacocks,” from Tallahassee (the quiet 6 a.m. song got an infusion of mid-tempo energy); and on “Dance Music,” which traded in some of its bop for some bittersweetness; and on “Dilaudid,” a desperate love song given a tougher bite.

Darnielle is in full-throated form again, moving nimbly from a feather-light whisper to a piercing pleasing bray, never losing grip of the syllables that define each moment of each song as unique. As he bangs away on his electric guitar, jaw dropped open an inch or two to release a goofy “I still can’t believe I’m doing this!” smile, he looks like he has moved through all the pain in his songs, found his own little corner of nirvana and invited us in. (Here’s some good descriptive writing about his performance style.)

John Vanderslice joined the band for the conclusion of both shows, adding to the fun and layering “Palmcorder Yajna,” “Half Dead” and “This Year” with some extra exquisite crunch. Then the young women of Pony Up, the warmup act, trotted out to sing backup on Darnielle’s devotedly straight-faced cover of Thin Lizzy’s ode to vernal rebirth, “The Boys Are Back in Town.”

It’s a great time to see the Mountain Goats. Go if you can. They’re playing again tonight at the Bottom of the Hill. Full tour schedule here.