Top Ten Songs of 2011 – #4
Fountains of Wayne has been churning out pitch-perfect pop songs for 15 years now, and in 2011’s Sky Full of Holes they might just have released their best collection yet.
This was a more tightly focused effort than their previous albums — less of a kitchen sink approach — and as a result, more satisfying overall.
Top Ten Songs of 2011 – #5
Resuming my countdown of my top ten songs of last year, I arrive at a poignant track from Lucinda Williams latest album, Blessed.
Blessed came out early in 2011 and has been somewhat off my radar over the past several months as I listened to other new releases, but today’s SOTD, ‘Copenhagen,’ was an easy call for my top five.
When I wrote yesterday that I never revisit Paul Simon’s Surprise, I left out one major exception.
‘Father and Daughter,’ the album’s closing track, first turned up on the soundtrack to The Wild Thornberrys Movie before finding a home on Simon’s own album. I suspect he considered it too good a song to relegate to a soundtrack album from a little-seen kids films.
Paul Simon waited six years between You’re the One and his next studio release, 2006’s Surprise.
But he wasn’t slacking off. In 2003, Simon reunited with Garfunkel for a memorable performance of ‘The Sounds of Silence’ at the Grammys. That appearance led to a reunion tour that spanned two years and included runs in the U.S. and Europe. The duo would go on to perform together several more times over the next seven years.
Top Ten Songs of 2011 – #6
Miranda Lambert is responsible for two of my top three albums this year: her fourth solo album, Four the Record, and Hell On Heels, the digital-only debut of Pistol Annies, a group formed with two friends and fellow songwriters, Angeleena Presley and Ashley Monroe.
Lambert had a hell of a year. She became the first artist in the history of Billboard’s country charts to have her first four albums debut in the #1 spot. And the Pistol Annies album debuted atop that chart as well.
