#97 The Dandy Warhols - Bohemian Like You

I like it when the beat drops and it makes me cry.

Also, This song reminds me of closing the coffee shop every night with my friend Hannah. We would lock the doors and play this song twice as loud as any other song. It's amazing how quick you can clean an espresso machine to this song.

Bohemian Like You - The Dandy ...

#97 - Sweetness - Jimmy Eat World

This song is the soundtrack to my high school friends and I piling into a Chevy Suburban filled to the brim with cases of Busch Light, cruising down the interstate with the windows down, our fists in the air, yelling out the lyrics (or what we thought were the lyrics), except for my friend Alec who always seemed to be screaming out 'YES!' like Marv Albert during the Jordan era. How this song always ended up being the staple song on our way up to a weekend of heavy drinking and debauchery at my friend's lake house I can honestly not recall. But it was, and though I haven't been up to the house in a good while now, and therefore have not really listened to Sweetness either, I can't put together this list without it.

Sweetness - Jimmy Eat World

#97 Kalvin, Elliott Smith - "Everything Reminds Me Of Her"

sometimes being in love is so stupid that you cant even explain how stupid it is.

luckily, Elliott Smith can.

Everything Reminds Me Of Her -...

Late #98 From Kalvin, Sunny Day Real Estate - In Circles

The dudes voice. Can we just talk about the dudes voice?

I mean, is an old prophet and a basement dwelling, computer nerd singing to me out of the same mouth?

and in this song... he's mad.
it's like this character in a nightmare that starts out as a gentle squirrel with big, blue eyes
and then suddenly changes into this snarling, sharp-toothed monster, standing ten feet tall and judging you.

and thats what hooked me and keeps me loving this song.

In Circles - Sunny Day Real Es...

#98 - Johnny Appleseed - Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros

This was one of the some 150 albums I pulled off the shared server of my dorm freshman year. So of course it sat on my computer untouched while I devoted my energies toward getting into The Shins. Fast forward six years later to the premiere of HBO's John From Cincinnati. I think I tried just as hard to get into this show, wading through all of its cryptic and mysterious bullshit, until I arrived at the final episode in which ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IS EXPLAINED. The show was canceled and I am left regretting each of the 10 hours I devoted to it... except for the opening credits of each episode where Johnny Appleseed plays over super 8 footage of California surfing.

This show brought me back to Strummer's album Global A Go-Go, which turned out to be pretty solid. R.I.P Joe.

Johnny Appleseed - Joe Strumme...

#98 Yeah Yeah Yeah's- Black Tongue

God damn you Karen O! Somehow you manage to be the cutest fucking thing in the world and tough as nails all at the same time. This was the song that first turned me on to the Yeah Yeah Yeah's and Fever to Tell continues to be one of my favorite albums of the past decade. Karen O's shrills, hand claps and good beats make this an all around great song. If I were to get a brand new cherry red 67' mustang, this would be the song I would play when I took the car for it's first joy ride.

Black Tongue - Yeah Yeah Yeahs

#99 Jens Lekman - A Postcard to Nina

Phone rings....

Hello? Nina? Wow, I thought you would never call. What's that? Thanksgiving with your family? Umm.. Uhh... What a surprise... of course I'll come with you. Yeah, I've gotta run too. I can't wait to see you.

Three Days Pass.....

Nina! Wow! You look amazing! I've been thinking about you a lot recently and I'm just glad you changed your mind about meeting up. Listen, I know we haven't hung out before or really ever talked besides that one time at the bar where I forced my number on you and then the other time when you called me to come to Thanksgiving with your family, but, listen... are you listening? I think I love y....wait... what? You have a girlfriend? like... a friend that's a girl? no? not like that at all? so let me get this straight... you have a girlfriend but your dad is super religious and would never understand so instead of breaking dad's heart you invited me to dinner to get them off your back about who you're dating? Will I do this for you? I mean, I am kind of hungry and you promised there would be dressing. Fuck It! I'm in!

A Postcard to Nina - Jens Lekm...

#99: "This Is Not An Exit" by Saves The Day

songs come to you at the exact time when you need to hear them.
I use to think that it was just such an amazing coincidence or that perhaps it was the music
influencing me so strongly that I lived my life according to what I listened to.

but that aint true.

you hear songs that are dealing with things that you are thinking about because at the time,
all over the entire universe, those same thoughts and feelings are being felt and thought about by everyone in the world that thinks and feels.

it's the invisible string.

I remember that when I first heard this song I was weeding my mothers garden and thinking about life and my friends and my girlfriend and how I felt like none of it really mattered and I couldnt wait for it to all just go away.

this song is about death.
and being okay with.
and being proud of the life you lived, no matter what.

I really liked that
and even still when I listen to this song, it's not nostalgia I am feeling,
it's excitement for getting to see what comes after I die.

This Is Not An Exit - Saves Th...

#99 - Kissing the Beehive - Wolf Parade

'I wish I could believe in who you are.' is belted out by Spencer Krug at the exact moment I began to give this song its much deserved consideration. I follow most of Krug's three(?) bands pretty intently, but Wolf Parade is by far my favorite of his projects. Yet, this is an album that is unaccommodating, even for me. It is far a less palatable than their first LP, Apologies to Queen Mary and wears its badge of "No Singles" with the utmost pride.

It has taken me two years to warm up to this song and to realize that Krug and Dan Boeckner's most epic and strangest track, might also be their best. These two don't usually sing on the same song with one another, but I think here it works perfectly, even if Krug ends up stealing the show a bit. It progresses as though it's three different songs the band decided to mash together. But it works, and I've grown to love every one of its eleven minutes. If I were drafting this list two months from now this might have ended up closer to the top, but for now I'll keep it here, safe at #99.

Kissing the Beehive - Wolf Par...

#100 Cursive- The Casualty

When we started coming up with this list I thought that it would be easy to come up with 100 songs that have defined the last decade of my life. Then the more I thought about it the harder it became to weed through the past ten years of music when you have listened to music for every one of those days.

Trying to find out what number 100 was going to be was just as hard as trying to figure out what number 1 was going to be. You don't want to come out guns-a-blazin' and blow your load before the list even begins. On the other side, you don't want to come out too soft with a korn cover of a limp bizkit song or something ridiculous because you are too scared to say "this is where the list starts, anything that doesn't make it on the list now is worse than this song. "

So here it is boys, kind of an oddball choice in my own opinion. Listening to Tim Kasher's voice growl through the chorus brings back so many memories of riding with my friends in high school and screaming the lyrics at the tops of our lungs. I recently went and watched them in New York and it just wasn't the same. It has been almost ten years since this album came out and the years haven't been kind to them. But when I put on my headphones and press play to the album Domestica and that guitar riff kicks on, I forget that those ten years have passed and I'm suddenly 17 again with the rest of my life ahead of me.

The Casualty - Cursive

#100: "Run" - Snow Patrol

This song was a song doomed from the get go. It was just too much of an anthem for it's own good and was destined to fall into the hands of teenage lovers and college radio dj's.

 See Also: Lazy Eye - Silver Sun Pickups

but I knew it had to make the list, because like most of the songs that you'll see in this list,
every single time I listen to this song, I have a movie projected in my head (which might be why I was a little let down by the actual music video)

so I guess this one is for all the anthem songs that fell into the wrong hands in the record shops and were overplayed in all the wrong places

and will now be forced to live forever as an embarrassing sign to all the girls that look through the track list of my ipod  and see that, at least one point in my life, I loved this song so much that I played it everyday as I drove myself to my shit job at the mall and back, thinking of how beautiful it would be if I could just say fuck it to everything and, well, run.

it probably also tells them that without a doubt, I will cry in any movie where the hero saves the world but loses the girl.

Run - Snow Patrol

#100 - Love Stoned / I Think She Knows - Justin Timberlake

The 4:30 Mark
For a while now I've known this song would be #100. I knew it would be at the very end of the list because it honestly isn't very good. The beat is boring and the verse redundant. It kinda reminds me of his horrible song, 'Rock Your Body,' that Bally's Total Fitness would use for their ads.

When I first picked up FS/LS I would skip past Love Stoned. It really didn't do anything for me. One day, distracted and too preoccupied to skip forward, I allowed the song to play through. I allowed it to make it to the 4:30 mark. The 4:30 mark caused one of those moments where I stopped what I was doing and wondered 'where the fuck did this come from?' The 4:30 mark is when something else starts to tease, change entirely, and then emerges as echoing guitars and synths that accompany, and somehow strengthen, the same lines JT's been reiterating the entire time. At this point I can forgive the mediocrity of the past 4 minutes and accept that it was worth waiting for... unless I've already skipped forward... to the 4:30 mark.

LoveStoned/I Think She Knows I...

I write this introduction after a long night of work and several beers with Kalvin. Good conversation and good times filled the night as it usually does when I am with either one of you (Kalvin and Benjamin) , or we are all together. One thing I feel that we always talk about once a night when we are together is music; what new music we like, first albums we bought, how much we can't believe Kalvin doesn't get Interpol, but most importantly, the past few months have been littered with the conversation of this list before us.

I write this because my favorite movie of all time is High Fidelity, a movie about music, well, that and girls. I think it's my favorite movie because if I didn't fall into photography when I did, that movie could easily be a documentary about me. I feel like that could be us three running a record store except we would probably all be John Cusack. I can't think of anyone I would rather partake in this list with than you two.

I write this because the first thing I do when I leave you guys and am by myself, my headphones are the first thing I worry about. I won't get on the train with them, I will make someone call their roommates to let me in their apartment just so I can have them, I will spend 30 dollars on a cab ride home if they aren't in my possesion. If music isn't playing, I feel like something is missing and I have to fix it immediately. I don't do a lot of research on musicians or try to find out their backstories to understand why they make the music they do, frankly these things dont concern me and I would rather keep it that way. Meeting these people, however great an experience it might be, might ruin their songs for me and I would never take that risk. It's their music that has made me who I am, not them.

We've shared great times to a lot of these songs and I hope we share many, many more. I don't think I could have asked for better friends since moving here and I'm glad that we're all here at this point in our lives. So let's begin shall we? Here's to those late nights we spend together, interrupting conversation for a moment just to hear our favorite line from a song.

Introducing my top 100

I want to say something meaningful. I want to introduce myself and the songs with such perfect words that you'd think they were lyrics from songs that didnt make the cut. I guess I cant explain why I loved Ben's idea for doing our own list of the top 100 songs of the last ten years. 

Maybe its because ten years ago when I was fifteen I became aware that a good mix tape could do wonders for my love life.

Maybe its because when I close my eyes and I think of being a teenagers, it's this list of songs that plays as a soundtrack in the background.

Maybe its just because finding two people anywhere in the world with the ability to be ridiculous and serious in the same breath is such a beautiful thing that it makes it hard for me to say no to any idea they might have, especially one that reveals so much about each other as this most definitely will. 

whatever. It doesnt matter. I just want to tell you that without music, these last ten years would have been meaningless static and stucco walls while I waited for the school bell to ring.

but with my windows rolled down or my headphones pushed in, I was always exactly where I needed to be.

from 100 all the way to 1

from 1999 to today.

and so... here we go.

My Top 100 (of 300)

Jacob. Kalvin. Benjamin. The three of us have been talking about doing this for the last month and a half and have finally put it together. Constructing this list was no easy task and it will likely be something I look back on with mild regret. I have undoubtedly forgotten songs while still having yet to discover others. My own list, simply enough, ranks my 100 favorite songs from the last ten years… as of today. Mine is not a list constructed by committee, one that required research of record sales, awards, or an assessment of what people would get most wild for “in the club.” Essentially, my apologies to Usher and Lil’ Jon and best wishes to Norah Jones, but your Billboard credentials will not be a factor here… at least not on my list.

We do not know each other’s lists. I am only somewhat aware of what will collectively be revealed over the next three months, but am positive there will be several similarities. When I first met Jake he already knew and was fond of Sunset Rubdown, which is an immediate good sign. While urinating at work one day "Ice Cream" by Muscles came through the bathroom speakers and I pinched off early to commend whoever had DJed the song, which was Kalvin. The three of us could defintiely road trip. Aside from repeats between our lists, there will be a lot of Pitchfork congruities in what follows, and I'm probably saying this just so I can beat someone else to the punch. In my own defense, I picked my songs before Pitchfork posted theirs.

Last, what I have to say about each of these songs will mostly come in the form of some random story or rant that I will try to associate with the track in question. So nothing too analytical. So here we go. 300 songs from three hooligans. Hope everyone likes Nickleback!


98. Johnny Appleseed - Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros
99. Kissing the Beehive - Wolf Parade
100. Love Stoned / I Think She Knows - Justin Timberlake