The folk delight Lavender Diamond originated from Bird Songs of the Bauharoque, an operetta inspired by the work of American painter Paul Laffoley. Vocalist Becky Stark wrote and created the piece with a friend, and she starred as a character named Lavender Diamond, a charming part-bird/part-human who wants peace on earth. An album of Stark's songs was sold on tour, and Lavender Diamond became a four-piece band when Stark relocated from Providence, Rhode Island to Los Angeles.

Lavender Diamond has a knack for creating songs that feel both fresh and timeless, blending percussion, strings, guitar, and piano into gorgeous, folksy arrangements. But I think it's the delicate yet sure voice of Becky Stark that I love best. Stark can sound despairing, hopeful, vulnerable, and triumphant within the space of only a few minutes, especially on songs like "Rise in the Springtime," "Oh No," and "You Broke My Heart," which sounds like someone's heart swelling until it bursts.

Lavender Diamond - "You Broke My Heart"

Like Mirah, Nina Nastasia is an artist whom I think everyone should know because she is crazy talented. But at the same time I love that I don't have to share her with so many people.

Nina is one of very few artists who makes albums worth hearing in their entirety. She crafts songs from her intricate guitarwork and haunting vocals, frequent collaborator Jim White's distinct drums, and an eerie violin or two. The woman knows how to use a dramatic string section. Her lyrics sound like fables, nearly true tales set in a place both a part of and apart from the world that I know.

I never skip a track when listening to one of her records, and indeed I almost feel like I can't. She creates such intimate, spectral music that even the small spaces of silence between songs seem to jar me out of some spell she has cast. I keep coming back to her most recent album You Follow Me, which somehow feels like her biggest album even though it features the fewest instruments, and I always listen to her 2003 record Run to Ruin on repeat because it just gets under my skin.

Nina Nastasia - "Stormy Weather"

The Ames Brothers - "The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane" (1954)

I don't usually write about music on this blog because, frankly, I suck at it, but I heard a song recently that's got my inner feminist itchin' to rant.

The song, called "The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane," was written in the 1950s and most famously performed by The Ames Brothers and Archie Bleyer. Aurally, I like the song very much because of its tight vocal harmonies and bouncy boom bada booms, which give it a wonderfully nostalgic sound. However, the lyrics prove problematic for me despite the tune being something of a novelty song.

The lyrics suggest the sexual promiscuity of the "naughty lady" as, "She throws those 'come hither' glances at every Tom, Dick and Joe," and, "When offered some liquid refreshment, the lady never, never says, 'No.'" But despite these bad behaviors, the song assures the listener that, "She just needs someone to change her and she'll be nice as can be." Obviously, the lyrics imply that this "naughty lady" is a grown woman who flirts and drinks and sleeps around, but the last line of the song reveals her to be a nine-day-old infant.

Ha ha, right? It's cute. But I don't think that a song like this one would ever be written about a male child, and even if one were, I think it would be very different. So I can't help but think of this song as evidence of how early society starts policing female sexuality.

There's also a bit of eroticization of children that disturbs me. Four men calling a baby "delectable"? Yeesh.

Bad films can have good scores, and good films can have bad scores. A good score can elevate mediocre acting and a bad score can turn a poignant scene to mush. Most of these scores belong to films that I enjoy, though not all of them. But each of these perfectly capture the atmosphere and the spirit of the film, and the music evokes certain moments and images from the movie whenever I listen to it. And most importantly, this music stands on its own outside of the film, ultimately making it just really good music.

Amélie (Yann Tiersen)

American Beauty (Thomas Newman)

Being John Malkovich (Carter Burwell)

Casino Royale (Burt Bacharach)

Charade (Henry Mancini)

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Tan Dun)

Edward Scissorhands (Danny Elfman)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Jon Brion)

The Fog of War (Philip Glass)

Ghost World (David Kitay)

The Godfather (Nino Rota)

The Hours (Philip Glass)

Igby Goes Down (Uwe Farhenkrog-Petersen)

In the Mood for Love (Shigeru Umebayashi)

North by Northwest (Bernard Herrmann)

The Piano (Michael Nyman)

Rabbit-Proof Fence (Peter Gabriel)

The Red Violin (John Corigliano)

The Royal Tenenbaums (Mark Mothersbaugh)

Trois Couleurs: Bleu (Zbigniew Preisner)

A list of the twenty albums I listened to the most, according to last.fm:

Obviously, this list is not exclusive to albums made in 2008, though many of the higher-ranking albums were released during the past year: Robyn, Youth Novels, Volume One, We Started Nothing, Common Reaction, Santogold, and Velocifero.

Several of the other albums I have owned for years: Rid of Me, Standing in the Way of Control, Murmur, Revolver, Title TK, Rejoicing in the Hands, and Set the Woods on Fire. Why did I choose to revisit these particular albums so frequently in 2008? What thoughts do they provoke or moods do they create that made me reach for them again during the last year?

2008 was certainly my year for dance-pop, as the high placement of Robyn, Britney Spears' Blackout, and Rihanna's Good Girl Gone Bad suggest.

M.I.A.'s Kala and the Juno soundtrack would have had a place on the list and You Follow Me probably would have been ranked higher if last.fm could somehow track what I play on my CD player.

Hazel didn't really tag me, but I decided to make my own list because I was intrigued mostly by the number seven and because Hazel is awesome.

THE RULES:

1. Post your list of the seven best albums, the seven bloggers you will tag, a copy of these rules, and a link back to this page.
2. Each person tagged will put a URL to their Blogger Album Project post along with a list of the seven best albums in the comment section HERE at Hill’s Country. Enough already!
3. Feel free to post the “I Contributed to the Blogger Album Project” Award Graphic on your sidebar (even though I couldn’t find it), along with a link back to this page.
4. Post a link back to the blogger who tagged you.
   

My major criterion in selecting these albums proved to be whether, when listening to the album, I felt like I would commit a crime if I skipped a single track. These are albums that I always listen to straight through and I'm never tempted to pass over a song. Of course, I excluded compilations and "best of" albums.

Abbey Road, The Beatles

"Come Together" and the George Harrison penned "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" became popular singles for the group, but the furious guitar work on "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", Paul McCartney's raw pop vocals on "Oh! Darling", and the perfectly harmonized "Because" convinced me to choose this album over Revolver or Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Blue, Joni Mitchell

Blue, for me, is the perfect singer/songwriter album with its spare arrangements, melancholy melodies, and confessional lyrics. Carole King's Tapestry came in a close second to this album, but I chose Blue because in every song I feel like Joni Mitchell is exposing a raw nerve. Even the more upbeat songs like "All I Want", "Carey", and "My Old Man" are suffused with a sense of loneliness and loss.

Dig Me Out, Sleater-Kinney

Sleater-Kinney doesn't so much play the brief 36 minutes of Dig Me Out's running length as they attack it. Rolling Stone justifiably named the title track one of the 100 greatest guitar songs of all time. Other album highlights include "Turn It On", "Words and Guitar", and "Little Babies". Dig Me Out is the album on which Sleater-Kinney defined their style: the conversation of Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein's vocals and guitars and their sometimes angular, off-kilter melodies are in full effect. Janet Weiss makes her first appearance on this, Sleater-Kinney's third album, adding her energetic and ferocious drumming and completing the band's roster that endured until the announcement of their indefinite hiatus in 2006.

Exile in Guyville, Liz Phair

Whenever I listen to Liz Phair's 1993 debut album, I can't help but feel transgressive, as if I'm hearing something that they don't want me to hear. Phair talks about sex and specifically how women feel about sex with frankness, in terms that women weren't, and indeed aren't, really supposed to use. Besides being something of a landmark album for women in music, Exile in Guyville is really fucking good. Most tracks feature a lo-fi production of only Phair's reedy voice and her distinctive guitar work, but with only a couple of instruments Phair crafts memorable and surprisingly accessible songs with an emotional honesty rarely paralleled.

Murmur, R.E.M.

Michael Stipe has said that R.E.M. chose to name this 1983 release Murmur because it's one of the easiest words to say in the English language. It also aptly describes Stipe's vocals on the band's first full-length album, which in combination with his inscrutable lyrics, Mike Mill's rumbling and prominent bass lines, and Bill Berry's often sharp, clashing drums sustain a dark and somewhat ominous mood throughout the album's 44-minute running length. Peter Buck's jangly guitars and folksy playing style lightens the sound here and there, but Murmur is a twitchy, almost uncertain album, full of songs that talk of transition, pilgrimage, and movement. Unlike much of R.E.M.'s earlier, and quite frankly better, work that sounds very much of a certain musical era, Murmur has a timeless quality, which is perhaps why I chose it over the equally excellent Reckoning, Life's Rich Pageant, and Automatic for the People.

OK Computer, Radiohead

Radiohead's first two albums, especially 1995's The Bends, were full of anthemic, soaring ballads with dark, introspective lyrics, though still musically accessible and radio-friendly. With OK Computer, Radiohead ventured out into waters uncharted by Britpop bands of their time and created a dense, almost frightening musical landscape, blending their guitar-heavy rock with electronica beats, eerie keyboards, and odd syncopation. Lyrically, Thom Yorke tackles topics like consumerism, social alienation, and political inaction. OK Computer laid the groundwork for Radiohead's later experimentation, but it remains the pinnacle of the band's excellent career.

Pink Moon, Nick Drake

I like moody music. I admit it. And when it comes to moodiness it's tough to top Nick Drake. Pink Moon is the last and most sparse of Drake's albums, featuring only Drake's voice and guitar on most of the songs. It's a short album, not even half-an-hour long, with many of the songs clocking in at under 3 minutes, but as one of Drake's friends put it, "If something's that intense, it can't be measured in minutes." Drake's voice is light and whispery but full of a melancholy that's somehow very intimate and comforting, even though it's difficult to tell sometimes what he's saying, let alone what the songs are about. Any of Drake's albums could easily have been on this list, but Pink Moon feels like a letter that a good friend wrote you many years ago that's so full of secrets and truths that you just can't throw it away.

My crush on Mirah dates back to college and a friendship I had with a girl named Katie. She was one of those people whom I meet and immediately want to be friends with but I'm too shy to actually talk to because they just seem that awesome. But Katie really was that awesome and actually talked to me about amazing things and made me mixed CDs with people like Devendra Banhart and Wolf Colonel. And Mirah.

Sigh, Mirah. Not only is she a talented musician but she's a CGiCG as well (Cute Girl in Cute Glasses).

What I love about Mirah's music is that when I listen to her albums, I feel like I'm sitting at the kitchen table with her and it's a rainy day outside and we're drinking tea together and she's telling me things about herself that she's never told anyone before. With her gorgeous voice, sensitive lyrics, and intricate instrumentation, Mirah crafts songs that are both intimate and grandiose, from "Cold Cold Water" that feels like the musical equivalent of a spaghetti Western, to "Mount St. Helens" that compares the end of a relationship to the destructive force of a volcano, to "Love Song of a Fly" that describes a house fly's perceived courting of a human in similar terms as Rostand's romance of Roxanne by Cyrano de Bergerac.

Mirah has a new album of old stuff out called The Old Days Feeling, which is a compilation of some of her early material and B-sides.

Mirah - "Cold Cold Water"

The Murmurs, ca. 1994
(Heather Grody, Leisha Hailey)


The Murmurs, 1997
(Heather Grody, Leisha Hailey, Sheri Ozeki, Sherri Solinger)


The Murmurs, 1998
(Heather Grody, Leisha Hailey)


The Murmurs, 1999
(Heather Grody, Leisha Hailey)
I can't back you on that haircut, Leish.


GUSH, ca. 2001
(Brad Casselden, Dave Doyle, Heather Grody, Leisha Hailey, Jon Skibic)
You're looking very Shane today, Leisha. Except you have hips.


Cast of Dear Bernard, 2004
(Producers: Jorja Fox, John Switzer, Katherine Kendall, Heather Reid)
(Book, Lyrics and Music: Heather Reid)


REDCAR, 2007
(Ryan MacMillan, Heather Reid, Jon Skibic)


Uh Huh Her, 2007
(Camila Grey, Leisha Hailey)

The sequence at -1:32 in this video exemplifies why I have a big ol' crush on Leisha Hailey.

Also, I prefer this simplified version of "White Rabbit," because it isn't trying too hard to be the Jefferson Airplane original, which it can never be.

I think this cover of "White Rabbit" is pretty banal — Heather Grody's twee voice cannot compete with Grace Slick's aggressive, throaty wail and the instrumentation isn't new and interesting enough to compensate. But I love how intense and fierce Leisha is trying to look in this video. I also love all the electric guitar feedback at the end of the song and the complete absence of an electric guitar in the video.

Stephen Trask and John Cameron Mitchell's gender-bending Hedwig and the Angry Inch has gathered a cult following among film- and theater-goers. As evidenced by this collection, the music has quickly become greatly beloved by musicians as diverse as Yoko Ono, Imperial Teen, and Fred Schneider. The passion for these songs espoused by the artists is readily apparent in all of the tracks, but unfortunately their love of the material does not always produce the greatest results.

The album's highlights:

• Sleater-Kinney & Fred Schneider's "Angry Inch" — Sleater-Kinney's intense guitar and drum work, Corin Tucker's half-singing/half-bellowing vocals, and Fred Schneider's snide delivery perfectly capture Hedwig's angry yet tongue-in-cheek narrative of his botched sex-change operation.
• Frank Black's "Sugar Daddy" — One of the albums most energetic moments, Frank Black truly embraces Hedwig's spirit of challenging notions of both sex and gender with his gravelly-almost-snarling delivery of lines like, "I'll be more woman than a man like you can stand."
• The Breeders' "Wicked Little Town" — The subtle guitar work and Kim Deal's quiet, raspy vocals make this song a very beautiful, intimate encounter with The Breeders.
• The Polyphonic Spree's "Wig in a Box" — This track is probably the best match of material to artist. The theatrics and ostentation of the lyrics perfectly complement The Spree's grandiose musical arrangements.

Honorable mentions include Rufus Wainwright's "The Origin of Love," Spoon's "Tear Me Down," Yoko Ono & Yo La Tengo's "Hedwig's Lament/Exquisite Corpse," Ben Kweller & Ben Folds' "Wicked Little Town (Tommy Gnosis version)," and Cyndi Lauper & The Minus 5's "Midnight Radio."

The new material by Robyn Hitchcock and John Cameron Mitchell is probably the biggest disappointment. And while Bob Mould's clubby, dance take on "Nailed" is a fun enough cover, it completely strips the song of its eroticism.

More of this album works than doesn't, and it's a must-buy for Hedwig fans and indie-music lovers alike.