Best Music of 2007

As I look over the various top ten lists for the music of 2007 released in magazines, as well as my own below, there's a sensation that I cannot ignore - are we all kidding ourselves? 2007 has to be one of the weakest years in recent memory for music, and it's not because there weren't some great songs, but I can't think of a single great album, an album that I even really fell in love with. Last year, there were three, and I complained about not having ten.

This year, I sort of have two that I loved, or at least spent a lot of time getting to know and not minding that I was spending a lot of time getting to know them. There are a few more that I like a little less, but am still pretty fond of. And then there are albums with some great songs and lots of filler, which is unfortunate, but it's how it goes some years.

The truth is I find myself very removed from most of the well regarded records of the year. Artists I've loved made albums I thought were terrible this year - Bruce Springsteen's Magic, Kanye West's Graduation, Queens of the Stone Age's Era Vulgaris, Wilco's Sky Blue Sky; not just sub par records, terrible records. That's to say nothing of the artists I'm a fan of whose records were mostly positive mixed bags (Lucinda Williams, Ryan Adams, Radiohead, New Pornographers), and the artists I'm supposed to love but actively dislike - M.I.A., The White Stripes, or Arcade Fire, all of whom's popularity continues to elude me.

This year, I can at least be very very happy about White Chalk, P.J. Harvey's 7th full length album, even though I think it may be her weakest. When you're an artist as extraordinary as Harvey, "weakest" is a pretty relative term. At the time of its release, I thought White Chalk was like an extended character piece, of a repressed victorian persona released from an old Dorset attic on a rusting piano, like The Others: The Musical. It is, for a good half the album, but then it's something else also - a muted walk into adulthood. Midway through the record, at the title track, Harvey walks barefoot along the Dorset beach and sees blood on her feet. It's like that walk transforms her into an adult, and the remainder of the record is subdued and lovely, stately and mature. "Silence," I think, is another Harvey great, a sort of be-careful-what-you-wish-for ballad of wishing to be released from your memories. Its followed by the atonal "To Talk To You," which is like a dip back into Harvey's child persona from early in the record. And it ends with a lovely combo of "Before Departure," a sweet song that seems written in slo-mo at a train track, and "The Mountain," a song that's both hystrionic and wise, screamingly off-kilter and melodically just right, which just about sums up Harvey and White Chalk.

I also am happy to report that Me'shell Ndegeocello's The World Has Made Me The Man of My Dreams gets better with every play, just like all of her records. She's a major musician too, and I have yet to see her on any Best of the Year list, which is typical. I'll still campaign for her if she needs it. Same goes with Talib Kweli, who seems like he should be more well-regarded than he is, considering the pure ambition and skill of his verse.

When it came to singles, I for one love "The Way I Are" by Timbaland over all others rock, pop, or otherwise. "Rehab" had personality and tabloid joyousness, "Hot Thing" is like alterna-rap's hot dance track in waiting, and Hilary Duff surprised the crap out of me by releasing a song I can't help but love.

Top Ten Albums of 2007:

1. White Chalk P.J. Harvey

2. The World Has Made Me The Man of My Dreams Me'shell Ndegeocello

3. Eardrum Talib Kweli

4. Easy Tiger Ryan Adams

5. In Rainbows Radiohead

6. Back to Black Amy Winehouse

7. Challengers The New Pornographers

8. Sound of Silver LCD Soundsystem

9. Because of the Times Kings of Leon

10. West Lucinda Williams

Top Ten Singles of 2007:

1. "The Way I Are" Timbaland

2. "Rehab" Amy Winehouse

3. "Hot Thing" Talib Kweli

4. "Umbrella" Rihanna

5. "When Under Ether" P.J. Harvey

6. "Gimme More" Britney Spears

7. "Dignity" Hilary Duff

8. "Until The End of Time" Justin Timberlake & Beyonce

9. "Jigsaw Falling Into Place" Radiohead

10. "Bartender" T. Pain

Ten Perfect Songs You Might Not Have Heard On The Radio:

• "Are You Alright" Lucinda Williams (West)
• "Silence" P.J. Harvey (White Chalk)
• "True Love Way" Kings of Leon (Because of the Times)
• "My Love For You Is Real" Ryan Adams (Follow The Lights)
• "Go Ahead" Alicia Keys (As I Am)
• "Lovely Lovely" Me'shell Ndegeocello (The World Has Made Me The Man of My Dreams)
• "Radio Nowhere" Bruce Springsteen (Magic)
• "Misfit Love" Queens of the Stone Age (Era Vulgaris)
• "Someone Great" LCD Soundsystem (Sound of Silver)
• "Go Places" The New Pornographers (Challengers)

2007's Real Top Ten

Last year, I wrote a blog of what I thought were the ten most significant books/movies/tv shows/ music that I had encountered that year. Maybe this year was less significant than last, maybe not, that sort of thing is hard to judge. There were 10 more great works I encountered this year though, without a doubt, starting with the one that's earned more ink than anything else I own since I bought it in February. Then there are some others. It all makes me think that the greatest work isn't just timeless, it reopens what you thought you knew and updates your thoughts.

A Different 2007 Top 10 List.

• Hejira Joni Mitchell (1976)

Considering I already wrote a 6 page essay on the subject and posted it on here, I don't have much left to say. It's hard for me to imagine a 2007 without Hejira - without my initial indifference towards it, my falling in love with it, my needing to hear the sounds released by its unique guitar, and eventually my satisfaction with it as it fell into the realm of all the music so familiar and beloved to me. Two days ago, I was driving in the cold mountains of the Boulder Canyon when "Blue Motel Room" came on, and after I finished singing along to every punchy word of it (It contains this gem: "You and me are like America and Russia/ always keeping score/ we're always balancing the power/ and that can get to be a cold cold war/ we're gonna have to have ourselves a peace talk/ in some neutral cafe"), it struck me how perfect it was - breezy and calm, but so full of emotion and wonder. Hejira remains an imperfect record, but a perfect one at that.

• "Kennedy and Heidi" The Sopranos (2007)

I could write and write and write about each of the final 9 episodes of The Sopranos that aired this year. Let's just say that at the end of season 5, Johnny Sack gets indicted and Tony's lawyer tells him he dodged a bullet. This season was about the anxiety of not being able to dodge bullets forever, of "waiting for the other shoe to drop." "Kennedy and Heidi" goes beyond shock when, 3 minutes in, Christopher, Tony's "nephew" and a driving force of the show played by Michael Imperioli, is killed as his car flips over, seconds after perhaps the most loving look Tony's ever given anyone. Followed, of course, by Tony suffocating Christopher as Christopher tells Tony he'd never pass a drug test and needs to be put in a cab. That their tumultuous, essential relationship could be boiled down to that act of... well, what is it? Love? Anger? Hate? Tony confesses to his therapist that he feels relief, after all the stress Christopher causes him.

The Sopranos had done death many a time through many characters, but never with the discomfort of "Kennedy and Heidi," an episode that has Tony admitting the relief of not having Christopher in his life, fessing up to the anxiety of wondering each day if "today's the day one of my rat fuck friends is going to turn on me," and, ultimately, feeling below the real grief of everyone else, that causes him to, suddenly, jet to Las Vegas to take peyote, fuck Chris's ex, and declare before God and a desert mountain "I get it!" The episode is uncomfortable, but so slightly uncomfortable, it speaks to the anxiety just below the surface in everyone. It sees Tony sitting in an ornate plane as the loneliest image on the planet, and strums the opening guitar of "Are You Alright" as he drives through the city (a lonelier guitar part is hard to imagine). All of Tony's anxiety, perhaps for the show's 7 years, is summed up and puzzled at in this episode, and it is, for all its frustration and shock, impossible not to agree with him that there must be relief in letting go of it. For someone that just killed someone he loves, that's quite an agreement.

• I'm Not There (2007)

One reason people my age become so passionate about movies, I think, is that modern filmmakers have a potential for creativity that can open up movies in completely new directions. That's what happens in movies like Mulholland Drive or Boogie Nights or Pulp Fiction or Palindromes - movies that start as an experiment and end as truer than any "normal" movie you recall watching. I'm Not There is unlike anything I recall seeing, and it's because it's an idea guided by a biography, and fragmented intellectually. But what keeps the movie so unique and not simply esoteric (which, it must be said, it is - if you don't know the Bob Dylan biography, you truly won't enjoy it much) is that the passion, loss, and anger of the man and of its vignettes is the story already told by the music, and the music is some of the greatest ever created. Todd Haynes expands the idea of ideolizing Dylan, but then does something else - he uses Dylan to forge his greatest film yet about identity freefall, and he does it through profound senses of loss and confusion that we don't even realize we're watching. For me, the most heartbreaking moment is not any of the sad shots between Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbrough as the fracturing Bob and his wife Sara, not Cate Blanchett's eerily accurate 60's train wreck, but a sad moment in which the Christian Bale character begins to sing "Pressing On," the best of Dylan's gospel songs, after disavowing all he's ever assumed to be true. Never has the song sounded so sad or so triumphant. What an experience.

• "Los Angeles Days" Joan Didion (1988)

It was my favorite of the After Henry essays even before this year's writer's strike, but Didion's take on 1988's writer's strike now reads with spooky precision, and that's because Didion, one of the greats, always sees a human struggle underneath a bureaucratic one. It's not 1988, but the following two paragrahs, that conclude "Los Angeles Days," are an unbearably true statement about our current strike:

>>I had gone to Atlanta in an extra-industry role, that of “reporter” (or, as we say in Hollywood, “journalist”), with credentials that gave me a seat in the Omni but access to only a rotating pass to go on the floor. I was waiting for this rotating pass one evening when I ran into a directior I knew, Paul Mazursky. We talked for a moment, and I noticed that he, like all the other industry people I saw in Atlanta, had a top pass, one of the several all-access passes. In this case it was a floor pass, and, since I was working and he seemed not about to go on the floor, I asked if I might borrow it for half an hour.

He considered this.

He would, he said, “really like” to do this for me, but thought not. He seemed surprised that I had asked, and uncomfortable that I had breached the natural order of the community as we both knew it: directors and actors and producers, I should have understood, have floor passes. Writers do not, which is why they strike.

• Jacksonville City Nights and Rock N Roll Ryan Adams (2005, 2003)

I became more obsessed with Ryan Adams this year than any other artist, and began tracking down all his records. To me, Jacksonville City Nights and Rock N Roll are both Adams' great extremes, and are two takes on the same album. Jacksonville is his purist country record, full of twang and pool-hall pianos, and Rock N Roll is all loud bravado and punk guitar, but each are records about self destruction, the voice of a record at once fiercly alive and ready to collapse at any given moment (one of Rock N Roll's highlights is a song called "Note To Self: Don't Die"). In that way, Rock's "This Is It" and Jacksonville's "Peaceful Valley" are like widening explorations of the same theme - excitement and anxiety rolled into on combustive expression. And they're so vibrantly different and vivid, they're the work of an artist whose breadth and abilities alone would astonish if his songs weren't as astonishing as they are.

• "Bring It On Home To Me" Sam Cooke (1961)

I must have had "Bring It On Home To Me" in my collection before, but this year, after buying a collection of Cooke's greatest hits, I truly understood the song for the first time. Amidst Cooke's hits - some bouyant examples of 50's and 60's doo wop, some great soul and gospel, some sorta generic - "Bring It On Home" comes alive with harmony. Cooke had the best voice of all of the male 60's soul singers, but it took harmony to make it so evident and heartbreaking. Hearing "Bring It On Home to Me" now is to hear one of the greatest songs ever made, without a doubt.

• The Brief and Hideous Reign of Phil George Saunders

Saunders is a punchy writer of tragicomedies as bleak and upsetting as they are hysterical. My favorite short story of his, "The 400 Lb. CEO" makes you ache and laugh at once, wincing with pain as the pure human cruelty flies by with one brittle jab after another. Phil is one of his longer works, but it's barely 100 small pages long with crazy illustrations, and it's hard to say when its creativity turns into lunacy, but it does, brilliantly. In this political fable about a country so small, only one person can fit inside it at a time, he invents crazy robots (the "media" are represented by creatures who communicate through giant headlines coming out of megaphones in their ass), and has them led by Phil, a robot whose brain keeps falling off, making him more dangerous and incoherent as time passes. If it sounds like a punctillious allegory of Bush, it both is and isn't, it's more - it's about our fears that go along with lunacy, that make us subject to it. Yet in its apparent bleakness, Phil has a savvier, more moving twist in it than in any work of his previously - a twist that makes us think there's hope for all of us.

• The Wire Season 2 (2003)

You've been told you're supposed to watch The Wire, right? One renegade friend of yours has seen it, or you read the reviews that often proclaim it a "highwater mark for dramatic television" (as Entertainment Weekly stated this last year when it failed to earn any Emmy nominations). Well, it happened, I got into The Wire in a major way this year, and it's every bit as great as you've heard, and for none of the reasons - it's plots are not "too complex" or "too labyrinthine," rather they have a lot of characters and a lot to keep track of, with details so nuanced and true to life you don't really notice you're paying attention to them.

The biggest surprise for me watching The Wire is the renewed love you find for police investigation shows. By opening the show up to, basically, the entire real world, there's incredible mystery behind the "well how will they figure this out" premise; it renews it entirely. Each of the three seasons I've watched so far has been brilliant, but in season 2, the season that focuses on Baltimore's dock workers (or, as one of my friends put it, "the season with all the white people"), that mystery was matched fully by its human story at the center. Following Frank Sabotka (Chris Bauer - see below), his nimwit son Ziggy (James Ransone), and his meathead nephew Nick (Pablo Schreiber), the show made its corruption a drama of family and collapsed expectations, all while never losing focus on its drug runners of season 1.

• "Are You Alright" Lucinda Williams

The greatest, loneliest, sweetest composition of the year. There's a thing about a great Lucinda Williams song that you might not grasp until having absorbed it a few times - her simplest words are her best. I remember years ago riding with a friend in my car who made me listen to "Side Of The Road" over and over again, wallowing in amazement at the way a simple description of staring at a farmhouse can evoke a longing for freedom. That's true of songs like "Memphis Pearl" or "Sidewalks of the City" or "I Lost It" or "Jackson" or "World Without Tears" or any of the other dozen masterpieces Williams has written. "Are You Arlight" stands with the best of her work, and it starts with that mournful but sweet guitar that segues into a natural enough question - "Are you alright, all of the sudden you went away." Yet in asking in its chorus, beautifully, "Are you sleeping through the night? Do you have someone to hold you tight? Do you have someone to hang out with? Do you have someone to hug and kiss you?" she not only creates sweet sing-songy lyrics, but asserts the real needs everyone has, and creates a universal longing for understanding. West doesn't quite match the promise of "Are You Alright," but it does show that no artist can cut to the core of human needs so simply.

• "The Deposition" The Office (2007)

People began whining about the fourth season of The Office, especially in those padded hour-long premiere episodes, but I didn't see much wear on the show - what I saw was growth. Just before the strike ended new episodes of The Office in November, the show aired what might be its funniest, most stunning episode yet in "The Deposition," which sees Michael (Steve Carrell, having a very good year) having to testify before his bosses, girlfriend, and least favorite person in the office, Toby. The things that come out of Michael's journal scald ("Who's this other girlfriend of Michael's, this Ryan?"), a court-transcript mediated "That's what she said joke" turns the shows geeky running gag on its ear, and its climax is the epitome of this season's attempt to humanize Michael - which is to say, the sympathy you feel for Michael might, for the first time, be real.

Great Performances I Saw This Year:
- Tony Sirico The Sopranos - Each actor on The Sopranos is brilliant, but Sirico is the most overlooked because he makes what should be The Sopranos most peculiar character, Paulie Walnuts, into a pile of old-age agita and crankiness that's completely recognizable. Funny, irascible, completely illogical, cold but loyal - Paulie and Sirico helped create a life on screen, so well you barely notice. One shot in "Walk Like A Man," in which a furious Paulie drives all over Christopher's lawn, is told entirely with the flare of his nostrils. But its his fear and childish idiosyncrasies becoming one in "Remember When" that was his real triumph as an actor this year - a one-hour duet with Sirico and James Gandolfini as Paulie and Tony evade feds by driving to Miami. It was a gift to Sirico, and a gift to us.

- Andre Royo (2002), Chris Bauer (2003), Idris Elba (2004) The Wire - Each season, The Wire's universally perfect cast has one performance that seems to step out and present itself as one of the best you can recall. In season 1, it was Royo's heroin-addicted snitch Bubbles, who, at an NA meeting, revealed his buried desire to live, and the need in his eyes has informed his character ever since. In season 2, it was Bauer, playing dock leader Frank Sabotka with fury and fatherly disappointment rolled into a seething triumph. And then there's Elba's Stringer Bell, the smooth dealer of seasons 1 and 2 who gets unravelled and feisty in season 3. In one extraordinary scene with lonely widow Donette, Stringer unleashes the real terror he's capable of, and you get a glimpse, finally, of what an extraordinary presence he's been all along.

- Molly Shannon Year Of The Dog, Steve Carrell Dan In Real Life - It's said the key to great comedy is playing crazy characters straight, which makes me think the best comedians have a fairly good grasp of internalizing outlandish characteristics. So, when two wonderful comedians turned in serious performances in two dramedies, I guess I couldn't be too surprised. Shannon in Year of the Dog seems like an apple of the regular Shannon-lunatic tree, except that we wind up so deeply identifying with her Peggy's search for meaning and companionship that it turns Mike White's comedy into a vital story of self-discovery. And Carrell in Dan In Real Life reminds me of a calmer Woody Allen in the 70's, a man torn by desire and obligation, revitalized by a taste of love then forced to swallow it back down again. His torment turned Dan In Real Life into a wounding comedy of family and romantic dynamics.

Remakes in the image of

It's easy to come out against remaking old songs and artists that get rich off those remakes - certainly in the history of music, there are more bad than good ones. I remember catching the old Leif Garret episode of Behind The Music in which a poor, awkward teenage Garret is forced to stand up for the practice of remaking that made him a teen heartthrob. Now I think no one would be put in that same position - remakes are beyond common, samples are even more rampant, and no one would confuse a Garret with an "artist" that needs to defend his approach to old songs.

Right now, two albums are making me think quite a bit about remakes though. One, Herbie Hancock's River: Letters to Joni is a jazz recapitulation of an odd, interesting selection of Joni Mitchell's songs, and has just been nominated for a Grammy for Album of the Year (dubious honor as it may be), and is described by Hancock as his "meditation" on Mitchell's work. The other is the soundtrack to Todd Haynes's I'm Not There, the deep vision creation about Bob Dylan is much more of a "meditation" - a brave, mind-bending one that is truly a film experience apart from any other you'd encounter. But it's that soundtrack of good and forgettable Dylan remakes that I'm thinking about. To think that in the same month, these two songwriters who take up so much of my thoughts are getting so much remade attention. One wonders when I'll have time to work or bathe with all the attention to strange details this is going to require.

Hancock's album came to my attention about a month ago in the form of a "song of the day" email featuring its version of "Edith and the Kingpin" featuring a guest vocal by Tina Turner. The song was beloved by that email's writer, but the truth is it doesn't really work. Turner, call it a product of old age, seems baffled by all of words - and lord, are there a lot of words. But that's what interested me about the remake - who in the world would conquer "Edith and the Kingpin," of all songs? That song, one of the more overtly moralistic of The Hissing of Summer Lawns, is the definition of an esoteric choice - it's not famous, not flashy, not memorable, and from a period of Mitchell's career that is still contentious.

Yet what the Herbie Hancock version did for that song is to remind me how great a bad Joni Mitchell song can ben. That song is so narrative and unusual, so descriptive and evocative. And the reason, I think, that the album has been so much more successful than any average tribute record is that Hancock knows what he is replacing by creating jazzy piano and clarinet arrangements. In this case, he strips away the 70's orchestration of guitar and synths and turns them into something, arguably, more interesting. Hancock has internalized, ripped up, and rebuilt the structure of Mitchell's songs and found an instrumet to replace each piece he's found.

That's more of a compliment to Hancock's ambition than his result. I hate most of the songs on the record. He and Luciana Souza bore me to death trying to rebuild "Amelia," and Corinne Bailey Rae, with her obnoxious 5-year-old squeakiness, seems simply undeserving of singing "River." Yet when he does right, he's really onto something. He and Leonard Cohen turn "The Jungle Line" (maybe the second most esoteric choice from Hissing of Summer Lawns) into a spoken word jazz piece, and it emphasizes the beat nature of that song, but also emphasize its poetry and rhyme scheme. Best of all, the album opens with a glorious expansion of "Court and Spark" with a magnificent vocal by Norah Jones.

What is it that those songs get right that "Amelia" or "River" get wrong? What I think it is is a couple of things - the courage to expand the original coupled with the understanding of exactly what made it work. The greatest remakes, truly, are ones that respond to elements in the original that are hard to see and then creates a song around them, exposing what was there all along. "Court and Spark" is one of my favorite Mitchell songs, a song as creative as it is honest, a song as human as any I can recall, and Jones deserves it. For those of us that love that song, there are a couple of slight changes to its words that she may not have noticed, but I think alter the meaning - she turns "He saw how I worry sometimes - I worry sometimes" into pure repitition, adding a second "how" before the second "I," which diminishes the innate poetry of that line. Ditto for calling LA the "city of the falling angels" rather than the "fallen angels."

But I love that I can speculate on meaning that specific to the song - that's what a good remake can do, too - continue the conversation about a great song. Unfortunately, very few songs on the I'm Not There soundtrack figure that out, which is especially disconcerting as the movie from which it comes is a once-in-a-lifetime deep meditation on an artist and all his meaning - it expands and obsesses over Dylan, and is, truly, unlike any movie experience you can recall having. The album, however, is like every tribute experience you remember having. Not every song is as dull as, say, Jeff Tweedy's version of "Simple Twist of Faith" or Eddie Vedder & Calexico's of "All Along The Watchtower" (a song nonpareil in how unnecessary it is to have another remake). Some are interesting - Richie Havens bluegrasses up "Tombstone Blues" thrillingly, Yo La Tengo has just the right mellowness to make "4th Time Around" as comforting as it needs to be.

Yet even those rare gems on the soundtrack only reminded me how many great Dylan remakes there already are, and how none of these deserves to stand with those. Nina Simone doing "Just Like A Woman" internalizes that song's vulnerability, Joan Osborne doing "Make You Feel My Love" makes the song so warm and sexy, Them's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" makes the song expansive and desperate, R.L. Burnside's "Everything Is Broken" that turns the song into the best blues jam you've never heard, Norah Jones (again - for a simply good artist, her sense of remakes is top notch) turning "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" into a sensuous lullaby. And it reminds me of how many bad and irrelevant Dylan remakes there are - from Hole's own "It's All Over Now" to that obnoxious Guns N Roses version of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door."

Each of those great songs that I can recall (to say nothing of the dozens of hits other artists, like Peter, Paul, & Mary or Joan Baez had with his work in the 60's) responds to elements in the song that need to be contemplated - much like the movie does. That makes me think what an act of interpretation and reconstruction a great remake is. The way that, say, Me'shell Ndegeocello turned Jimi Hendrix's "May This Be Love" on its ear by making its guitars into a piano and string arrangement, or how Emmylou Harris used that song to soften it into gliding harmonies on Wrecking Ball - songs like that seem just as much work to create correctly as an original work.

I think that's why remakes are degraded and forgettable for the most part - no one's willing to do the work they require. Did Ndegeocello hear the Hendrix original and realize how sexy it could be? Did Hancock hear Mitchell's "Court and Spark" and think of ways that a jazz vocalist could expand it? I have to say yes and no - those artists heard those originals like true fans, injested them, and remade them in their own image. Good thing it's a worthwhile image.

Alicia Keys for beginners

I started writing the following blog sometime last December, but was interrupted by a need to go get beer with my friend Mike. Now I have returned....

If I were to make an Alicia Keys mixtape, it would be around 10 songs long. If that mixtape were an album, it would have to be the great soul album of the decade, somewhere with D'Angelo's Voodoo. That's because buried in Alicia Keys's mediocre albums are some of the great soul songs written in the last 30 years - she's an artist beyond talented, if talent for an r/b star is to be judged on an extraordinary voice and musicianship, on the ability to forge the simple, sing-songy truths of pop songs with a voice and structure that makes them something more.

Not to brag, but I knew that years ago. And I think it is not bragging to say that because it seems like reviews of her new album As I Am are surprised to find out that she has talent - just before they conclude with the same lukewarm approval her albums have always gotten. I don't necessarily blame reviewers for feeling so ambivalent about Keys - I've never owned a record of hers myself. But I'm always a little surprised by the summarial dismissals of her work.

David Browne, in Entertainment Weekly, once described her attempts at old-school soul as "like a jogger who runs out of steam quickly," The Guardian said she's a fan of "the familiar and the bland" and even of As I Am, which, by all accounts is a more modern record, is described as "having lots of confidence and volume, but less of the shades in between" (says Mojo). The girl can't win - when she's confident, she's dull, when she's loud, she's not confident enough... I think.

I can't keep track of what I'm supposed to think of Alicia Keys - certainly not by Keys, who is a smoldering beauty, to be certain, but is also a little era-less. During "You Don't Know My Name"'s reign as a single, she was Foxy Keys with an afro. Nowadays, you catch her on the bizarre Dove marketing campaign "Short Takes" in the commercial breaks of The Hills, and she's a modern city woman, advocating for respecting your mother and (I think) not doing yoga. Her message, even in those "love your man" tracks, is to believe in yourself... again, I think, because of so many "love your man" tracks.

Still, if I go under the Alicia Keys category as artists in my iPod:
1. "Prelude to a Kiss" (from As I Am)
2. "Go Ahead" (As I Am)
3. "Wreckless Love" (As I Am)
4. "Diary" (The Diary of Alicia Keys)
5. "Dragon Days" (Diary)
6. "Fallin'" (Songs in A Minor)
7. "Unbreakable" (Unplugged)
8. "Heartburn" (Unplugged)
9. "You Don't Know My Name" (Unplugged)
10. "Mr. Man" (Songs)
11. "How Come You Don't Call Me" (Songs)
12. "If I Ain't Got You" (Diary)

When I look at those songs, I don't see a lot of variety - they're songs either about being in love, falling in love, hoping to fall in love, or telling a dude that you don't even need love. I think with "Go Ahead," "Dragon Days," and "Hearburn," I have every fast-paced song Keys has recorded (besides "Karma," which I don't like much). I see that the songs got more soulful with the move to The Diary of Alicia Keys.

And I see that I just love a lot of those songs, above all else. When I see Keys smile in public appearances, and even - god forbid - on those damn Dove commercial breaks, I know I'm supposed to see her as another pop star, as disingenuine of all the rest - but Keys, I think, is so beautiful, you simply want to believe and support her. That's so true of those songs, too. "Diary" remains in my top-played iPod playlist, and why wouldn't it - the song is as great a soul song as you can remember hearing. I've never heard an Alicia Keys album straight through, and perhaps if I did, I'd find her as dull or over-confident as I'm supposed to, but in the format of just having a selection of songs available, the truth is I kind of love her. So be it - I guess I'm a fan.