His Year In Lists

He spent most of the first half of 2008 in Portland living in the corporate condo while his house was on the market back in Atlanta.  But the real estate market was so bad, that not only could he not sell the house, he couldn't get anybody to come by and even look at the place, despite the best efforts of one of the top realtors in town.  He couldn't afford to keep a house in Atlanta and live in Portland, and he soon realized that his long-sought-after relocation to the Pacific Northwest wasn't going to happen and he had to turn down the offer to move to Portland, another victim, he felt, of the Bush Administration.

To say he was disappointed was an understatement, but he chose to not play the victim and consider himself to be "trapped" in Atlanta, but instead to make the best of his life there and appreciate what he had, not pine for what he didn't.

Vancouver's Black Mountain released In the Future that year, their follow-up to 2005's self-titled debut, and it was one his favorite records of that year.

But that's not all that he listened to in 2008 - it was a transitional year for him musically.  Earlier in the decade, he tried to act his age and listen to so-called "adult contemporary," even going to a Norah Jones concert and buying Jill Scott and Anita Baker CDs, but it didn't really work for him.  It was not what he liked or what he wanted to listen to.  

He was still downloading and listening to a lot of electronic music from the 90s and early 2000s, particularly The Orb and Pete Namlook, but he was aware there was a lot of new music being released in 2008.  He felt like there was something great out there but he just hadn't found it yet, or maybe it hadn't yet been recorded, but in either event he knew that something big was on the verge of breaking.

Doing research for this post (yes, I do research these things), I came across some CDs that he burned that year, including a two-disk set titled Best of 2008.  Most of the songs are hook-filled pop-rock and shoegaze, and music downloaded from Sirius XMU playlists, but while it all still sounds vaguely familiar to me today, I honestly don't recognize the names of three quarters of the bands.  But there was some Radiohead in there from 2007's In Rainbows, a little Feist, Scars on Broadway, and various, assorted late 2000s alt-rock bands.

Here are the three songs from those disks that resonate the most with me now, that most make me recall the year 2008:

1.  Silversun Pickups' Lazy Eye, which actually came out in 2006, but which he only discovered in 2008:

2.  There were a lot of songs on the disks by The Ting Tings, but this is the one that stands out:

3.  The wit and energy of the Wales' Los Campesinos! made a big impression on him that year as well.

Another transitional year, and even though he ultimately wound up not moving to Portland, he was changed by his experience there and was not going to be the same again.  Yet another new incarnation, and this time without all that boring being dead in between.