My boy Josh Bobbitt inspired me to come up with a list of my best music of 2005. Like Josh, I am not limiting this to albums released in 2005—this is autobiographical, dammit, so it’s music I got a hold of in 2005. Nine releases, listed below in alphabetical order, with the countdown on the pages to come. Hit the links of the albums to jump to my thoughts on the album.

• Hem’s Eveningland
• Sandra McCracken’s The Builder and the Architect
• Over The Rhine’s Drunkard’s Prayer
• Andrew Peterson’s Behold the Lamb of God
• Elliott Smith’s From a Basement on the Hill
• Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska
• Sufjan Stevens’s Illinois
• Uncle Tupelo’s March 16-20, 1992
• Derek Webb’s Mockingbird

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It’s a disappointing thing to have to put Sandra last on this list, but I just got this disc on the 11th, so it makes sense for it to be last. Plus, I have to start somewhere.

Any list of music, though, that starts with Sandra McCracken as the least great of all the list has to be damn good. I am blessed to count this woman as a friend; she is as gracious, loving, and considerate as her writing and visage would suggest. A lot of really great artists put on a sense of false humility out there as a way to knock down their pride. [Sandra's husband, Derek Webb, would freely admit to you that he is one of these people.] I never feel, though, that Sandra is being disingenuous when she’s astonished that people love her and her music so intensely.

With The Builder and the Architect, Sandra has taken 18th and 19th Century hymns and breathed new life and music into them. This is no surprise to fans of hers who’ve followed her work with the Indelible Grace projects, but it is a departure in some respects from her commercial work, especially her last one, Best Laid Plans. The one song written wholly by Sandra, “Rock of Ages (When the Day Seems Long)” is ultimately the strongest on the album and a great finisher for the work.

Rock of Ages, “It is done!” you cried
The curtain’s torn and I see justice satisfied
Now write your mercy here on my heart and hands
Rock of ages, in faith I stand

Sandra’s kindness, graciousness, and great talent has inspired me to begin a new project that will see life in 2006.

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There’s probably not much that can be written about Nebraska that’s not already been written by people with far greater music credibility than yours truly, but that won’t stop me from taking the time to write a few things about this wonderful album.

Of all the stuff Springsteen has done, I prefer the stripped-down, mellower stuff. Give me Nebraska or The Ghost of Tom Joad, a free Saturday, and $100 in gas and soda money and I can have myself a great day of driving, thinking, and contemplative music. It’s a great soundtrack for my favorite past time: driving so as to clear my head.

I’ll freely admit that I’d discounted Springsteen as irrelevant, thinking him another arena rocker. That’s a mistake. Andy Osenga got me to listen to Springsteen, and the aforementioned Josh Bobbitt and our friend Joe Bassett introduced me to Nebraska in particular as a great place to start listening to The Boss. I’m coming around to the rest of Springsteen’s oeuvre now, probably because of my great love for Eric Clapton and Billy Joel, who are temporal if not musical contemproraries.

I think that my favorite track is “State Trooper”:

New Jersey Turnpike ridin’ on a wet night ‘neath the refinery’s glow, out where the great black rivers flow
License, registration, I ain’t got none but I got a clear conscience
‘Bout the things that I done
Mister state trooper, please don’t stop me
Please don’t stop me, please don’t stop me

It’s haunting, eerie, and unresolved—which is, in a way, the whole album for me. In dealing with complex problems in simple songs, Springsteen quietly states that there are no simple answers to poverty, loneliness, or disenfranchisement.

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It’s a shame that I got into Elliott Smith after his death, but there you go. Mark Smiley gets the credit for this one, as he all-but-forced me to listen to this. Since then, I have started picking up the rest of Smith’s discography so I can drink more deeply of his music.

I’m drawn to Smith’s work because it’s deep and dark. Derek and I were talking about Elliott one day, and he mentioned how he never really could identify with any of what Smith was really going through, but that the music allowed him to connect with the pain and joys of his life. Now, I’ve certainly had my share of depression, but nothing like Smith. Still, his words clearly resonate within me, and his writing is top-notch.

I think my favorite track of late is “Memory Lane”, which is delightfully dissonant.

Isolation pushes past self-hatred, guilt, and shame
To a place where suffering is just a game
But everybody’s scared of this place
They’re staying away
Your little house on Memory Lane

A little ditty about mental illness, institutionalization, and being numbed into submission by psychotropic drugs certainly resonates with me. I seem to collect a lot of friends who suffer from mental illness [for whatever reason; certainly, I don't mind, as they're powerfully awesome individuals], and we’ve talked about choices to take and avoid these drugs. It’s something folks don’t like to talk about much, and Smith gives voice to it.

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Yes, I’m quite late to the Uncle Tupelo bandwagon—so late that, well, I got into them after all the re-issues of their work. Ever since being introduced to Wilco by Trey Lampley, I’ve been drinking deeply of the alt-country fountain, and if you’re going to be faithful to fully studying the genre, I feel like you have to get some UT.

I think I resonate with March 16-20, 1992 so much because it just feels like their most focused effort. I like bands with tension in their work—come on, I’m a Caedmon’s Call fan!—and the pairing of Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar was certainly tense.

It’s difficult to pick a favorite track, but I’ll go with the opening track, “Grindstone”:

No thanks to the treadmill
No thanks to the grindstone
There’s plenty of dissent from
These rungs below

The clockwork of destruction
Hanging low over our heads
Always a smokestack cloud
Or a slow-walking death

Growing up in the Midwest, I’m familiar enough with the plights of blue collar workers to be empathetic. The cries of the commoditized worker are not always economically correct, but they’re almost always genuine. [It's that "clockwork of destruction" phrase that just gets me.]

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Hem is a great, wonderful find. I ran into them from recommendations from Audioscrobbler / Last.FM, read up on them in Paste, and then proceeded to jump in with both feet and buy a large chunk of their discography sound unheard. [I never claimed rationality!] The gamble paid off with great rewards.

I believe that you will give away the things you truly love; not long after I got this, I sent a copy of the album to Derek and Sandra. When I next saw them, Sandra brought it up, saying that she’d really liked it: “It’s a little country and then not, kind of like me.” I thought about that for a moment, and then I nodded and smiled. I hadn’t thought of it like that when I sent it to them; I’d been talking about the production concept they did with Eveningland—writing most of the album, then traveling to Europe to record all the orchestral backing in a crazy handful of days—while we were talking about possibilities for how Mockingbird would shape up.

I also bade Andy Osenga to listen to a song from Eveningland when he asked readers of his Weblog for ideas on new music to try. I got him to try “Pacific Street”, which he loved:

Beautiful. This girl’s voice is absolutely enchanting, and the lyric is hypnotically poetic. A very simple piano/vocal/strings/oboe? arrangement. Without sounding like them, this leaves me with the same feeling a Sixpence record does. And that is a very good thing. The second verse lyric is amazing. “I don’t know you except for the way a traveler knows a traveler…” This was my other favorite, and I’m going to look into them as well.

I never have asked if he got anything else from them; I need to do that and buy them for him if he hasn’t. [Yes, as you can tell, I like providing the artists I know and love with music I think they'll enjoy. It's fun!]

I think my favorite from the album isn’t “Pacific Street”—it’s accessible, which is why I suggested it—but, rather, “Lucky”:

The storms came down out of Mackinaw
As the weigh stations closed
There was a terrible darkness I saw
Pulling up on the side of the road

But if I should lose
I’d wake up feeling lucky
If I should take a fall
Or throw it all away
I wouldn’t mind lying beside you
The rest of my days

I think that most all of us can get behind that concept.

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In writing Behold the Lamb of God, Andrew Peterson really has achieved his goal: an faithful and accurate retelling of the true tall tale of the coming of Christ.

The music on this album was my first introduction to AP—somehow, I missed him the entire time he toured with Caedmon’s Call, and my late entry into that community of artists meant that my first taste of his songwriting ability came at the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville’s West End three years ago. [In an entry I wrote then, I had a complete fanboy moment, meeting Derek for the first time. I need to show him that sometime...]

Anyhow, the album … it truly is an honest and faithful retelling of the story of Christ’s entry into this world. The other night, Rick and I were watching the DVD of last year’s show, and he said to me, “Other than the two instrumental pieces on this album, I think I could listen to the other tracks at any time during the year. It’s Christmas music, but it sure doesn’t feel like it.” He’s right—it’s music about Christ and His coming, but it’s not stuff that you put behind glass with “DO NOT BREAK GLASS UNTIL BLACK FRIDAY” etched into it.

Any words I’d have for this album don’t do it justice—it truly has to be heard to be experienced. As I said before, I really believe that, if you truly love something, you’ll give it away freely. This explains how the copy I bought on Sunday night in Nashville was out of my hands by Tuesday morning: I felt a need to give it to a co-worker for her to have.

My favorite track has to be “Deliver Us”, which features Derek on lead vocal. [I love the performance, but the writing is just so great.] Here’s why:

Our enemy, our captor is no Pharaoh on the Nile
Our toil is neither mud nor brick nor sand
Our ankles bear no callouses from chains, yet Lord we’re bound
Imprisoned here, we dwell in our own land

Deliver us, deliver us
Oh Yahweh, hear our cry
And gather us beneath your wings
Tonight

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Over The Rhine’s latest album, Drunkard’s Prayer, is one of the most painfully beautiful albums I’ve ever heard. It’s the story of the brokenness and redemption found in the marriage of Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler, the engine that drives OTR. It’s hard to listen to at times, but it’s so, so good.

It’s really hard for me to say too much about this album, just because it’s so intensely personal. They didn’t leave much on the table in opening up to their fans and letting them into their world—but as I understand, that’s nothing new for Karin and Linford.

It’s also similarly difficult for me to pick a favorite track from the album, because there’s just so much good here. My favorite lyric, though, comes from Spark:

Obsessions with self-preservation
Faded when I threw my fear away
It’s not a thing you can imagine
You either lose your fear
Or spend your life with one foot in the grave
Is God the last romantic?

Powerful. Haunting. Damning. Yep, that’s this album.

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Some people are saying, “Hey, that album isn’t even out yet!” Well, yes. However, I’ve had the rough mixes for months; it’s a perk of being one of the guys behind [derekwebb.net].

This is a very socially-focused and politically-inclined album. That doesn’t sit well with many in Derek’s core fanbase, which is largely comprised of folks who came of age as he did, finding Reformed theology simultaneously or because of Derek and his former band, Caedmon’s Call. As evangelical Christians in American have largely identified with the Republican party for the last generation or two, any criticism of the GOP is seen as anathema.

Honestly, though, Derek isn’t criticizing politics—he’s criticizing Christians for holding themselves to constructs of this world. Christians are going to be political and opinionated if they’re loving their brothers and sisters and speaking the truth in Christ, but to align with an earthly organization is to start loving this world too much.

Mockingbird is another musical shift for Derek, this one largely influenced by The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. I’m also detecting all the Tom Waits and Woody Guthrie that he listens to in the themes he’s hitting—but as Derek notes in the title track, he feels that there’s nothing new to what he’s really singing:

Because I am like a mockingbird
I’ve got no new song to sing
I am like an amplifier
I just tell you what I’ve heard
Oh I’m a mockingbird

I am curious to see what all the reaction will be to this in 2006 as people really get to drink deeply of the album.

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As I compiled this list, I knew that Illinois was going to take the top spot. There was a ten-week period where I couldn’t go without listening to pieces of the album at least once a day—no matter what other new music I had, I kept coming back to this. It’s disturbingly epic, alternatingly simple and complex, serious and self-effacing.

Sufjan Stevens has an extremely ambitious project ahead of him: writing an album based in some part around the history of each of the Nifty Fifty. He’s got two albums done already, one each for his home state of Michigan and Illinois. The project doesn’t produce albums that are wholly about the state: “Casimir Pulaski Day” has nothing to do with the holiday at all, but rather is the retelling of young love wrecked by miscommunication and an early-onset debilitating illness.

Stevens doesn’t wholly ignore the history of Illinois, though; he does write of things like the Lincoln-Douglas debates. These little allusions offer ample reason for the Wikipedia-addled among us to spend many hours learning more about the Land of Lincoln as referenced by Stevens.

My favorite track has to be “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” Yes, yes … a song about an infamous serial killer! At first, it seems wholly historical, and then we are presented with the payoff:

And in my best behavior
I am really just like him
Look beneath the floorboards
For the secrets I have hid

Stevens then audibly sighs twice while the piano accompaniment radically falls apart. It’s damnably effective. So effective that writing this entry has made me pull out this album … again.

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Anyhow, that’s my list. Please comment as you see fit.