dhwe's personal highlights of the 2010s

 

Hi everyone! As this is my first thread here and as I'm relatively new, I feel I should introduce myself: I'm dhwe, and you may have seen me making posts here and there in a number of forums. I've been reading through some of the countdowns here and was inspired to make my own list.

 

This one will be a little different though, as I haven't ranked any of the songs; indeed, at this point, I haven't even compiled a definitive list. Instead of a ranking, I'll be going through each month of the decade so far and posting a song that was personally significant to me at the time. In the end, this will provide a list of 60 tracks, which I think is good for a five-year period.

 

Now, I usually like lists and statistics and ranking things (it's how I got into music charts in the first place!) but for some reason, I'm unable to compel myself to go through the last five years of my life and definitively rank every song I loved at the time. This could be for a number of reasons, but I think my method is beneficial because in the course of this five-year period, my musical interests changed frequently, as they do during your teens. (In January '10, I had basically zero interest in the charts and top-40 pop, which is a complete 180 from May '15 me.) A drawback of this is that there are a number of songs I love that all came out at the same time, so they won't all be reflected here the way they would in a traditional ranking. To amend that, in every post I'll also be adding a list of my other favorite songs from the month, with YouTube links to each. And who knows, maybe at some point I'll be inspired and post a ranking as an addendum.

 

One other dicey thing about this is that the past five years have been rocky for me personally; I started suffering seriously from depression around the time this list starts, something I deal with to this day. I only mention this because it has immensely colored a lot of the music I listen to and, by extension, a lot of my song choices for this list. I will lightly touch on the matter when it's relevant, but it won't be relevant for every song. In any case, this isn't the place to go on about it too much, so I hope it's not too much of a damper when you read it.

 

So there you have it! Oh, and here's how I'll be choosing the song for each month:

• Generally, the single/track will have been released that month, and in the case of album tracks, then the album itself.
• Sometimes for a single, I'll use the parent album's release month instead if I feel like I have to include it.
• For tracks that charted, sometimes I'll go by when they peaked rather than release date (which helps for stuff that wasn't on my radar when it was first released, but peaked months or even years after). As I live in the US, I'll be using the US chart. Sometimes there'll be stuff that charted in the UK and not in the US (or way before it charted in the US), so I'll go either by release date or when it peaked in the UK depending on when/how it hit me.

My goal is to make it reflect the stuff I loved on the charts as well as the stuff I loved elsewhere. I hope that makes it as diverse as possible.

 

On to January '10!

 

(P.S. I don't know if this has been done before; it may well have in 21 pages of the forum, and I may have inadvertently taken the idea from someone thinking it was my own. Apologies if this has been done before, this was probably inspired by your thread!)

Edited May 12, 201510 yr by dhwe

Totally looking forward to this! I've actually had a very similar idea but never completed it enough to post here. Chronological order definitely has its benefits, ranking songs is just so so hard. Anyway, ready!! :D

January 2010

US #1: Ke$ha – TiK ToK | UK #1s: Joe McElderry – The Climb, Lady Gaga – Bad Romance, Iyaz – Replay, Owl City – Fireflies

http://i61.tinypic.com/2u4u81t.jpg

"Take Care" by Beach House

http://i60.tinypic.com/2e49pwk.jpg

from Teen Dream

Teen Dream was released in the grip of one of the harshest winters in recent memory for the US's Mid-Atlantic region, which houses Beach House's hometown of Baltimore and my own hometown in eastern Pennsylvania. The week after it came out, two blizzards struck the region, dumping up to 55 inches of snow upon the area stretching from Washington to New York in less than a week. I still remember the weeks after: the snowbanks piled up to my waist, the tree branches snapping under the weight of the snow, the flamingo garden ornament in my family's yard completely buried but for the beak, the jokes about how we ought to mail some of the stuff to a snow-deprived Vancouver in the middle of a Winter Olympiad.

I first heard Teen Dream in this wintry otherworld. It was my introduction to Beach House's sound, and I fell for it completely: the way Victoria Legrand's voice seems to leave her body like wispy breath on a chilly day, the way the organs shroud over everything like fog. It was a hypnotic combination. Some acts are inspired by the places they're from; later in 2010, Katy Perry would release a single from a similarly titled album inspired by the seemingly eternal paradise of her home state of California, the latest in a musical tradition paying tribute to the Golden State. The beaches of the East Coast are not as heralded in pop culture (the closest thing to a tribute we had in 2010 was, uh, Jersey Shore). But I like to think Beach House occupy that musical space for us: everything from their sound to their name to their promo pics evokes the cattails and reeds and gusts of the Eastern seaboard, where the impermanence of summer decays to the chill of autumn and the freeze of winter.

And Teen Dream is all about impermanence and decay. The dissolution of relationships that have lost their way, the loss of familiarity, memories that return and you push away. Victoria delivers a number of withering lines throughout. From "Walk in the Park": "The face that you saw in the door isn't looking at you anymore / The name that you call in its place isn't waiting for your embrace / The world that you love to behold cannot hold you anymore." I could have chosen any number of tracks to represent the album, but I keep coming back to "Take Care", the track that closes it. Forget the silly video for a moment; "Take Care" is devastating in its narrator's refusal to commit to a passionless relationship. "I'd take care of you if you'd ask me to," Victoria promises. A hesitant pause, and then a blow: "In a year or two." But it's also a freeing declaration, one that enables her to make promises that, with time, she hopes she can deliver. "I'd take care of you, that's true."

If I were ranking albums, Teen Dream would be somewhere in the top ten; truly one of my favorites of the decade so far. And we're in luck as we'll meet Beach House again in about two years' time.

More from Teen Dream:

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More from 01/10:

by Alicia Keys [uS #27, UK #7] |

by Vampire Weekend [uK #39] |

by Spoon

Edited May 14, 201510 yr by dhwe