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Wednesday, January 04, 2006 Highlights of 2005: Music It's the time of year that begs for retrospectives, and this blog has also fallen prey to the tendency to contemplate the last 12 months--the next few posts will feature various highlights from 2005. I've discovered huge amount of wonderful music in the last year and thought I'd share 10 gems (in no particular order): 1. The Last Five Years Around three years ago, I was introduced to Jason Robert Brown's music by crewing a production of Parade, one of the few musicals that manages to both stay serious and resist the urge for unnecessary theatricality (in contrast, Miss Saigon, another of my favorites, is serious but includes such novelities as a beauty contest and a helicopter). The Last Five Years is a more untraditional show; it has only two characters. I haven't seen it live, but I've listened to the recording obsessively--it's a rather autobiographical story of two people whose marriage falls apart, and you see them through all the stages of their relationship: the initial giddiness of new love, marriage, struggles, and the end. 2. Beth Stalker Beth is a wonderful musician that I was privileged to share the stage with for a benefit. She's the winner of multiple Detroit Music Awards, runs the gamut of folk, gospel, and blues, and will be performing as part of the Splintered Light Concert Series at the Chapel Coffeehouse, a venue I am partially responsible for running. 3. Josh Allan Josh is my Myspace discovery. He's an amazing musician from Colorado--soon to be California--with similar sensibilities to me in the vein of acoustic pop. But more upbeat. He seriously needs to tour to Michigan. 4. Christian Matjias In the spring, I got a newsletter from U-M's alumni association mentioning Christian's work in dance and music (he's a professor at U-M). Intrigued, I wandered into his website and somewhere along the line we started an email correspondence that revealed he's as much a fan of my music as I am of his. Excellent compositions--check out "With Each Moment." 5. The Blind Boys of Alabama I caught the gospel/blues group at the Detroit Jazz Festival this summer--and they were phenomenal performers, having played together for 60 years. Their CD with Ben Harper is high on my To Buy list. 6. Mae Not only was their old website the coolest Flash site I'd ever seen, but their music is a great blend of synth and alt rock (not always easy things to combine). 7. Todd Martin Todd's another musician I came to appreciate after sharing a show with him--we played together at Magdalena's Tea House in Lansing and I listened to his CD for the next two weeks straight. Another fantastic acoustic pop singer-songwriter. 8. CJ Chenier and the Red Hot Louisiana Band I don't normally listen to zydeco, but I caught CJ and band during Summerdance, a free concert series run by the city of Chicago. On my birthday, no less. And while the accordion is generally an instrument I don't appreciate, that night it worked--probably because there was a good amount of blues in the set too. 9. Etta James I'd heard her music before unknowingly, but over the last year I discovered the wonders of this incredible blues vocalist. Think melted chocolate. Mmm. 10. Sufjan Stevens It took two different friends--who, interestingly enough, don't quite get along--to get me hooked on Sufjan's music, but now I definitely am, in spite of the fact that his song titles are getting longer and longer, to the point of incredulity (one is literally a paragraph long). His style is hard to pin down, a mixture of minimalism, folk, and indie rock, and I've got to admit that I wish I'd thought of it first. Once I was reading his lyrics and commenting that a Christian would write such sentiments--"And in my best behavior / I am really just like him," and that about a murderer--when Patrick responded, "Don't you know? He is a Christian." Well then, mystery solved. ^ Top | 12:03 AM | | | 
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