2013 Faves Part 4 (#20-#11)

Now we're getting to the good stuff. Every month, I make a playlist for myself to listen to in the car or at home and I take special care to think about how to rank the songs I'm listening to most. These songs were all, at some point this past year, in my personal top 5 and I certainly shared them with a few friends. I wasn't surprised to see a couple of them become mainstream hits, nor was I surprised to see my young kids latch on to some of them. Now that we're getting close to the end, I've decided to throw in a few comments on the songs. Let's get to it:

#20: "Safe and Sound", Capital Cities



I first heard this song after seeing it chart on Billboard's Top Alternative Songs chart and wondering who these guys were. After hearing it, I thought it was a curious song to appear on that chart and figured it would be right at home as a summer hit on the CHR charts. It took a while, but as most anyone stopping by this page knows, it eventually was playing everywhere and was definitely one of my kids' favourites this year. Great video too. Not bad for a two-year-old song!

#19: "Went to War", Amason



For a brief moment this past year, I was listening to last.fm to pick up on new stuff and while cruising through some links on their pages I came across one to this track. It hits on a couple of my "songlike" criteria, featuring both a male-female duet and Swedishness. I also found out that the group features a member of one of my other favourite Swedish groups, Miike Snow. A big favourite that was at #2 on my playlists throughout the entire fall.

#18: "Trying to Be Cool (Chainsmokers Remix)", Phoenix



Phoenix is a perennial favourite of mine. The problem with the word and their dog wanting to remix everything they put out is that there are a pile of versions of each of their songs to sift through. This is a strange case of a song where I was not a fan of the original version, but the Chainsmokers completely turned it into something I wanted to listen to over and over again. Still not entirely sure what R. Kelly was doing performing with them at Coachella...

#17: "Thrift Shop", Macklemore x Ryan Lewis feat. Wanz *



I think I stumbled onto this song mid 2012 but didn't really think much of it, aside from the fact that it was hilarious. I sent links to thrift-store-loving members of my family and that was the end of it. Then The Heist came out and these guys just exploded for me. It was probably my favourite album of 2012 and I listened to a large portion of their album repeatedly this entire year. Guilty confession: I saw them in concert in Syracuse in November. Weirdest part of the show was their choosing to perform "Can't Hold Us" twice, once as an encore. I thought that was a bit lazy.

#16: "Royals", Lorde



I heard both "Royals" and "Tennis Court" online at the same time and "Royals" was the big head-to-head winner. I wasn't surprised to see it get some run at Alternative Radio but I had no idea it would become the longest-running #1 Alternative track by a female artist, nor did I think it would top the mainstream pop airplay charts. It was my top track for October and November this year.

#15: "Fade", Jakwob feat. Maiday



Ok, so I just checked Jakwob's wiki page and it alleges that he got his start in jazz, death metal and folk. Not quite what one would expect after hearing "Fade". Depending on how you slap genre labels on songs, this is probably the third-highest ranking pure electronic track on my year-end list. I don't really have much to say about this track: I found out about it on The Hype Machine, it never broke through as a mainstream hit in North America as it did in the U.K., I don't know much about the artists involved and I listened the heck out of this track.

#14: "Doin' It Right", Daft Punk feat. Panda Bear



Who knew that my favourite track on Random Access Memories would be "Doin' It Right" and not "Get Lucky". This track really leapt off the page - the rest of the album is all fairly cohesive but this is the one song that echoes back the most to their past work that I love so much. I have yet to see any of Daft Punk's live shows, though I did see Panda Bear with Animal Collective this past summer. It will be interesting to see if they get to play the Grammys.

#13: "Always Like This", Bombay Bicycle Club *



So how did this song get on my list? By the end of 2012, I had listened to "Shuffle" and "Rinse Me Down" enough that I could pick these guys out of a crowd. So when I went rock-climbing at an indoor gym with my mother-in-law (RANDOM EVENT ALERT!) and the hipster gym owner pumped this song over the speakers, I knew who it was but wasn't familiar with the song (even though it was three years old at the time). This past year, it has been one of the songs people have asked me about the most and for obvious reasons. Unfortunately, just shy of the Top 10.

#12: "Stubborn Love", The Lumineers



Folk. Possibly roots or bluegrass. How was this almost one of my favourite 10 songs of the year? Dial things back 10 years and there's no way I thought I"d find anything of merit in the genre. "Ho Hey" was the gateway drug and this is the song that made it all worthwhile. Heck, if it's worth of being in trailers for Meryl Streep/Julia Roberts movies, it must be good right?

#11: "Lies", Chvrches



There it is, the grand champion of "Oh so close!". The synth-pop Scots broke the Internet with "The Mother We Share", but this song stuck with me a lot longer. The aggressive beat and vocals hooked me right from the start and almost a full year after first hearing this song, I still turn it up. I'm (embarrassingly) just starting to explore the rest of the album, The Bones of What You Believe so Chvrches probably has a couple of tracks in store for me for 2014.