This isn’t a list of the “best” songs of 2007, or even my favorites. It’s a personal 2007 compilation that tries to capture my experience with music over the past 12 months. The songs are meant to play off each other — sometimes in obvious ways, often not — and there’s a purpose to the sequencing.
My goal is simple: to give readers some ideas for new listening, or perhaps to spur you to go back to an artist you’d dismissed. There are a lot more familiar names in this year’s mix than last year’s, and that’s because of the accelerating fragmentation of the music market; it seems increasingly difficult for anything to capture the public’s imagination for more than a few seconds.
So here are 18 songs that I felt deserve more love than our short cultural attention span typically allows.
The Psychopathic Chicken (and Other Lessons of Evolution)