#1. Rehab
by Amy Winehouse
Amy Winehouse is so confident she’s got the goods on Rehab that she starts her vocal a half beat before the music comes in. She’s not a foreplay kind of gal. What she is is mouthy, funny, sultry, and quite possibly crazy. “They tried to make me go to rehab/ I said ‘No No No,’” she announces, and while real life indicates she ought to reconsider, it’s impossible not to be seduced by her originality. Combine it with production by Mark Ronson that references four decades worth of soul music without once ripping it off, and you’ve got the best song of 2007.
#2. 1 2 3 4
by Feist
Leslie Feist specializes in songs that make sophisticated adults feel like little kids, and 1 2 3 4 may be her masterpiece. Lyrically it’s little more than a nursery rhyme — “One Two Three Four/ Tell me that you love me more” — but Feist sings it with a mixture of wisdom and exuberance that’s all her own. Thanks to the divine hand and wallet of Steve Jobs, who used the video for 1 2 3 4 in an iPod ad, it also became Feist’s first top 10 hit.
#3. Umbrella
by Rihanna
Sometimes an umbrella is just an umbrella. A few seconds into Rihanna’s Umbrella you realize that this is probably not one of those times. It’s not that Umbrella is explicit; its lyrics (”Now that it’s raining more than ever/ Know that we’ll still have each other/ You can stand under my umbrella”) owe more to Doris Day than Madonna. But Rihanna, a Barbadian ex-beauty queen, has a special talent for vocal innuendo. She toys with the word umbrella — or, as Rihanna would put it, um-ba-rella, ella, ella — as if she’s taking it for a ride on a water bed. The sexiest song of 2007.
#4. All My Friends
by LCD Soundsystem
There’s a magic to this song that I won’t ruin by trying to explain the potion. Suffice it to say that a straightforward repetition of the same guitar, keyboard and bass lines, combined with lyrics about life without regret (”I wouldn’t trade one stupid decision/ For another five years of life”) and life with all kinds of regrets (”You spend the first five years trying to get with the plan/ and the next five years trying to get with your friends again”) pays off with a punch about what we lose as we get older.
#5. Jigsaw Falling Into Place
by Radiohead
This journey through flirtation, consummation and regret gets about as close as you can to summing up a doomed relationship in four minutes. The lyrics are typical Thom Yorke shards of glass (”What’s the point of instruments/ Words are a sawed off shotgun”) — but it’s the tightness of the music, rising in intensity like a three-act play, that makes Jigsaw howl.
#6. I Get Money
by 50 Cent
When it comes to the admittedly minor art of turning a few menacing bars into a hypnotic track, Fitty is king. I Get Money owes a lot of its appeal to a sample from Audio Two’s Top Billin’ that’s best described as the sound of bad things about to happen, but 50 Cent’s bemusement — at his survival, his success, the fact that you could possibly care what he has to say — makes the song as wry as it is scary. On his returns as a Vitamin Water investor, for instance: “I take quarter water sold it in bottles for 2 bucks/ But Coca-Cola came and bought it for billions, what the f**k?”
#7. Hey There Delilah
by Plain White T’s
There’ve been thousands of aching guy reaching out to distant girl songs recorded over the years, and it’s a credit to the Plain White T’s that this one manages to feel fresh. Singer Tom Higgenson has an imperfect voice, but his nasal delivery makes the nearly-comic sincerity of his lyrics — “Delilah I can promise you/ That by the time we get through/ The world will never ever be the same” — seem completely genuine. Backed by a warm acoustic guitar and a hint of viola, Delilah is an intimate love song that’s damn near universal.
#8. Me Llaman Calle
by Manu Chao
Manu Chao sings in six languages, but he’s world music’s great cross-cultural hope because his best songs transcend all of them. Chao’s warm singing over José Manuel Gamboa and Carlos Herrero’s leaping Flamenco counter melody creates a direct emotional line to the core of this mid-tempo ballad. With its easy melody and universal rhythm Me Llaman Calle walks proudly in the shadow of Bob Marley, the last guy who made world music this disarmingly simple.
#9. Potential Break-up Song
by Aly & AJ
Everything great about this track can be summed up by the lyrics in the bridge: “This is the Potential Breakup Song/ Our album needs just one/ Oh baby please.” PBS is winking pop that doesn’t skimp on the hook (borrowed from Del Shannon’s Runaway) or the emotion. And if its message for teen girls — ’screw you, ex-boyfriend who dumped me’ — isn’t empowering in any original way, at least it was written by the teenage sisters who sing it.
#10. Baby Fratelli
by The Fratellis
This Glasgow band has no new tricks in its bag. They steal shtick from the Ramones — the members all go by the adopted last name Fratelli — and riffs and louche-ness from T-Rex, which explains how they produced this unapologetically glammed up, eight ball of a rock song. It’s about a skanky girl, but really it’s a high-energy ode to the thrill of stupidity, thus its prominent place on the Hot Fuzz soundtrack.
But my favourite is….
“I grieve” by PG
It was only one hour ago
It was all so different then
Theres nothing yet has really sunk in
Looks like it always did
This flesh and bone
Its just the way that you would tied in
Now theres no-one home
I grieve for you
You leave me
so hard to move on
Still loving whats gone
They say life carries on
Carries on and on and on and on
The news that truly shocks is the empty empty page
While the final rattle rocks its empty empty cage
And I cant handle this
I grieve for you
You leave me
Let it out and move on
Missing whats gone
They say life carries on
They say life carries on and on and on
Life carries on
In the people I meet
In everyone thats out on the street
In all the dogs and cats
In the flies and rats
In the rot and the rust
In the ashes and the dust
Life carries on and on and on and on
Life carries on and on and on
Its just the car that we ride in
A home we reside in
The face that we hide in
The way we are tied in
And life carries on and on and on and on
Life carries on and on and on
Did I dream this belief?
Or did I believe this dream?
Now I can find relief
I grieve
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