so what do you do on a friday night when all your married friends choose to have date/family night tonight, and your single friends live out of town? you eat a bowl of special k, drink some turbodog, and commence typing about what you actually listened to in 2006. i wrote about my top 10 of 2006, but i was looking at jacob’s blog earlier and saw he had gotten this idea allegedly from hynes. all of us have last.fm accounts, which is a website that keeps track of everything you listen to (as long as you have the software plugin installed, don’t worry, it’s not nearly rocket science, it’s not even 7th grade life science) for you. mine is located here. anyway, here we go…

10) whiskeytown – stranger’s almanac
i LOVE this record. i listened to it several times throughout the year. i like it better than ‘pneumonia‘.
9) jason morant – abandon
ok, i’ll admit it….this was one of those albums where i loaded a bunch of music and left it playing. sorry jason. i love his new one, ‘open‘. nothing on ‘abandon‘ really stuck out for me, i’m not sure how this got in the top 10 over open and city of two rivers.
8) nickel creek – why should the fire die?
i started listening to this album a lot after i saw them at the house of blues. it became one of my favorites because when i first got it, i didn’t like it that much.
7) sufjan stevens – illinois
again, i started listening to this more after i saw him live. at first i listened to him to try to understand all the pub about him, and i still don’t really “get” him like some of my friends. seeing him live though was pretty special though, and i like this album.
6) ryan adams – jacksonville city nights
i listen to ‘my heart is broken’ a LOT. i love the steel guitar intro. so i guess this would be the highest ranking ryan adams record of the year, and that’d probably be about right.
5) earthsuit – the rise of modern simulation
i definitely missed the bus for earthsuit when they were still around, but i’ve come to appreciate their talent in the bands that have spawned since they broke up (macrosick, club of the sons, and mute math). this record has some great songs like “bloodshot fanatical” and “noise for your eyes”. it was on heavy rotation for a lot of the summer.
4) family force 5 – business up front/party in the back
this is the only top 10 record to make it to the last.fm top 10. imagine that. anyway, i still listen to this record a lot, it’s pretty much been a mainstay since the night jacob gave me his copy that he didn’t want (can you believe that?).
3) david crowder band – a collision
this record was my favorite of 2005, and i still listen to it a lot. no surprise that it’s ranked this high.
2) johnny cash – the legend of johnny cash
i got this record the day ‘walk the line’ came out on dvd because best buy was having a sale. it’s pretty much a greatest hits record. i have the two prison albums and a lot of other random cash stuff, but this record introduced me to the song ‘one piece at a time’. check it out.
1) the fray – how to save a life
chad had asked me about them early last year, and i told him i had heard good things. the week after that mention, i got a copy, and listened to it numerous times. i listened to it many many times over the summer, and really loved a lot of the tracks. i don’t watch ‘grey’s anatomy’, so i didn’t have ‘how to save a life’ overplayed. it didn’t count on my top 10 because it came out in 2005.

interesting notes…..mute math had 7 of the top 10 tracks i listened to for the year, yet somehow the album was not listed….i guess that was last.fm’s fault. i listened to MM a LOT. and pearl jam’s eponymous album was #11. i listened to 4 tracks on that album quite a bit, and skipped the rest.