Yes, I’m well aware that it’s February. This list of albums has been sitting in my drafts since January 8th and I’m just now doing something with it. It seems I took a break from ye olde blogge for much of January in favor of trying out Tumblr. (I can’t decide if I like it or not. It seems to steal my longer-form writing thunder).

My varying tastes in music from day to day would make it pointless to put these albums in any best-to-worst order. So I went with the time-tested alphabetical order method, which is completely arbitrary if you think about it, but that’s a thought for another day.

Read on for my favorite albums that came out in 2009 (or thereabouts; I fudged a little). If you’ve been checking out my monthly playlists (you’re forgiven if you haven’t), most of this will not be a surprise.

And if you’re patient and make it all the way to the bottom, there’s a prize for you, in the form of a few select songs from these albums that I particularly enjoyed.

WARNING: This gets a bit lengthy, so get comfy.

Read on for my album picks for 2009!

It takes a hell of a lot of energy, courage, thought and faith to take your foundation, drop it off a cliff and start over. It’s the biggest undertaking any of us will ever attempt. And, for some reason, I’ve discovered that continually doing so is what keeps me motivated to keep going. I’ve never felt so satisfied realizing that I know so little.

It’s not so much that I enjoy freeing myself of my beliefs, philosophies and values. It’s more that, when I look at those who don’t go about this process, the cancer of complacency is written all over their graying faces. Challenging my own ideas is what I do best, it seems, and the one habit I can’t seem to free myself of when shedding my ball and chain is judging those who, knowingly or not, do not deny themselves — mind, soul and spirit included — for the sake of their own personal development and enlightenment.

Today, the concept of Universal Truth is on the table.

To those who deny it, it sounds like the product of fundamentalist rubes. Only one Truth is possible. One timeline; one explanation for life, the universe and everything; one way we’ll experience the afterlife, if an afterlife exists at all. It’s impossible that you and I could experience two very different things in the very same circumstance, and even less possible that two contradicting beliefs can both be right. It just makes sense.

But relative truth certainly has its appeal. A world where we can justify our actions by claiming relative truths sounds much fancier and full of options, but it’s hard not to wonder if the motivations still boil down to one enveloping universal truth: we don’t want anyone to challenge what we believe. In other words, selfish individualism (which potentially leads to the death of community and tradition).

On the other hand, universal truth denies the gray area of differing cognitive realities. Part philosophy, part neurology, we can’t prove that what I see is what you see. Somehow (if I’m not just imagining you all exist in my own self-created universe) we all manage to get on the same relational wavelength about whether or not that blue rubber ball just rolled off the table and bounced into a corner. But hallucinations, misinterpretations and crossed wires in the brain can’t be overlooked either, therefore invalidating the mind from being an entirely trustworthy vessel of Truth.

What it comes down to is the fact that it’s hard for me to shed the weight of 25 years of dogma — which I find increasingly full of cracks — when I’m trying to pragmatically explain why I know that, despite the billions of people that disagree, my truth is the Truth.

Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism. If there is one Universal Truth, why are we all so split on what we believe? Why is there no clear front-runner with the vast majority of the votes? What gives me, a WASP if there ever was one, the right to think that what I believe is right? If I were born and raised by Iranians in Iran, I’d be a Muslim. No doubt about it. My core foundation, that I continually push off a cliff — and eventually dive after to retrieve every damn time — seems more a product of my environment than some spark of inspired awareness imbued in me by a greater power.

Maybe I lack faith. Maybe I just got lucky. Or maybe the only Universal Truth is that every venue of faith is true and, despite the overwhelming list of contradictions, they all converge into one path in ways that are beyond our ability to understand. (It should be just as easy to use what faith we have to accept plurality as it is to faithfully believe in only one way; the attempted use of empirical evidence to pick one over the other will continually fail.)

But I don’t know. I really don’t. I’m somehow satisfied with not knowing. It’s surprisingly easy to relate to people when willing to admit to knowing nothing. And I like it that way.

In case you haven’t been reading these for long (or at all) and you’re wondering why the heck I post a list of songs at the end of every month, perhaps I should explain: A few years ago a friend of mine and I started making a playlist for every month, in a sense to act as a piece of nostalgia, as something of a musical fingerprint of a moment in time. It takes very little effort and is one of my favorite ongoing musical projects.

That said, here’s January’s list, which chronicles the new Vampire Weekend album release, hitting 100,000 listens on Last.fm (the song was “Last Dance” by the Raveonettes), listening to albums from people’s year-end best-of lists, mourning the loss of Jay Reatard and the end of These Arms Are Snakes, seeing Cross Canadian Ragweed live and remembering that I like Jimmy Eat World a hell of a lot. And bands with swear words in their name.

And, to start the year off right (hey, we’re only one twelfth of the way in), I’m going to be posting the songs from one of the many handy streaming music services that let you embed playlists. Check out the player below or go here to listen.

1. The Dead Texan – “A Chronicle of Early Failures, Part 2″ (The Dead Texan)
2. The Low Anthem – “Charlie Darwin” (Oh My God, Charlie Darwin)
3. The Big Pink – “Velvet” (A Brief History of Love)
4. Vampire Weekend – “White Sky” (Contra)
5. Vampire Weekend – “California English” (Contra)
6. The Raveonettes – “Last Dance” (In and Out of Control)
7. Mastodon – “Crack the Skye” (Crack the Skye)
8. Metric – “Sick Muse” (Fantasies)
9. Jay Reatard – “Faking It” (Watch Me Fall)
10. Cross Canadian Ragweed – “17″ (Cross Canadian Ragweed)
11. The Antlers – “Sylvia” (Hospice)
12. The Decemberists – “The Wanting Comes in Waves / Repaid” (Hazards of Love)
13. These Arms Are Snakes – “The Shit Sisters” (Oxeneers or the Lion Sleeps When Its Antelope Go Home)
14. The Very Best – “Julia” (Warm Heart of Africa)
15. Infinite Body – “Dive” (Carve Out the Face of My God)
16. Native – “Backseat Crew” (Wrestling Moves)
17. Jimmy Eat World – “Big Casino” (Chase This Light)
18. Jimmy Eat World – “Chase This Light” (Chase This Light)
19. Fuck Buttons – “Olympians” (Tarot Sport)

What if we could pedigree our food? We do it for our pets and our own family trees, and that has almost no usable value other than investing in human pride. But having a pedigree on our food, that has some potential health benefits.

There’s been a lot of talk that we Americans (and all consumers of mass-produced food) are basically corn chips with souls thanks to corn subsidies in the American midwest. So what if we knew that our vegetables were grown, not only organically, but with fertilizer from well-pedigreed cow manure with three “generations” of distance from mass-produced feed?

Okay, maybe vegetables are an overwhelmingly large food to start with, but we could at least do it with meat, right? I’d much rather eat beef that I knew had five generations of grass-fed, free-range behind it.

There are other things we could rate too: how humane the slaughter house is; the quality of the land the cows were pastured on; the number of cows shared the square acre it lived on.

Yeah yeah, most people don’t care about these things. But that’s half the point: creating a system where people can see how well, or how terribly, our food is managed, maybe it’d be easier for them to care, and easier for them to make wise decisions, and easier for food-makers to feel bad when they serve us crap.

It’s just an idea. And before you proclaim that it’s “too much work” (though in reality it probably is) let’s have a look at how often we add personal content to the internet cloud that, collectively, creates enough material to create 3D models of certain parts of the world. What if we cared enough about our food to spend a little time caring about where it came from.

My friend Matthew recently started a community of bloggers doing what he calls “Poetry Wednesday.” The idea is simple: post your favorite poetry (yours or someone else’s) on Wednesdays. And that’s it. So here’s mine.

Another song cascading as a poem. Except Saul Williams is originally a slam poet (with degrees in acting and philosophy, no less) who found some release in hip-hop. So a poem it is.

Talk to Strangers

by Saul Williams

Now, I wasn’t raised at gunpoint and I’ve read too many books
To distract me from the mirror when unhappy with my looks
And I ain’t got proper diction for the makings of a thug
Though I grew up in the ghetto and my niggas all sold drugs

And though that may validate me for a spot on MTV
Or get me all the airplay that my bank account would need
I was hoping to invest in a lesson that I learned
I thought this fool had jumped me just because it was my turn

I went to an open space cause I knew he wouldn’t do it
If somebody there could see him or somebody else might prove it
And maybe, in your eyes it may seem I got punked out
Cause I walked a narrow path and then went and changed my route
But that openness exposed me to a truth I couldn’t find
In the clenched fists of my ego, or the confines of my mind
In the hipness of my swagger, or the swagger in my step
Or the scowl of my grimace, or the meanness of my rep
Cause we represent a truth, son, that changes by the hour
And when you open to it, vulnerability is power
And in that shifting form you’ll find a truth that doesn’t change
And that truth is living proof of the fact that God is strange

Talk to strangers when the family fails and friends lead you astray
When Buddha laughs and Jesus weeps and turns out God is gay
Cause angels and messiahs, love, can come in many forms
In the hallways of your projects or the fat girl in your dorm
And when you finally take the time to see what they’re about
Perhaps you find them lonely or their wisdom trips you out

Maybe you’ll find the cycles end you back where you began
But come this time around you’ll have someone to hold your hand
Who prays for you, who’s there for you, who sends you love and light
Exposes you to parts of you that you once tried to fight
And come this time around you’ll choose to walk a different path
You’ll embrace what you turned away and cry at what you laughed
Cause that’s the only way we’re gonna make it through this storm
Where ignorance is common sense and senselessness the norm
And flags wave high above the truth and the two never touch
And stolen goods are overpriced and freedom costs too much
And no one seems to recognize the symbols come to life
The bitten apple on the screen and Jesus had a wife
And she was his Messiah like that stranger may be yours
Who holds a subtle knife that carves through worlds like magic doors

And that’s what I’ve been looking for, the bridge from then to now
Just watching BET like, “What the fuck, son? This is foul.”
But that square box don’t represent the sphere that we live in
The earth is not a flat screen, I ain’t trying to fit in
But this ain’t for the underground, this here is for the sun
A seed a stranger gave to me and planted on my tongue
And when I look at you, I know I’m not the only one

As a great man once said,
“There’s nothing more powerful
than an idea
who’s time
has come.”

December brought winter songs, wrapup best-ofs for the year and the decade, and a few other random lovely things.

I wish I had a way to share all these songs with you in a more listening-friendly way. Seriously. Someone find a way. Imeem and Blip.fm’s music collections are unreliable, mp3-collecting is questionable and time-consuming, a monthly podcast is too much work (but sounds like a lot of fun if I found someone to do it with), and hardly anyone I know uses Rhapsody, where I keep track of these lists.

1. Brand New – “Sowing Season (Yeah)” (The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me)
2. MxPx – “Let It Happen” (Let It Happen)
3. Bob Dylan – “Like a Rolling Stone” (Highway 61 Revisited)
4. Fleet Foxes – “Ragged Wood” (Fleet Foxes)
5. Camera Obscura – “The Blizzard” (The Blizzard)
6. Black Moth Super Rainbow – “Just for the Night (BMSR remix)” (Drippers EP)
7. Ghostface Killah – “Kilo” (Fishscale)
8. Fuck Buttons – “The Lisbon Maru” (Tarot Sport)
9. Micachu and the Shapes – “Vulture” (Jewellery)
10. Ghostface Killah – “Buck 50″ (Supreme Clientele)
11. Fucked Up – “No Epiphany” (The Chemistry of Common Life)
12. Taken by Trees – “My Boys” (East of Eden)

My friend Matthew recently started a community of bloggers doing what he calls “Poetry Wednesday.” The idea is simple: post your favorite poetry (yours or someone else’s) on Wednesdays. And that’s it. So here’s mine.

The Soviet

by mewithoutYou

God is love and love is real
But the dead are dancing with the dead
And whatever’s charming disappears
All things lovely only hurt my head

As I gather stones from fields
Like pearls of water on my fingers’ ends
And wrap them up in boxes
Safe from windows
From things that break

As the nighttime shined like day
It saw my sorry face
Hair a mess but it liked me best that way
Besides, how else could I confess?
When I looked down like if to pray
Well, I was looking down her dress

Good God! Please!
Catch for us the foxes
In the vineyard, the little foxes

So turn your ears, you musicians, to silence
Because they only come out when it’s quiet
Their tails brushing over your eyelids
Wake up, sleeper, and rise from the dead!
Or the fur that they shed
Is gonna lay on your bed
In a delicate, orange-ish cinnamon red

Ah, but I don’t need this!
Fall down! Stay down!
I don’t need this

One of my favorite songs by one of my favorite bands, and it just so happens to be one of the most sadly poetic things I’ve ever read.

My girlfriend linked me to the site of Kevin Fanning, who recently wrote How I Learned To Love You From So Far Away: a collection of stories about love & technology. Considering this is the story of my and Erin’s life, it seemed like a fitting addition to our collective library.

It ended up not being quite what either of us expected, but still good. It addresses hypothetical and possibly real relationship situations that intertwine heavily with modern social technology. It isn’t always love stories or hate stories, but always about how we connect with each other in the 21st century. These short stories are happy, sad, beautiful and abrupt and show loads of potential from Kevin Fanning.

If you’re interested, you can also read it on your Kindle if you have one. If nothing else, support a writer with potential. Everyone deserves a chance, and you can help give Fanning his.

Last week, while bouncing from airport to airport on Christmas day, I managed to read The Medium is the Massage in its entirety.

The book is what you might consider “experimental literature.” From page to page, layout, style and meaning change to go along with the ideas being addressed by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore. The subject matter is the philosophy of print and other types of modern media and how they relate to human psychology, education and the modern development of our society.

I ran through this one so quickly that I don’t have much insight to provide, other than to say that I enjoyed it thoroughly and wish I had written down half the book as quotes. I should probably get my own copy of the book and do that eventually.

I originally read J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye sometime during high school. I remembered loving it then, but couldn’t remember why. I could hardly remember the plot, even. So I read it again.

It didn’t make much more sense the second time, really. I still enjoyed it, but I still don’t entirely know why. A story of a maladjusted teenager with a habit for getting kicked out of boarding schools. No real climax or strong story structure. Just a kid struggling through adolescence.

After I finished reading, I consulted with Wikipedia to see if they had any more information as to why the book is such a widely enjoyed classic, and what made it big in the first place. And it turns out I was already on the right path: the widely accepted purpose of the book was to give an accurate snapshot of adolescent life in America at the time.

If you’ve never read this book, you probably should. It’s one of those that’s easy to read and practically required reading for any educated American, if for nothing else than all the cultural references that followed.