Check out the recording of Phil of Sleepy Bird Orphanage from 8/1/08. Phil discusses the beginnings and current progress of his new indie label on Local Heroes Live! You can listen to this interview at www.sleepybirdorphanage.com, top post!

I know there were a kajillion amazing albums of 2007 that I either didn't get into or around to, but these are the ones that I enjoyed the most. Because I like lists.



20. Radiohead - In Rainbows (after much internal debate)
19. Y.A.C.H.T. - I Believe in You, Your Magic is Real
18. The Most Serene Republic - Population
17. The National - Boxer
16. Marissa Nadler - Bird on the Water
15. Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
14. St. Vincent - Marry Me
13. The New Pornographers - Challengers
12. Battles - Mirrored
11. Feist - The Reminder
10. Annuals - Be He Me
9. Dr. Dog - We All Belong
8. (Broken Social Scene Presents) Kevin Drew - Spirit If...
7. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago
6. Panda Bear - Person Pitch
5. The Shins - Wincing the Night Away
4. Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala
3. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
2. Andrew Bird - Armchair Apocrypha
1. Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam


Agree/disagree/qualify?

"He said it would be very nice to come home and be in the wrong house. To eat dinner with the wrong people by mistake, sleep in the wrong bed by mistake, and kiss everybody goodbye in the morning thinking they were your own family. He said he even wished everybody in the world looked exactly alike. He said you'd keep thinking everybody you met was your wife or your mother or father, and people would always be throwing their arms around each other wherever they went, and it would look 'very nice.'"

"There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything. Of course, we make him pay afterward for his moment of superiority, his moment of impressiveness."

"I like France where everybody thinks he's Napoleon--[in Rome] everybody thinks he's Christ."

"All legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold."

-Salinger


"Since everything that is moved functions as a sort of instrument of the first mover, if there was no first mover, then whatever things are in motion would be simply instruments. Of course, if an infinite series of movers and things moved were possible, with no first mover, then the whole infinity of movers and things moved would be instruments. Now, it is ridiculous, even to unlearned people, to suppose that instruments are moved but not by any principal agent. For, this would be like supposing that the construction of a box or bed could be accomplished by putting a saw or a hatchet to work without any carpenter to use them. Therefore, there must be a first mover existing above all--and this we call God."

-St. Thomas Aquinas


"But now [man] could do evil--and suffer for it; now they had acquired what the Church calls an invaluable possession, the Moral Sense; that sense which differentiates man from the beast and sets him above the beast. Instead of below the beast--where one would suppose his proper place would be, since he is always foul-minded and guilty and the beast always clean-minded and innocent. It is like valuing a watch that must go wrong, above a watch that can't."

-Twain


"It's a no-win argument--that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth."

-Irving

"The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, &c. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw, or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as they even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated by it as enemies. A wise man will only be useful as a man, and will not submit to be "clay," and "stop a hole to keep the wind away," but leave that office to his dust at least:--

"I am too high-born to be propertied,
to be a secondary at control,
or useful serving-man and instrument
to any sovereign state throughout the world."

He who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless and selfish; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist."

-Thoreau