No finer collection of music this year. It's a bunch of stuff you've never heard and it all sounds amazing. If you like soul music, you simply can't go wrong with this collection.
Very strong release from the downtempo veterans. It didn't hit me strongly with the first listen but has grown on me something fierce over the year. It's a great accompaniment to the album I've listened to the most this year, although not a 2007 release, Incognito's Bees + Things + Flowers.
I don't go to Andrew Lojero's parties around town with the same regularity that I used to but this absolutely sounds like that Los Angeles. Underground. Creative. Excited. Agitated. We're under freeways and in back alleys and abandoned churches and it's 3 in the morning. The party don't stop because Art Don't Sleep.
What can I say? I tried to deny this album but I'm a sucker for good Raphael Saadiq production and Stone seems further along in her finding her own voice than some other young blue eyed soul singers. Where I find Amy Winehouse's Back to Black derivative and imitative of a certain sound, I somehow find Introducing... interesting and indicative of a certain sound. Joss might not have half of Winehouse's personality but, at the very least, I'm not running through the artist's her records sound like. And that is not to say that Amy Winehouse isn't great but, without fail, I keep thinking that Back to Black is that the music industry found someone to finally make a sophomore Lauryn Hill album and it just so happens to be a drunk off her ass white girl from the UK.
It's the Avett Brothers. Blue-grassy soulful indie pop harmonizing? That's my kind of cocktail.

And the rest:

6. Feist - The Reminder
7. Jay Dee - Ruff Draft
8. Evidence - The Weatherman LP
9. Peter Bjorn & John - Writer's Block
10. Arcade Fire - Neon Bible

I woke this morning with this song in my head. I've listened to it four times throughout the day. This is the fifth. It has been a weekend of intense solitude. I've been locked in with my thoughts and my music, The Race Beat, and Zelda. My communication tool of choice has been almost exclusively one-way: Twitter. Outside of a few brief conversations with my parents and a random IM chat here and there, I've played observer when out in the world and self-analyst when in my home.

I've switched iTunes to repeat. This is play number six.

There have been several eureka moments while reading The Race Beat, many of them about how journalism effected the Civil Rights movement and how the conservative buzzwords and tactics of the time are co-opted in today's political rhetoric. I've learned several words and concepts that I didn't know before and found some new heroes but I'll save all that information for when I actually finish the book.

One statement has stuck with me since I read it on Saturday: Write every day. Stephen King says as much in On Writing but this is just some matter-of-fact advice given by a grizzled 40s era editor to a cub reporter and for some reason it struck a chord. Perhaps it was because I was sitting outside of Psychobabble in Los Feliz as an aspiring artist talked to his friend about an old Gypsy myth and the man responding to the tale by noting that his own hair was kinky...like a Black.

Spin number eight. I'm taking replay off but reserve the right to return.

"Like a Black," I thought. "I've got to write about that one." Los Feliz is hipster heaven. Every person walking by, young and old, is dressed in shabby chic. Designer hobos, if you will. I was reminded of Laina's commentary about the sociocultural ignorance of hipsterism and connected it to another eye-popping quote from The Race Beat,

"In the South, whites would say to Negroes, 'Come close, but don't go too high.' In the North, whites would say, 'Go high, but don't come too close.' "

That lack of proximity is what creates the space in which that common hipster douchebaggery is free to grow unfettered even in 2007.

I watched the last hour or so of The Color Purple over the weekend. I caught it as Shug and Miss Celie have happened on the letter from Nettie and go on their search for the rest of them. I cried. I straight bawled my eyes out for the remainder of the film -- a movie that I have probably seen 25-30 times since I saw it with my mother and her friend in the theatre over 20 years ago.

They were tears for my grandfather.

That's a simplification. They weren't tears for my grandfather. I'm not one for mourning the dead. I mourn for the living. They were tears for my grandmother who lost her partner of 54 years. They were tears for my mother, who wanted more time with him, more time to prepare for life without him. They were tears for me. The frightened me. The one who has dreaded phone calls from the 415 area code for 2 years, fearing every time that it was the "death call". The one who would avoid calling so as not to hear his tired, wheezy voice and worry that was the last time. The one filled with -- guilt isn't the right word -- regret that I didn't take every opportunity I had to be in his presence.

I head to Nebraska in just over a day. I'm tasked with speaking about the man. To raise my voice out into the universe. Raise my mind beyond the planets and the sun. Spread my message everywhere.

Stand tall.

Raise.

"Bees + Things + Flowers" is an album with a difference. The album features new arrangements of four Incognito classics - Always There, Still a Friend of Mine, Everyday and Deep Waters - and covers of such great tunes as Roy Ayers’ Everybody Loves the Sunshine, Earth Wind & Fire’s That's the Way of the World, Summer in the City as well as a stunning remake of America’s Tin Man. There are also three brand new Bluey compositions.

- Review, Acid Jazz, 09.16.06

Purists complain that too many of these songs skate by on the familiarity of the R&B classics they sample. They have a point, but they also overlook the element that makes My Life both original and indelible: Blige's voice. It's never, ever perfect; sometimes Blige can barely stay on key such is the excess of feeling. Yet that careening-out-of-control sound gives My Life an instant intimacy that cleaner singers never approach. Producer Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs probably didn't twist too many dials, but he knew that he wanted to reinvent R&B, and by blending the wah-wah pedals and strings that signified romance to his parents' generation with the heavy breathing and beats that did it for the kids, Combs helped do just that.

- The All-Time 100 Albums, Time Magazine, 11.12.06