Sweet Tunes Thursday: Best of 2013

This week I compiled songs from albums that I deemed the best of 2013’s releases.

It was a tough decision, and ultimately I went one song over my time limit, but I put together a great compilation of music. Here is the playlist for you. It features a little of everything from David Bowie, to Daft Punk, to Lorde.

I created the second installment of my graphic design experiments with this playlist.

I’ve put the following constraints on the experiments: 5-minute time limit, use only items within 10 feet of wherever I’m creating the graphic, use  nothing from the internet, use my playlist text, and only use one font. I’m looking at this now and thinking that next week I need to treat the playlist text differently. I’ve been treating it like a block both times that I’ve experimented.

Also, I have to share this fun thing that was made possible through my DJ-dom.

I livetweet my radio broadcast, and try to tag the band responsible for each track in my tweets. At the end of my show, I thank every band for having awesome music, because that’s how I roll. I’ve had a couple of artists tweet back at me and I have been totally fangirl about it, but tweet back at them like it’s all cool. The Mountain Goats tweeted me last week, and this week, Jeremy Messersmith tweeted at me.

@jmessersmith no problem! You make beautiful music. I hope to be at the album release show in February.

— DJ chimes on KURE (@DJchimes) December 11, 2013

And then my day in the twitterverse ended up going full-circle. You all know I’m a huge fan (and a member) of The Current. I’ve been a listener and a member since 2009, and that station has given me so much information on new bands, new albums by favorite bands, concerts, etc. Now that I’m a DJ, I’ve been chatting with some of their DJs  on twitter. I was looking for something to send to Mark because he was having a bad week, but I wanted it delivered that day — kind of like flowers, but not flowers. So I tweeted at Barb Abney, one of the daytime hosts at The Current, who gave me a couple of ideas. I contacted Candyland in Stillwater, and they came through with a bucket of popcorn for me.

@Candyland1932 thank you so much for this awesome delivery from the Stillwater location: pic.twitter.com/gpjDg4nMrh

— DJ chimes on KURE (@DJchimes) December 12, 2013

@DJchimes@Candyland1932 I’m so glad it worked out! @jmessersmith single handedly got me hooked on their popcorn!

— Barb Abney (@BarbAbney) December 11, 2013

That’s right … Jeremy Messersmith got her hooked on that popcorn, and my day on twitter came full circle. How cool is that?

Since I’ve been talking about Jeremy Messersmith, I probably should include some of his music in this post. My favorite music video of his is for his song Tatooine. It’s about exactly what you think it’s about.

One of my favorite songs of Messersmith’s is Dillinger Eyes. Here’s a live version of that song (unfortunately not from the show I went to in 2011).

And, finally, he released a new single from his forthcoming 2014 album. Here’s Tourniquet.

What do you think was the best song or album of 2013?