Best Use of Vincent Price's Moustache on a Record Cover: Bob Dylan, "Love and Theft" (Columbia)
And that wasn't even the half of it. "Love and Theft" was Dylan in an increasingly gleeful dirty-old-man guise, loose with craggy wisdom and saltier than a truckful of fishheads. "Love and Theft" rocked, rolled and swung like a drunken divorce: At its heart, it ached, sure, but mostly it wanted to just keep moving. And so it did.
Best Record Available Only on Quicktime: Wilco, "Yankee Foxtrot Hotel"
The rumor goes that when Wilco found out that a rep from its record company stole the "Yankee Foxtrot Hotel" tapes in an effort to remix it and get the hit that had always eluded the band -- despite a standing status as the foremost of American rock bands fighting the good fight, despite the fact that their previous effort, "Summer Teeth," had become a sort of bona fide, cross-cutting classic of the kind that is simply not made anymore -- the band went apeshit. And rightly so. Having found a loophole in their contract that prohibited such antiquated (or at least we like to think so) music-biz shenanigans, the band walked out on their label, record completed, in debt to no one. So they did what any smart band would do: Until they found a new label, they'd stream it off their Web site. The story is great -- Rock Band Emboldened by Art and Truth Tells Major Label to Stick It! -- but the killer is that "Yankee Foxtrot Hotel" is an absolute fucking monster of a record. Sad and psychedelic, jazzy and poetic, breezy and weary, the record is loaded with all the clammy portent of the human experience. It begins with the lines, "I'm an American aquarium drinker/I assassin down the avenue," and just gets even braver from there. Now if somebody could just convince them to take on Clear Channel.
The Michael Penn Award for an Artist I Liked for Five Minutes and Then Changed My Mind About Completely: India Arie
"Video" -- the debut single from India Arie, a nu soul empress who, ideally, should take us all straight back to the heady days of Arrested Development and the first season of "A Different World" -- strummed its way into heavy rotation during the summer. And with its vocal hook -- "I'm not the average girl in a video/I don't have the weight of a supermodel" -- it was easy to love. But by the time Christmas rolled around, something in India -- in fact, maybe in all of nu soul as it was seen on TV -- had turned. There she was on the Gap's "Give a Little Bit of Your Love to Me" ads, emoting like crazy, pointing her fingers at all the crazy wavering notes she was hitting, like a professor at the Mary J. Blige School of Humorless Histrionics. Tragic, that.
Best Badly Drawn Boy Side Project: Gorodisch, "Thurn & Taxis" (Leaf UK)
In which Stephen Cracknell -- sometime Badly Drawn Boy guitarist and apparently a young genius himself -- makes a mini-album driven entirely by his own whimsical pairing of John Fahey/Leo Kottke-esque acoustic guitar figures propped up against scratchy rare grooves, feathery bossa nova rhythms and long, loping cello arcs. The result is not, as it would be easy to categorize, two-years-too-late trip-hop, but rather, something bold and new in instrumental music. But something happens, and the world yawns, failing to notice its raw enchantment and melancholy spark. It makes me crazy when this happens.
Best Homemade Elliott Smith-ish CD-R Album: Bill Ricchini, "Ordinary Time"
CD-Rs have become the cassette of the ought years, and as such, they've also become in most music quarters, an object of pure dread, often containing some of the worst music you've ever heard. That's the taint in the DIY world that no one ever wants to talk about, but it is as certain as the rain. So when one gets passed your way that is as much a homespun work of quiet beauty and low-key charm as Bill Ricchini's "Ordinary Time" is, it's something to talk about. Billy Ricchini is an unassuming South Philly boy with a genuine knack for the kind of hushed pop that made Elliott Smith's first few acoustic albums one of the defining artistic statements of '90s and Belle and Sebastian a cottage industry. After getting the ol' dot-com heave-ho -- who knows how much of the art of the next decade will result almost directly from the dot-com fallout? -- Ricchini sat up in his room for a year making "Ordinary Time," and then sent off a copy to everyone he could think of who might possibly like it. Within weeks, he was a touring member of the indie pop group Mazarin, "Ordinary Time" was one of the biggest selling CD-Rs ever to grace the indie shops of Philadelphia and he was mulling over which local label was finally gonna put it out, you know, like, for real. Long story short, the record is due out in the spring on the Red Square label, but if you can't wait until then, make Billy's day and order one from wr43@hotmail.com. I love it when technology is not used for evil.
Best Ryan Adams Album: Whiskeytown, "Pneumonia" (Lost Highway)
Because, really, there were three to choose from: Adams' solo debut, "Heartbreaker" (Bloodshot), which came out at the end of last year; this one, the vaunted (and apparently, much-MP3'ed) swan song from Adams' old band Whiskeytown; and "Gold," his bid for major label son-of-a-gun status. Given that Adams is, by anyone's count, a talented and prolific (perhaps too much so) songwriter with an entire palate of classicist rock, pop and soul motifs at his disposal, the breakdown of product went thusly for his solo efforts: "Heartbreaker" was sheer, wired genius, raw and hillbilly with just the right touches of "Highway 61 Revisited"-style sneer thrown in, and "Gold" -- damn you, Elton John! -- was pure schlock that even Hootie would have deemed perhaps a bit facile. But it was "Pneumonia" -- the record that Adams almost seemed to want to suppress -- that showcased Adams, with the aid of Mike Daly and Caitlin Cary, at the peak of his songwriting powers. The record played havoc with American musical theater, Laurel Canyon-ified big FM pop and even the much-worn alt-country formula of sad eyes, boozy breath and a suitcase full of regret. "Pneumonia" was a big production, to be sure, but something about Whiskeytown made it stately and grand in a way that neither of Adams' solo albums managed to be. Doing press for "Pneumonia," Adams joked that the band was trying to make the last alt-country album ever. That remains to be seen -- in fact, it is completely unlikely -- but that doesn't take anything away from "Pneumonia's" random-access, broad-minded glory. It was probably the best record I heard all year.