Azure Ray - Displaced

It was once said that the thing about life is that no one makes it out alive. Displaced is one of those songs that reminds you of this fact, which might seem a bit morbid. The fact of the matter, though, is that the song is about the little things that keep us from despair-- loyal friends, trying to make something out of the time and space that we're given. It embraces that sense of discontent ennui without giving into it entirely, and I think that sums up a good number of people, giving the song a profound applicability.

The song plays slow and mellow, all acoustic guitar and smooth female vocals, giving it an overall feel that the audience, no matter how hard they might try, will never manage to get really close to the song. Of course, this only reinforces its point, making it even stronger.

The Weepies - Not Your Year

How very like our generation to embrace moments of complete uncertainty and immortalize them in song.

Not Your Year isn't so much about everything going terribly wrong as it is about the failure on the part of things to go particularly right. You wake up in the morning and look around and wonder how in the world things have come to this, how your life has amounted to the clothes you left on the floor and the messages you haven't checked. Life becomes some kind of glorified anti-climax, really, and we look around and wonder what it was we'd been so excited about all along, if this is all there is.

The Weepies put out a song with a solution, though, and Not Your Year offers, "Breathe through it, write a list of desires/ Make a toast, make a wish, slash some tires/ Paint a heart repeating, beating “don’t give up." It's impressively sage advice.

Anna Nalick - Forever Love (Digame)

This song has been in my head all day today (and off and on for the last several days), so it seems only fitting that it should acquire "song of the day" status. Anna Nalick's gift seems to lie in strong lyrics superimposed on classic dance rhythms (we're talking ballroom dance numbers here, not club music), and "Forever Love (Digame)" is no exception. The song has a mellow flow to match the singer's requests that her lover be constant, rather than infallable. It's a dreamy and wistful song about finding the faith to trust in someone else.

Conjure One - Center of the Sun

The first thing you'll notice listening to this track is that the vocals are the work of none other than Poe, who's been somewhat absent from the mainstream music scene due to legal battles with her former record label. Her vocals are perfect for the cool winding melodies of this song; she sneaks her way through this track's acoustics as though she's following the heart of it through darkened city alleyways.

This song isn't the easiest one to sum up, as it possesses a profound level of detachment from the world at large. It's about being so alone in throngs of people that you rely on the music in your own head to make sense of the world, but it's also about those moments where you look so deeply inward that you come out the other side, embracing like-minded people and the world in general, albeit with some hesitation.

Lisa Mednick - Wrecker

I wish that I had something long and elaborate to say about this song, but I don't. I've heard it once (and immediately bought the cd, which these reviews are indicating happens far more often than it does).

Lisa Mednick comes from Austin, Texas, the live music capital of the country. Do you really need to know anything else? Well, okay, you probably do. I can't really pinpoint what it is about this song, except that it has this haunting, almost Celtic overlay. Wrecker is less a song than it is a keening, even though we'll all read into it different versions of loss. Because of this, Mednick becomes mythical; she's Medea, or the bean sidhe.

Ultimately, Wrecked talks about being, well, a wrecker. The choice of words is phenomenal; she speaks not of the end of love as a cessation, but as a banishment. Moreover, it's never really even about the end of love, but about how she'd said all along that it would never work because neither person is really built for the relationship. The song starts with a line strong enough to strike hard in direct contrast to Joni Mitchell's Case of You (which was likewise quoting Shakespeare's Julius Caesar): "I'm not the faithful star to lead you through the night."

There seems to be an almost nautical theme in the music that I've chosen lately; it all flows in a way almost oceanic, and this song is perhaps the hallmark of that trend. Wrecker is the ocean's destructive qualities, which we can see in other songs, like Dar Williams' The Ocean.

Hem - Half Acre.

While I'm a firm believer that bands sell out a bit when they allow their music to be used in commercials, it was in fact a commercial that introduced me to an absolutely amazing band.

Liberty Mutual is responsible for the commercial featuring Hem's "Half Acre," a slow and cautious ballad that asks, "Do you carry every sadness with you/every hour your heart was broken?" In the commercial, the random good deed of one individual gets passed on to another, who is looking on, until we've seen an entire day where people are kind to each other, taking care of one another as though it's become a way of life. Such things are so terribly rare these days that it's nice to remember the goodness in the world, the little kindnesses. No song would have fit that television moment better than this one.

More than anything, "Half Acre" is a song about hope in the darkest of times. It's about that moment when everything that can possibly go wrong has done so, and you're downtrodden, but you manage to see the tiniest ray of light peering through the clouds.

Sara Bareilles - Fairytale.

This song made my entire weekend. I don't know how many times I listened to it on Sunday, but when Pandora queued it up and the song began, it didn't take long before I was absolutely hooked. Within the course of a day, I'd bookmarked her myspace page, visited her website, listened to all the songs and clips available on both sites, bought tickets to her upcoming Dallas concerts, and introduced several friends to her music, convincing them to buy tickets to her concerts as well.

This song operates on a philosophy vaguely remniscent of Ani Difranco's Not a Pretty Girl, changing up the classic paradigm of the helpless female and suggesting that such patriarchal values are not only obsolete but rather annoying.

The line in this song that won me over was the simply stated tale of Rapunzel: "I'd have cut it myself if I'd known men could climb hair. I guess I'll find another tower somewhere and stay away from the window."

Do yourself a favor and check her out.