alternative sounds : an ipod music blog: déjà vu all over again : the best songs of 2006

As the new year has come, it struck me as a good idea to revisit 2006 and list the best songs of the past year. The thought of a creating compilation excited me, and I knew it wasn't going to be too difficult since I already knew my favorites. The only challenge was whittling them down to 34 and trying to see how to best group them in two. Thirty-four is not a number I picked for the sake of being random. I still make mix tapes ("mix CDs" just doesn't roll well off the tongue) with the intention of sharing and sending them to friends, and 17 just happens to be the average number of songs I can burn in a normal CD.

In these mixes, you'll clearly see that the first puts together songs that rock, and the second, songs of a more folksy nature. Now, the diligent mix tape nerd will disregard the fact that most people now listen to music on their computers or iPods in shuffle mode, and will take pains putting the songs in proper sequence. You just don't throw them into a pot; you have a whole set of issues to think about. Do you start with a bang or do you gradually build up the mood? Can you follow a song that ends abruptly with one that starts slowly? How do you make a transition between two completely different genres? Can you build a story out of your song choices? Admittedly, I factored all these when I started to make this set, but in the end I left it up to the wisdom of iTunes: I sorted them by song length, shortest first. And you know what? I'm happy with the way it turned out. I hope you enjoy listening to them as much as I did putting them together.