The Fortlander

Almost ten years into the twenty-first century, I decided it’s ok to start thinking of best-of’s for this decade. First up for consideration are musical collaborations. These things are usually boring marketing ploys (Everyone + Sinatra), unnecessary strokes to enormous egos and table scraps for their fans (Plant + Krauss), or cute compilations put out by famous (or famously?) beautiful people (She + Him). I’ll be fair and say that some such efforts produce good tunes or have value simply because they’re weird pairings. Sticking Ol’ Blue Eyes in a sound booth with Bono, for example, is hilarious! But more interesting are collaborations that achieve something beyond kitsch and storied meetings.

To narrow this down a bit and because I’m an indie rock fan, I’m focusing on smaller-label collaborations in which two or more musicians who have other main projects came together for a one-off recording project. So I’m excluding supergroup-type bands like, say, Wolf Parade or Broken Social Scene, who continue to put out material. A few examples that came close but didn’t make the top three are Calexico + Iron and Wine, The Postal Service, and Animal Collective + Vashti Bunyan (a CLOSE number four). You get the idea.

Below are my choices for the top three collaborations to date of the twenty first century, plus streaming selections from all three:

3) Home, Volume IV: Bright Eyes and Britt Daniel (Post Parlo, 2002, re-released in 2004)

This was during the Bright Eyes era, and frankly, Conor Oberst used to annoy the shit out of me. A little too precious, self-counsciously wobbly, and aggressively bringing all the “grit” to the surface. I wasn’t buying it. Daniel, on the other hand, was coming into his own with Spoon, tightening all the screws on what had been a noisy, experimental, crunchy rock machine. Girls Can Tell (Merge, 2001) received critical acclaim and bounced Daniel onto the national radar. The most striking thing about this collaboration is its raw honesty, like Oberst and Daniel holed up for a couple days in the middle of nowhere and hammered out a few tunes together without wasting time worrying about production. Oberst’s shaky vox actually complemented Daniel’s confident rock sensibility. And the resulting four-song, off-the-cuff recording is as relevant now as it was then.

2) Matt Sweeny & Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Superwolf (Drag City, 2005)

Pretty much anything Will Oldham (Bonnie “Prince” Billy) touches turns to gold, even mediocre dialogue and rap videos. (Or especially those two things.) But when he collaborated with Matt Sweeny (Chavez, Zwan) for Superwolf, something magical happened: the ground rumbled softly and the skies slowly parted, showing us glimpses of a coming darkness. The album features the vocalists’ shared knack for deeply personal, prosaic lyrics. Lonely, dry voices lure listeners into shaded corners, but some songs explode forth into fiery, noodling guitar solos. It’s a battle between darkness and light, and light, just when it seems to be fading sweetly into the abyss, fights back. Powerfully.

1) Macha Loved Bedhead (Jetset, 2000)

This record marked the end of Bedhead after the band managed to lower the pulse of guitar-driven rock throughout the 90s. At the end of that decade, before they morphed into their new band, The New Year, the Kadane brothers looked to childhood friends (and also brothers), Josh and Mischo McKay, members of Macha, for inspiration. The album was written through the mail, the two bands passing tracks back and forth. The result was a beautiful combination of Bedhead’s calculation and Macha’s chaotic percussion. A triumph of collaboration, the strengths of each band complement the other. Plus it’s nice when typically serious musicians show us they don’t take themselves too seriously: first, the EP has 86 tracks, 79 of which are five-second clips (two more tracks are eight-seconds) of creepy ghost-voice room noises. And second, the album closes with a cover of Cher’s wildly popular “Believe,” complete with auto-tuner and phone buttons and dial tones, which brings the long distance-album project thing full circle.

What else?