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: