Hal's Top Two Discs of 2006:

I'm getting tired of top 10 lists too, so here's my top 2 list from 2006. If I had to pitch everything overboard to keep my boat from sinking (or in this digital age, delete to free up hard-drive space), what two discs from 2006 would I keep? Josh Ritter's "The Animal Years" and Jon Dee Graham's "Full". Sadly, I skip The Boxing Mirror,Mockingbird,A Case For Case,Meadow, The Town And The City,West of the West, A Blessing And A Curse and The True False Identity across the water.

Coulda, shoulda, woulda!

I really wanted to include T-Bone Burnett's career spanning retrospective "20/20" on my best of list for 2006. I've been a fan of T-Bone's music for years and admire his body of work as a producer. The collection itself is reasonable if not outstanding (where are the rarities, b-sides and live tracks?). I can accept the seemingly random non-chronological sequencing of the tracks. The sound, in general, is clean and crisp, including the older Alpha Band tracks recorded shortly after T-Bone left Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue. What I can't comprehend was the decision to "newly produce" several of the tracks from the brilliant 1986 release "Proof Through The Night". Several years ago, realizing it may never be issued as a compact disc, I converted my decaying cassette tape of "Proof Through The Night" to digital files, cleaned them up using AudioCleaningLab and burned them to a disc. My amateurish remastering sounds better than the new and inferior versions of Fatally Beautiful, The Murder Weapon, Hula Hoop, When The Night Falls and Hefner and Disney included on 20/20. T-Bone's vocals are muffled. It sounds like he's singing into a microphone swaddled in gauze. I have T-Bone bootlegs with cleaner sound. A few lyrics were changed for no obvious reason. The character in "Hula Hoop" now deals "a little scorn" instead of "porn". "Proof Through The Night" with an all-star cast including Richard Thompson, Pete Townshend, and Ry Cooder is one of my favorite T-Bone albums. You got it right the first time T-Bone! Several tracks are included from the hard to find "Trap Door" EP including a riveting minimalist version of "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend". I'll keep my fingers crossed, waiting for a reissue (not newly produced) of the original disc hopefully with a hefty dose of bonus tracks. Until then, this retrospective will have to do.