The melancholy voice and hauntingly beautiful lyrics of Cat Power (aka Chan Marshall) have proved strong enough to earn her the title of this year’s Shortlist Music Prize for her popular 2006 album The Greatest, a culmination featuring highlights from her impressive body of sombre songs laden with heartache and expressed sincerely and tragically through aching vocals and emotive piano playing.
No matter who is chosen for the prize, there will always be fans of the other nominees that think their favorite artist’s album should take the honor.
According to the press release today by the Los Angeles-based Shortlist Organization, “Cat Power’s album quickly got under my skin. She has one of the most beguiling voices around. ‘The Greatest’ is an immediate classic that will never age.”
Despite her unquestionable talent and important contributions to indie music, it may have some music fans scratching their heads, considering the line-up of intial nominees picked by the Shortlist Organization panel of judges.
In addition, the winning album is not a release of new, original music – it’s a compilation of Marshall’s ‘greatest’. Is that fair to the other artists and their fans?
The announcement of the Shortlist Music Prize was late this year by a couple of weeks at the least. The organization said in March that it would announced the winner in May after shaving down the list of nominees to the top ten. Speculation that a deal with iTunes to feature the winning album on the store’s homepage is what caused the delay.
This year’s nine listmakers including last year’s winner Sufjan Stevens, Franz Ferdinand, KT Tunstall, Panic at the Disco, The Killers, Snow Patrol and Flaming Lips.
Drummer Ronnie Vannucci of the Killers said “the finalists are the backbone of what makes music special in the first place. They are each doing their own thing and it’s beautiful.”
Greg Spotts, the Shortlist co-founder, said: “this is the year of the storyteller. More than half of our ten finalists are wordsmiths who create unique characters and narratives, interpreting our complex world in new ways.”
Many of these artists employ unusual instruments and sounds, from the harp of Joanna Newsom to the accordion of Beirut to the secondhand percussion of Tom Waits.
Nine of the ten nominated albums were released by independent labels, marking the indie sector’s largest share of the finalists in the award’s six-year history.
Check the entire list. Entries in bold are the top ten Shortlist nominees. Those in italics are my own choices for the top ten.
Background Information on the Shortlist Organization
Anyone who wants a fast track introduction to indie and alternative rock should definitely take a browse of the nominated albums by the little-known Shortlist Organization.
Each year since 2001, the organization, comprised of rock musicians, producers and others from the independent rock music scene, has gone about selecting their favorite albums for the past year.
The only restrictions are that album nominated must have been for sale in the U.S. and could not have sold more than 500,000 units.
Once all the “listmakers” have turned in their nominees, they are all collected and collated into a “long list” of the past year’s best album and artists, which usually comprises about 55 to 70 nominees on average.
For example, this year there were a total of 60 albums nominated for the year of 2006.
The list itself reads like a rooster of the best indie artists and albums of the past year – enough to make any rock fan want to check and double-check their music collection again just to make sure they have everything.
After the long list is released, the committee goes to work to pair the list down, ultimately giving birth to the name “Shortlist”.
Anyone who has been an indie fan since, let’s say roughly 1999, knows that it is a daunting task to create a “short” list of the best albums in any one year because there are so many great releases. Look at 2006 alone.
The long list is itself a microcosm of a much longer list of fantastic music released by indie and alternative rock, pop, hip hop, trance and others in the past year, but just as the iPod Nano teaches, you need to begin to limit your music collection somewhere – there’s simply not enough time.
This is yet another purpose of the Shortlist Music Prize – that is, to basically do all the work finding the best music out there for you, packaging it up really nice, offering a streaming jukebox of songs from the list nominees (located on the site’s homepage) and essentially writing up your list of CDs to go buy or request for your birthday or other occasion.