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This is Said the Gramophone's 2010 Funding Drive.

It's where we ask those who have enjoyed the site over the past year to help keep this wild nonsense going.

You may notice that Said the Gramophone does not have advertising. That is not an accident, or a mistake. We just feel the site is better without it. And although there are costs to running an mp3blog like this - server costs, website costs, most of all the investment of time - we have made do, for several years, by becoming shills just once a year. That is to say, by asking you, on bended knees, for your dimes, nickels and Sir Robert Bordens. You can donate here.

Said the Gramophone is run by three people. Dan is an actor; Sean is a freelance writer; Jordan, who contributes once a month, somehow pays his rent as an editor. This doesn't mean you should feel bad for us: we don't feel bad for us, we're doing things we love. Besides, you're probably broke too. But what we mean is this: we could use your help.

In the past year, we have written more than 250 posts, played you more than 500 songs. Some of it, we hope, you liked. (We try very hard.)

Said the Gramophone will never be the biggest mp3blog in the world. We do not post videos, tour-dates, album art. We do not even post the new singles by our favourite bands - unless they are wonderful songs, deserving to be here. We try to do just one thing - writing with spirit about the songs we love, - and to do that one thing well. As we've said before: Our audience is you. That's it. There's no one else. You small, strange gang.

If you enjoy the site, please support us with a donation. (We're even giving thank-you gifts, including mixes, graffiti, chess-moves and short films.)

These are some of the things we did in the past year: introduced or (more likely) reintroduced you to artists such as Abner Jay, Andrew Cedermark, the Antlers, Au, Bear in Heaven, Black Feelings, Boat, Bombadil, Braids, Brave Radar, Capybara, Cains & Abels, Caves, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Christopher Smith, Clara Clara, Clogs, Clues, Cousins, the Crown Vandals, Cryptacize, Digital Leather, Dori Hoffman, Double Dagger, Drake, El Perro del Mar, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, Eternal Summers, Exuma, the Franks, Gigi, Girls, Gobble Gobble, Googoosh, Grand Trine, Group Bombino, Happiness Project, Haunted House, Here We Go Magic, Highlife, the Hoof and the Heel, JEFF the Brotherhood, KenLo Craqnuques, Laura Marling, Lido Pimienta, Little Scream, Los Zafiros, Luc, the Luyas, Machesa Traditional Group, Maison Neuve, Matias Aguayo, Mixylodian, Nicolas Jaar, Nicki Minaj, Nurses, Oberhofer, Pat Jordache, Pill Wonder, Railcars, RatTail, Reigning Sound, Sean Nicholas Savage, Sharon Van Etten, Silly Kissers, Sleigh Bells, Smith Westerns, Speech Debelle, Standard Fare, Suckers, Surfer Blood, Talbot Tagora, the Tallest Man on Earth, the-Dream, Titus Andronicus, Tomboyfriend, Tune-Yards, Twin Sister, Valleys, Young Galaxy, Yura Yura Teikoku, and the xx; wrote stories about sweat, Sir Galahad, the Cloud King, Major Kill, Cajun breakfast, "Good Intentions Paving Company", Pop Montreal, Sappyfest, fourteen seconds of Tim Hardin, filthy love songs, the blues, Gary "Cartmeleon" Cartman, file folders, the Institute's shrinking machine, squared circles, Miguel and Abby, hawks, "utter guff" about Michael Jackson, last words, cute stuff, Trans Parents, WU LYF, true love, eight-year-old Dickie, not following Mark Kozelek, a free Mushpot comp, and the deaths of three great singers; offered just a few guest-posts, by Michael Krueger, Bear in Heaven, White Hinterland, Frog Eyes and Jeff Miller; found a couple of hundred strange, fitting picture images. We also shared our favourite songs and favourite albums of 2009.

Now in our eighth year, we did a lot with little. But it was only worthwhile because of our readers' kindness of spirit, eagerness of ear, and dope handclaps. Thank you so much for all your comments and clicks, your hoots and chides, your tips and toodle-oos, your back-blogs and back-rubs. Thanks for telling your friends, your uncles, your sisters, your thesis advisors about us. Thanks for adding us on Facebook or Twitter. Thanks for playing our favourite songs to your lovers. Thanks for having patience with our bullshit. We understand that not everyone can afford to donate to a silly website. Regardless of dollars or cents, pounds or zloty, thank-you thank-you thank-you all yet again for continuing to make this one of the most rewarding things in our lives.

Now then, a song:
Peter Nalitch - "Gitar".
Nalitch was Russia's delegate at this year's Eurovision Song Contest. Before all that, this was his hit. Thank you for reading Said the Gramophone.

What Cheer? Brigade - "Malaguena". Sixteen tourists arrive on a Pan Am 737 jumbo jet. They are dressed in suits and sun-dresses. They disembark, carrying luggage. They get on a shuttle into the city. Arriving in downtown Paris, they make their way on foot to la Défense. It is the business district. On the sidewalk outside a glass office-building, the tourists snap photos of the skyline, the automobiles, the Parisians clacking past in high-heels. Their luggage is at their feet. From their luggage, they withdraw clubs, placards and whistles. These are not tourists. They are a riot. They are a riot that flew in from Minneapolis to cause a scene at la Défense. They break the building's windows, they stomp out into the street. The Parisians want to know, Pourquoi est-ce qu'ils sont venus?. The mob will not tell them. They are putting on face-paint. [buy We Blow, You Suck]

Radio Radio - "9 Piece Luggage Set". One day in December, Ghislain slipped on the ice outside the dep. His iPod Touch fell out of his pocket and into the snow. It wouldn't start. He called his big sister in Montreal and she told him he should put it in a jar of brown rice. "Rice?" Ghislain asked. "It dries things out," she said. Brown rice was hard to find in St-Hippolyte. He found some basmati at the Metro and figured it would do. It didn't help. The iPod was dead. Now it was May and blazing hot and Ghislain still couldn't listen to tunes. As soon as school finished, he'd get a job stocking shelves at the SAQ. For now, he loped glumly around St-Hippolyte. He counted bars in his head, rapping under his breath. On Saturday afternoon, while everyone else was watching Iron Man II at the cineplex, reclining in the A/C, Ghislain went down to the river. He sweated in the sun. The grass was packed flat. Ghislain practised his break-dancing moves. Cottonwood-seed blew on by. [buy]

Lido Pimienta - "Mueve". Carlos couldn't decide if he wanted to be a mover or a gardener. Three days a week, he kneeled in the earth, digging holes, pruning brambles, planting seedlings. Three days a week he lifted armoires, ottomen, easy-chairs. One day a week, he rested. On one of these rest days he was sitting sipping a vanilla soda. He was on a plastic chair, under a plastic parasol, at the side of the road. Three girls were playing hopscotch, skipping across chalked white lines. Carlos sipped his vanilla soda. He finished his vanilla soda. He didn't want to be a mover or a gardener. He wanted to play hopscotch. [buy] (thanks guillaume!)

The National - "Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks". (Removed at label request.) As the buds turn to flowers and then turn to fruit, over hours and days and months, they do not know a single thing about love and longing, about loneliness; they do not know busy concert-halls and warm streets at night; they do not know mystifying conversations and flying kites, opaque texts, waiting and wondering, and biking as hard as you can. Fruit do not know anything about searching another person's eyes. They know nothing about calling someone's name. Sometimes I am a single, perfect, burnished purple plum. [buy]

(photograph of Marilyn and Ulysses comes from r0b0god - thanks.)

The Hoof & the Heel - "Fireworks" [video, buy].
Tragically Hip - "Fireworks" [buy].
Animal Collective - - "Fireworks" [previously, buy].

Three albums, from three different years, and the best song on each is titled "Fireworks". In every case, "Fireworks" may be the greatest song that band has ever recorded. This is too improbable to be coincidence. There are two explanations - one, that artists tend to title their best songs "Fireworks"; two, that songs titled "Fireworks" tend to be artists' best songs. I side with the second conclusion. I say there is something about fireworks that lend fireworks to songs. Just as the fizz and bang make nights into celebrations, illuminate faces in inimitable ways, so do those two words, fire and works, stuck together, transform rough tracks into radiant songs, imbue little tunes with gunpowder and phosphor.

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Montrealers, take note - The extraordinary Rialto Theatre is reopening for concerts, beginning with a bash on June 9, led by the Luyas, one of my favourite acts in the city. Other acts include Hoof and the Heel (see above) and Avec Pas d'Casque. It will only cost an extraordinary $5. Tickets now in stores, and more info here.

Bill Withers - "Lovely Day". On days that go wrong, you just try to take every step like it's a good one. You will this bassline into the empty parking-lot, Bill Withers' doubled vocals into your weary inner monologue. With only mild irony, you murmur this chorus to the hospital-room floor. It was not a lovely day. But you're all still here, bruised & battered, and you can sing if you damn well please.

Travels - "Friends in Bands". A brilliant song, a brilliant sound, part Yo La Tengo, part Young Knives, part Low, with lyrics that gesture toward a feeling both familiar and hazy, like staring at your best friend through smoked glass. And of course there's the brilliance of how soon it ends, in just 2:36, leaving you wanting the rest. (You have to buy the rest.) I love the juxtaposition of that hot, cruddy electric guitar and the soft, low backing oooohs; I love the single tambourine clicks. It's the xx's minimalism and restraint, applied to different ends. [MySpace / pre-order - comes with instant download and Travels' last album too]

Steve Mason - "All Come Down". One of my favourite things about the Beta Band was the way that now and then they reminded me of Phil Collins. Most of this was Steve Mason's doing, with his Collinsian blend of wistfulness and bravado. On "All Come Down" he shows these same qualities, singing like a rising nobody, a humble champion. But whereas the Beta Band (or King Biscuit Time) were shambolic, "alternative", here everything is perfect, gauzy, pristine. Even the reverb sounds expensive. When I was 18 I wouldn't have liked it, but today it sounds basically magnificent. Pop producer Richard X has made a simple song into beautiful soft-rock, suffused with melancholy. Would that this song ended the prom. [buy]

(still-life painting source)

"NOAH AND THE SNOW", by Jeff Miller, originally appeared in the magazine Fish Piss in 2004. It has recently been republished as part of Ghost Pine: All Stories True, an anthology of Miller's zine work over the past decade-plus. Jeff is a friend, but I was smitten with this piece, completely, at its four last words, and I wanted to share it. More on Ghost Pine (and a song from Jeff) below.

"So I was walking down St. Laurent last night and I did something I don't usually do," Noah said.
     "What's that?"
     "Well, I guess I tried to pick a fight with somebody."
     "What?"
     "Well yeah, this big ape of a dude with a fancy leather jacket, Tommy Hilfiger jeans and gelled up hair was talking on a cell phone and as he was crossing the street he bumped into me."
     "Uh huh."
     "So I guess I said 'Why don't you go shove that cell phone up your ass.' We were walking at the same pace on either side of the street yelling insults back and forth for about five minutes, until he says to the person he's talking to, 'I'm going across the street to see what this motherfucker wants.'
     "So he comes across the street at me and says 'Why don't you tell my brother what you were calling me' and hands me the phone, but it's dead. There's no one on the other end. So I hand it back to him and he says into it, 'Yeah, this guy thinks he's funny but really he just has nice eyes.'"
     "Was he trying to hit on you?"
     "No. Then he asks me if I have any smokes, and I do because someone left these Japanese cigarettes at my house, but neither one of us has a light. So we start walking north again, next to each other but not really together, you know. Then we see this really angry kid, couldn't be older than fourteen, walking down the street punching the wall.
     "We ask him if he has a light, and he says 'I have fire for you, if you got a smoke for me.' So we're all standing around smoking Japanese cigarettes on the sidewalk together. And then it began to snow. The first snow of the year.
     "When he finished his butt the kid took off. But me and the cell phone guy stood and talked, only for a minute, but it was a real quality conversation. You know?"
     "I guess you should try to pick fights more often."
     "Yeah, I guess." Noah sipped his tea.

Okara - "Red Tide"

The song I chose is "Red Tide" by Okara from their first self-titled seven inch released in 1995. Okara were the first band I saw play at Ottawa hardcore venue 5 Arlington and they completely opened by mind to what music and art could be; engaging, mysterious, accomplished, and uncompromisingly unique. Ottawa hardcore was the soundtrack to the first years of my zine. - Jeff Miller

Sean again: I didn't read Ghost Pine, the zine Jeff Miller has maintained since the late 90s. That is, I've only ever read one issue - a small square pamphlet I picked up last year. But now I have read Ghost Pine: All Stories True, the beautiful book newly issued by Invisible Publishing (buy). This anthology collects dozens and dozens of stories like the one above, short short short, arranged for skip and jump, that ratatat off the page. It is compulsive reading - these bittersweet morsels, disconnected from time. Bike rides, love affairs, road-trips, high-school triumphs. Like all the best personal writing, it is at once private and universal. I love that Miller has left in some of the earliest stuff: tales coloured by his youth, as clumsily honest as the things that dwell in this site's archives. I love how he writes about Montreal, evangelizing as only an emigre can. (Like me, Miller moved from Ottawa at the beginning of the 21st century.) I love too how he writes about my hometown - painting a different city than the one I knew.

I love his descriptions of the tiny victories and defeats that shape & make us, but that go unwritten, and I love the way names flit in and out of his life, the same way the names of my life have. I love the twists of Jeff's dialogue, too; the way things end. -- And so, again, I say: buy it, this fumbling and truthful folio. And also visit his website.