"Replaying Great Songs: 2011" This is a collection of songs that I listened to many times during 2011. Some are new, some are new discoveries, and some are songs from my past that I rediscovered. Below is the complete track list of this compilation along with the reasons why I listened to each track so much. Thanks to social media, a lot of friends introduced me to some great stuff without even knowing it. To hear it for yourself, just click the link below to download the whole album! (about 260MB as a zip file, songs are AAC files)

		Disc 1
	1	"Nightcall"	Kavinsky & Lovefoxxx	This is the song that opens the movie "Drive" and it is awesome. I doubt I would have cared for this track nearly as much if it weren't featured on such a great soundtrack to my favorite movie of 2011.
	2	"Egyptic"	Beats Antique	I think this album came out in 2010, but I didn't get it until 2011. This is the opening track and I couldn't get enough of it. The whole album is good, but this one if my favorite.
	3	"Diet"	Au Pairs	I had never heard of Au Pairs until I saw a Swiss film in January that featured several of their songs. Really good stuff. I had to choose one track for this compilation so I think this is my favorite.
	4	"The Robots"	Kraftwerk	I played this song for Ronin the Robot and he later requested it several more times. Though Kraftwerk isn't new to me, I rediscovered that the album that features this track, The Man Machine, is an incredible album as a whole. Easily one of the best albums ever.
	5	"Battling Go-Go Yubari In Downtown L.A."	edIT	One of my favorite examples of glitch-hop, this track kicks ass. Sure, it's a little cheesy, but it's awesome. I heard this album for the first time in 2011 and it's quite a departure from edIT's previous album, much more giddy and less melancholy. Good times were had by all.
	6	"Sway"	Story Of The Sea	Story Of The Sea is a local band from Minneapolis that I heard of when I met Adam Prince who I work with. This is Adam's band and this is my favorite song.
	7	"End Of Line (Photek Remix)"	Daft Punk	I loved Daft Punk's "Tron: Legacy" soundtrack and this is from the "Tron: Legacy Reconfigured" remix album from early in 2011. This was my favorite track from the original soundtrack and Photek does some cool tweaking to make something new out of it.
	8	"Gimme All Your Lovin'"	Whiskey Shivers	I somehow stumbled upon this video and was fascinated by it. The video is really fun and this song is amazingly catchy.
	9	"Always On My Mind"	Akira Yamaoka	This is from the soundtrack to the Wii game "Silent Hill: Shattered Memories". All of the Silent Hill soundtracks by Yamaoka are great, but by chance this track popped up on my iPod then I wanted to hear it again and again. It's a great, moody cover of a classic song that already has a lot of covers.
	10	"King Night"	Salem	I read a brief blurb in Rolling Stone about how the video for this song made an 18-wheeler driving through the night seem incredibly ominous and creepy. I had to see it, and they were right. This is my first exposure to the music genre of witch house (there's a new genre born every day), but whatever the hell defines the genre is just different enough to be interesting.
	11	"I Know"	David Lynch	I had heard, in the months leading up the to release of David Lynch's debut album, that Lynch was going to be trying his hand at creating music. There was a lot of speculation as to what the music would sound like. This is my favorite track from "Crazy Clown Time", but the whole album is exactly what you'd expect David Lynch to create if you had the power to predict what David Lynch was going to create.
	12	"Sponsored By Destiny"	Slagsmålsklubben	I stumbled across this video at random (which itself is an homage to another video for "Remind Me" by Röyksopp). It's obviously not the official video for the song, but the video was fun and the song was way too catchy to ignore. This was the first time I'd heard Slagsmålsklubben, but I haven't found any of their other songs that I like as much as this one.
	13	"Say Shhh"	Atmosphere	I had heard of Atmosphere several times from different friends, but didn't start really listening to their music until I put a couple albums on my iPod and good tracks kept popping up at random. Suffice it to say, they have a lot of good songs. Even though it seems that it's mostly friends from New Mexico that told me about Atmosphere, the band is from Minneapolis. This is a hidden track at the end of the album "Seven's Travels" and it's especially entertaining to me after living the last year or so in Minnesota.
	14	"Harvester Of Sorrow"	Metallica	I used to love Metallica in the 80's, but 90's Metallica turned me off, to say the least. The band that Metallica became made me ignore pretty much all the songs I used to love. Ronin's frequent requests for "guitar music" made me search for more old metal songs to play for him. This made me get out "...And Justice For All" and play it again. I had totally forgotten that the album is really good. Besides the songs I never really forgot, the deeper tracks like this one still kick ass.
	15	"Lovely Day"	Bill Withers	Though I saw the movie in 2010, I got the soundtrack to "127 Hours" in 2011. Because of the excellent use of this classic song in the movie it still makes me thirsty when I hear it. I never connected with any Bill Withers songs before seeing the movie, but now the happiness of this song is just infectious.
		Disc 2
	1	"Sail"	AWOLNATION	Howard Semones did a good amount of raving about this band and this album. Though none of the other tracks I heard interested me much, I couldn't get enough of this one.
	2	"Vamp"	Trentemøller	This album, "The Last Resort", came out in 2006 and I had previously heard of it's reputation of being heralded by electronic music critics as being some kind of special awesome. I assumed it to be some kind of album that a club DJ puts on when he's feeling lazy. When I finally heard it, I was amazed to find how diverse the album is with a lot of tracks that are too minimal or understated for play in a club. No one track could exemplify the album as a whole, but this one is great even on its own. Do yourself a favor and listen to the rest sometime.
	3	"Hell Broke Luce"	Tom Waits	The newest Tom Waits album, "Bad As Me", is his first in many years but one of his best. This track is DAMN good.
	4	"Some Children"	Holy Ghost!	Howard Semones pointed out a short animation to part of this song which is where I first heard it. Also, I work almost every day with Josh Lannan who, for some reason, often references the smooth singing of Michael McDonald making me take note any time I hear his voice now. Between the Michael McDonald singing and the cool animation, it made me take notice of this song. Oh, and it's awesome.
	5	"The Gears"	Dethklok	Again, Ronin's requests for "guitar music" got me to playing a lot of Dethklok for him. Even though the band itself seems like a simple novelty from a really funny TV show, the second Dethklok album (in particular) is some really great metal. This was my favorite.
	6	"Acid For Nothing"	1200 Micrograms	This is another track I stumbled across because of a silly video on You Tube. It's very cheesy, but very fun. Obviously it gets a lot of its awesome appeal from its gratuitous sampling of one of my favorite songs from the 80's. If I was a club DJ, you'd probably have to hear this song often.
	7	"Rome"	Yeasayer	Marty Crandall pointed out a different track from this same album, "Odd Blood", when it came out in 2010. I instantly loved that song, but it wasn't until 2011 that I realized that every other track on "Odd Blood" is amazing, too. It was hard to pick just one.
	8	"Knight Rider & The Forty Thieves"	Gabber Nullification Project	I met Kenney Hanzely in 2011 who then introduced me to his band, GNP. Can you tell that Kenney and his bandmates like old Nintendo games? This is my favorite GNP song.
	9	"Immigrant Song"	Karen O, Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross	From the debut of the trailer for David Fincher's "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo", I knew to expect good things from the movie and its soundtrack. How could a combination of so many things I like (Nine Inch Nails, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Led Zeppelin, David Fincher movies, Swedish movies, hot gothy chicks) be anything less than awesome?!
	10	"First of the Year (Equinox)"	Skrillex	You could say that dubstep really blew up in 2011. Skrillex is pretty uneven, but this song is one of the best examples of the genre. But, more importanly, this was probably my favorite music video of the year. If you were around me for more than 10 minutes in 2011, I probably made you watch it.
	11	"Crystalline"	Björk	This was the first single from Björk's new album, "Biophilia". I loved the song when I first heard it, but even better is that she made yet another video with Michel Gondry.
	12	"This Is the Remix"	Girl Talk	I had heard Girl Talk before, but hadn't heard the album "All Day" until January of 2011. I think it's easily his best album of totally awesome mashups. Again, it was hard to find just one track, but most especially with this album since it plays like one hour-long party mix.
	13	"Sofi Needs A Ladder"	Deadmau5	I had heard of Deadmau5 before and got the idea he made some ho-hum dubstep. When I finally listened to this album, "4x4=12", it was hard to turn off. Very fun stuff.
	14	"The March Of The Varangian Guard"	Turisas	Viking metal at its best! You can't deny the cheesy awesomeness. Okay, maybe you can, but I can't. Just one example from the new Turisas album from 2011.
	15	"The Proposition #1"	Nick Cave & Warren Ellis	In 2011, I FINALLY saw the movie "The Proposition". I think it was one of the first things I put on my Netflix queue years ago and it took this long to get around to it. Not only is it a great, GREAT movie, the score is absolutely indispensable. Easily one of my favorite movie soundtracks.