Here are my 50 favourite songs of 2008: the ones I really, really, really, really like.

I decided not to include any artist twice, nor any songs from albums I heard last year.

I made similar lists in 2005, 2006 and 2007.

The best way to browse this list is to click the little arrow beside each song and then listen as you read. The things you like you can then download by right- or ctrl-clicking with your mouse. Please buy albums, singles and EPs by bands that you enjoy.

You can also download complete zips of the fifty songs here, via Mediafire.

See also: Dan's favourite albums of the year.

1. Antony & the Johnsons - "Another World" [buy]
   2008 did not have a "Hey Ya!", a "Crazy in Love", a "1 Thing" - a song so essential that it felt like a new page ought to be added to the calendar. (If anything, it had "Paper Planes".) So my favourite song of the year is not a dancefloor-filler, not an anthem; it is just my favourite. I don't know why "Another World" seems so essential to me, this December... Whether it's Antony's moth- and butterfly-wing voice, the piano like first snow. Whether it's a response to the Year of Obama. "Hope" and "Change" seem like true and important things, this year, things we crave and wish to put in our briefcases, but I sense how fragile they are, and how dreamed. Of course maybe it's just that this is a pretty, sad song. Maybe it's Antony's microphone, full of tears.
2. Lykke Li - "Dance Dance Dance" [buy]
   In February I wrote a premature valentine: Were you born in Sweden? Wait, what? A Portuguese mountaintop!? Was it cold? Sure, I'll hold on to it for you. What do you want me to do? Rattle it? And stamp my foot too? Are we recording a song? Who's that? That's a very large saxophone.
3. Rye Rye with MIA - "Tic Toc" [MySpace]
   There is no single component that makes this song sing. It is, yes, like a clock. Rye Rye slow-loping, MIA tick-tocking, Busy Signal hey-heying, zither-thing glittering, and all of us setting our time to its diamond-hard 6-jewel movement. (Previously.)
4. The Low Lows - "Modern Romance" [buy]
   There's no reason to put a cover-song so high on a list of the year's best except that the Low Lows' remaking of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is beautiful. Dan wrote about this song on New Year's Day. The Low Lows will shake me around in their cup, they'll keep me humble and working inside this sock-drawer winter apartment until something gives way, he wrote. I have to think that something gave way.
5. tUnE-YaRdS - "FIYA" [buy]
   The same way that someone might use every part of a deer, Montreal's Merrill Garbus uses every part of her ukulele. It's a toy and a weapon, a calendar and an engine. And she uses every part of her voice, too: the high part, the low part, the pretty part, the roar. It's four seasons in five minutes and too thrilling to call just lo-fi "pop". No -- this is "bang", it's "boom", it's "kablooey". (Previously.)
6. School of Seven Bells - "Half Asleep" [buy]
   Fly to Greenland in a twin-engine plane, your pockets filled with Jolly Ranchers and freshwater pearls. Set down on a flat of snow, like the back of some vast arctic hare. Leave the propeller going & dig. Put your back into it. Yes, the Northern Lights seethe, yes there's much to explore in Nuuk & Kangerlussuaq. But dig. After two long winters it's time to dig. The airplane's roaring beside you, the sky teeming above you, the sting of sweat in your eyes. But sooner or later you'll hit spring.

7. Carl Spidla - "Blackfly Rag" [MySpace]
   Too much to say about this track. "Blackfly Rag" is obviously one of the finest songs I've heard this year, and it's clearly the finest folk song. I mean here's just a dusty live recording of a guy with a guitar, mouthfuls of lyrics and a heart full of blackwing birds. Carl's not channelling Dylan so much as dream. He's planning a CD for next year.
8. Chairlift - "Bruises" [buy]
   A song whose beauty is in the singing - part "Close To Me", part yodel, part spring, part summer, part six-month anniversary. Pop music.
9. Baby Dee - "Safe Inside the Day (ft. Bonnie Prince Billy)" [buy]
   Eleven months ago I wrote, A song that is hurled with so much spirit that it could pin ... tomorrows to todays and wills to oughts. It's a manifesto and a prayer and an inflammatory writ ... the greatest utterance of the word "safe" that I've heard in my life. Dee's day will dim yours, cast yours into half-light and make you aspire to ... find a peace so gloriously hard-fought as this.
10. White Hinterland - "Vessels" [buy]
    "Vessels" is my favourite song on Phylactery Factory and I keep it in a small pouch attached to my belt. I use it when I am lost in a forest, trapped on a glacier, or longing for home. ... I use it when I'm not so sure about myself, and when there's not much light on the water. ... It's always seemed wrong, to me, speaking of "hope" unbordered. Better to speak of enough hope; to stop there. Well there is enough hope here for me.
11. Sister Suvi - "The Lot" [buy]
    People say: okay, Montreal, played out. You've indie-rocked yrself dry, right? Running on fumes? And then we say a lot of things back. We throw fruit; we whip bagels and lob pierogies; we have snowballs and ice-cream cones. We take you the fuck out, you mess with us. I could name a lot of bands, some of the reasons why this city keeps catching me by the throat. But tonight I will name just one: Sister Suvi. ... [Tune-Yards'] Merrill's got the big bad wolf in her gut, blow you down.
12. Kanye West - "Say You Will" [buy]
    His line about "your neck" is one of the creepy-crawliest this year, but still I'm mesmerised by this. "Say You Will" is the opening track on the new album by one of the biggest artists in the world. And its last three minutes are just empty synths, barren drum loop, silence. It's a stupid one-liner, calling 808s & Heartbreak Kanye's Nebraska; but the loneliness here, the desolation, is just as potent as any 4-track-slinging singer-songwriter. Heartbreak has rarely filled so many Walmart shelves.
13. Vampire Weekend - "Ottoman" [buy]
    Dan may not agree, but I love Vampire Weekend. I loved it last year, too, and so none of its tracks festoon this list. Happily, Vampire Weekend released a new one, and it's no less sweet; chamber pop with secret-weapon drums, a "Peter Gabriel" call-back, as wistful a fade-out as any I've heard.
14. Frightened Rabbit - "Keep Yourself Warm" [buy]
    Still think Scott Hutchison's lyrics are turgid, but Frightened Rabbit nonetheless turn it into one of the year's best rock songs - desperate, melancholy, awesome. Scotsmen finding the middle ground between the Constantines and the Foo Fighters.
15. Beyoncé - "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)" [buy]
    A song with a thousand handclaps and a hundred bird-coo synth-squiggles. Oh, and some 8-carat "Whoa-oh oh oh oh ohh oh oh ohh oh oh oh." Never have I so wished to be a single lady. (As Tyler writes: It's fabulously easy, you just need to sing all the best notes in the best way.)
16. Fleet Foxes - "White Winter Hymnal" [buy]
    Not a fan of the album, but still love this song as a warm keep-cosy ski-lodge thing, as a beautiful sleigh-ride of a song, a mulberry jingle-bell snowflake of a song. In other words, I like it quite a bit.
17. Y'all is Fantasy Island - "With Handclaps" [buy]
    This song could be called "Mostly Without Handclaps", or "With Guitarline". The handclaps wait almost the entire song to appear, and it's the guitar-line that marks your brain, colours your day, sends you humming a scale to yourself while you wait in line at the fruit-stand. There are handclaps though, and a song worthy of carrying them.
18. The Tough Alliance - "Taken Too Young" (a remix of Taken By Trees' "Too Young") [buy other things]
    The Tough Alliance rediscover "Too Young", by Victoria Bergsmann's Taken By Trees project (& which I wrote about last July). They make it one of the songs of the year. And when I say rediscover I mean they found it in among diamonds, saffron and milkweed pods; in with childhood, sex and distant waters; in with the way you feel, your eyes laying on hers, when all that's green in you curls.
19. Forest Fire - "Slow Motion" [buy]
    I wrote a story about this song in July. It's a sort-of folk-song. "Sort-of" because there it is filled with slams, bangs, booms and howls; like a man falling down a lighthouse stairwell.
20. Adam & the Amethysts - "Bumble Bee" [buy/MySpace]
    Civil and shaking, Dan wrote. It's true. Anchored by drummer-boy snare and a battered guitar riff, "Bumble Bee" pretends everything's cool as cuke, locked up in old diaries. But there under it all - under the friendly fanfare, the slacker doo d'doo, - there's something trembling, buzzing, shaking with black-&-ochre resolve.
21. Elbow - "Starlings" [buy]
    FANFARE.
22. Karl Blau - "Before Telling Dragons" [buy]
    Karl Blau's Nature's Got Away is a weird album, with teeth and feathers and amplifiers. Bits of Harry Nilsson, the Zombies, Spoon, Smog. "Before Telling Dragons" is a forest anthem, recorded in a basement. Girl-group drums buried six feet under and ... words of wisdom from a man who has eaten seventeen wild, unidentified red berries.
23. Styx Tyger - "String Strikes" [MySpace]
    A pop-song from Sweden - but whereas usually that means shyness and shimmy, here it's gold, glitter, croon, and a copy of the Cure's Disintegration. (Previously.)
24. Mount Eerie with Julie Doiron and Fred Squire - "Voice in Headphones" [buy]
    This is my favourite song from Lost Wisdom, probably my favourite album of the year. It is Phil Elverum singing with Julie Doiron, one of my favourite singers. That is a lot of favourites, all together. "Voice in Headphones" is about how recorded music - particularly a song called "Undo", by Bjork, - makes Mount Eerie cry. Which is, all snarkiness aside, a good question. (Previously.)
25. Shearwater - "Leviathan, Bound" [buy]
    Like when you're at your piano, scared, and every key turns to grey. Jonathan Meiburg sings about apocalypse, hard and loud, joined by dulcimer, strings and glockenspiel.
26. Withered Hand - "New Dawn" [buy]
    You know how some people, especially old-fashioned people, hang their carpets on clotheslines and then beat all the dust out of them? Or how some people knock their snowy boots against the side of the car before getting in? Here's Edinburgh's Withered Hand using mandolin, guitar, cello and his voice to shake all the dust from him, all the stray feelings, all the loose longings; so that at end of song he'll be just a body and the light in his eyes.
27. Ponytail - "Beg Waves" [buy]
    Ponytail get it exactly right in the opening track to Ice Cream Spiritual: electrically live and still marvellously composed, like a Duke Ellington suite for hoarse throats, scraped knees, joy. It's The Fall, not Deerhoof, I hear clearest in their song - but with fewer regrets, fewer chips-on-shoulder ... beautiful and squalid.
28. Final Fantasy - "Blue Imelda" [buy]
    Final Fantasy released two albums this year. One was recorded at a CBC studio, and one - from which this song is taken, - was recorded at a forest in the fictional country of Spectrum. It was recorded in the 14th century. If this sounds far-fetched, you are not a student of history. "Blue Imelda" has all the hallmarks of Spectrum ca. 1360 - steel drums, tuba blasts, a melancholy to puff seafaring sails.
29. Ne-Yo - "Mad" [buy]
    It's only in my twenties that I came to appreciate the slow-jam - the perfect catchy yes yes yes r&b form, the perfect thing for slow-dances and lip-sync and romantic montages. Though this one I mostly listen to as I tramp in the snow on the way to get some work done. (thank-you s1utsky)
30. Meursault - "The Furnace" [buy]
    BREAKING NEWS: CYBERMAN 3000-D HAD HIS HEART BROKEN THIS WEEKEND. HAS GONE ON RAMPAGE THROUGH COUNTRYSIDE. VALLEYS OF CLOVER BEING BURNED BY CYBERMAN 3000-D'S ROCKET-BOOTS. BARNS SMASHED APART AND LEFT SMOULDERING. TWO SHEPHERDS DEAD. DOGS HOWLING. CYBERMAN 3000-D HAS BEFRIENDED A SWALLOW WHOM HE IS CARRYING ON HIS SHOULDER-MOUNTED ELECTRO-BAZOOKA.
31. Sigur Rós - "Gobbledigook" [buy]
    A pity the Sigur Rós-meets-Animal Collective vibe didn't carry over to the rest of the album, but this is still great. Breathless dashing flashing dancing strum coo dive jump dive jump jump jump go go nightfall fire and dawn.
32. Lord Dog Bird - "The Gift of Song in the Lion's Den" [buy]
    Here's a song for the day the river turned to wine, the city turned to chalk, your heart turned to tin. The same way that a lantern reminds me of a campfire, this reminds me of early Wolf Parade. And from a woefully ignored album!
33. François Virot - "Say Fiesta" [buy]
    François Virot's songs are both simple and crooked - like gnarled hooks you can hang your coat on. The way he sings radio on "Say Fiesta" - well it's silly, endearing and French but it lets the song's emotional oomph come out of nowhere, like an alleycat with violets in its mouth.
34. John Maus - "Do Your Best" [buy]
    You swing through the hills with headlights silver, alone & the forests darkly. Dreams of stags and music-boxes. Down below are a thousand black Mercedes, men with watches, women in sequin dresses. A satellite passes over your head. The motels lie docile as you pass them, singing in low voices, trying to make sure you're ok.
35. Kasai Allstars - "Quick as White" [buy]
    Thumb-pianos like light in lamps; bells, sticks, shakes, slips, a hundred kinds of glimmers. Though the Kasai Allstars are from Kinshasa, Congo, and this is the third in Crammed's Congotronics series, the Kasai Allstars are not some mere Konono no. 2. They are sorcerers, wonder-workers, enchanters pulling hopes from throats and making me wonder, here in Montreal sun, if maybe one day I will touch a magic sword.
36. The Dodos - "Fools" [buy]
    This is what the Dodos do: strum hard at acoustic guitars, beat methodically at drumkits. But a little bit of horns, a little bit of shouting - they go a long way. Before you know it, you've signed on the dotted line.
37. Weezer - "Pork and Beans" [buy]
    It doesn't matter that I am tired of Weezer, nor that Weezer (2008) is a piece of ess. It doesn't matter that "Pork and Beans"' lyrics are effing stultifying. What matters is that, well, [bass riff] this song is dumbly dee oh pee ee.
38. Kleerup - "Until We Bleed (ft. Lykke Li)" [buy]
    Part dance track, part pop song; a soundtrack for dial-tone, brrrrrrr, Hello?, click. (Previously.)
39. Lil' Wayne - "Mrs Officer (ft. Bobby Valentino" [buy]
    It's not so much Lil' Wayne's rhymes, nor even the Wee-oo-wee-oo-wee, that do it. It's the spectacular supple sing of his raps, the way he does whatever the hell he wants with his voice, whatever as old leather. (thanks, liz.)
40. We/Or/Me - "Tell Sarah" [buy]
    This is a very careful song. "Tell Sarah" glows, just of itself, like fireflies in a jar.
41. Pretend You're Happy - "The Other Side of the Earth" [buy]
    One of the last additions to this list - sprawling, messy and brilliant, like Handel's Requiem rearranged for lo-fi drums, whining violins, bullshit and whistles. Takes decades of practice to fuck-up this good. (Previously.)
42. Esau Mwamwaya & Radioclit - "Dinosaur on the Ark (ft. Ben Brewer)" [free album download]
    Mwamwaya is everything I used to love about "World Music", before my world got shaken by a thousand other sounds, before I learned that "World Music" is a fucking stupid term. But that's just to say he sounds eminent and good and warm, not unlike Phil Collins, the sort of man I would follow into a desert arena. Plus: it's the best song this year to feature MIA's fiancé! (Previously.)
43. Beck - "Walls" [buy]
    Perhaps the best production of Danger Mouse's life, and one of the finest Beck tracks in years, this song has several interesting bits: Beck's half-a-melody, the drums that clatter like collapsing drywall, the way Cat Power's backing vocals have been sucked as thin as cassette-tape.
44. Jib Kidder - "Windowdipper" [buy]
    Cyber-booty baby-crunk glimmer-bump ghetto-DOS. And genius. (Previously, in short story form.)
45. ((Sounder)) - "Daily I Will Calculate the Distance" [buy]
    Another hardly-muttered-about band made one of the best indie rock albums of the year. It's ambitious, dusty, rumblingly rock - but not an album of singles. "Daily I Will Calculate the Distance" is as close as ((Sounder)) come. Brazen, yearning, crack-lipped, welcome.
46. Ratatat - "Mirando" [buy]
    No idea what this song is for. It's not for dancing, moshing, kissing or meditating. It's not even for riding the bus. Maybe if you have a piano-playing robot to assemble, this is the splendid, somersaulting ticket. I envy you.
47. Young Coyotes - "Momentary Drowning" [MySpace]
    A song that's yell and thump but is still brilliantly slow - relaxed as it booms, as it dings and claps and bobs. Young Coyotes play this music like they've figured it out, like they've solved it.
48. Hologram - "Ghosties" [buy other things]
    Said the Gramophone loves this burgeoning band. One day Hologram are going to be a gigantic baby-blue chrysanthemum and everyone is going to stick their nose in, but in the meantime here we are with a ceramic chrysanthemum pinned to our lapels, the image of what we're dreaming, and we listen to the clanging, beautiful, clamoured song called "Ghosties", and we lug a busted amp waiting for a lover to hand it to.
49. Helvetia - "Old New Bicycle" [buy]
    A ramshackle conversation between drumkit and electric guitar. Sure, vocals chime in at some point - slurring and murmurs, - but it's the guitar + drums that matter. They're the ones that'll figure this shit out, that'll solve all the ills that ail ya. (Previously.)
50. Johnny Foreigner - "Cranes And Cranes And Cranes And Cranes" [buy]
    it'ssort of like Los Campesinos meets Avril Lavigne, but i mean tht in a totally gd way. call+answer+yells, but bttr dynamics, bttr places to sing alng, like instd of thnkng of witty twee songtitls they focusd on BEING AWSOME.

Finally - 50 is an arbitrary cut-off. There were way more great tracks in 2008. Said the Gramophone has written about 500 of them over the course of this year. If you're new to the site, please come again (or subscribe)! We update every weekday, writing about the songs we love. Thanks for reading.