It is my pleasure to today wish you a Happy 2007, a year of dazzle, razzle and tender kindnesses, and to do so by at last - at last! - sharing one of my favourite discoveries of 2006. Her name is Basia Bulat.

Basia is a singer-songwriter from London, Ontario, dwelling in Toronto, who recorded Oh My Darling with my friend Howard Bilerman at the Hotel2Tango in Montreal. A studio for Silver Mt Zions and Arcade Fires, home suddenly to her charging pop-folk. Rough Trade has snapped up her album for release outside North America, but she is still (bafflingly) in search of a label in Canada/USA.

A couple of months ago I voted on the most exciting Canadian acts of 2006, and Basia was #3 on my ballot, just behind Swan Lake and Destroyer. I wrote: "songs that clatter with all the clatter clatter clatter of a fine set of drums. And a voice like the moon, that time." And this is true. The moon, that time. (You know the time.) It's a voice that opens wide, wide, wide, something with tinges of Joni Mitchell, Leslie Feist or even Amália Rodrigues, and yet so unhidden in comparison - a voice that is above all exciting to listen to, with so much volleying through it. Like sticking your head into the thick of fireworks, of northern lights, feelings flashing full in your face.

And it's a pretty music, catchy and hot; and it's been sustaining me for months. And I guarantee that one of the songs below will be in my Best Songs of 2007.

Basia Bulat - "Snakes and Ladders". One of my favourite things about this album is the way the drums are played on songs like this. They hurtle at double-speed, ratatat-tat, chasing the singer breathless. So many female songwriters take-it-always-easy, languishing in slow piano chords and then the occasional strident bit. Here it's like the band (Basia, drums, strings) are throwing themselves down a hill, feet scarcely keeping up with their feelings, this close to tumbling head-over-heels into something. And indeed so it is: "It's the way we come undone / what a perfect accident / oh we danced around them all / like we didn't even notice / oh / at the way we'd come undone."

Basia Bulat - "The Pilgriming Vine". One of the last songs recorded in these sessions, and I like to imagine the musicians sitting there despondent, nothing quite catching, Christmas lights twinkling, when in through the door troops a marching band - bass-drum, cymbal, flute, string section, a guy with a piano balanced on his open palm. And suddenly they know exactly where the song's headed, where it ought to be headed, the path that leads from the girl and her acoustic guitar, hopes in hand, to the moment at 2:55 when with her voice doubled-up we hear every trembling angle of what she's (we're all) waiting for: "Tell me I'm always your Only," she sings. Down by the maypole. If you go.

(My suggestion to you, dear readers, on this January 1st: do go.)

[Basia Bulat's MySpace (replete with Strokes cover) is here, her homepage is here. Her album is due in March in the UK but she still seeks a label elsewhere. She plays The Drake Hotel in Toronto this Thursday, the day before my birthday.]

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The final version of Herman Dune's "I Wish That I Could See You Soon" music video is now online. All sorts of things are invisible! I think I liked it better with goofy green men, though.