Milk Teddy - "Come Around". 36-year-old Murray Schelm, MFA, sat in his panelled office, reading students' art school applications. A boy from Morocco who makes sculptures out of cocktail gherkins. A girl from Carolina who swallows paint and vomits it onto canvases. An old man from Timmins, ON, whose performance art consists of swallowing wedding rings. Murray yawned. He brushed muffin-crumbs off the next spiral-bound manuscript. NEW WAVE, read the title page, by R.E. Dudamel. Dudamel's thesis opened with a 50-page essay laying out the pretext, context and subtext of their work. Experiments in the imaginary, Murray read. Invented nostalgia within the jubilant absurd. Murray dozingly scanned the pages. More words began to catch his eye: The Raincoats. Hawaii. Surfboard. "Wait, wait, wait," Murray said, out loud. He leaned into the text. While the machinists worked on my 'mass surfboard' schematic, I began recruiting musicians from among the peninsula's surfers. Murray turned the page. 'Shark' promised that the only thing better than his Morrissey impression was his facility for 'catching waves' at the turn. "But it can't be serious, they didn't--" Murray said, flipping pages, but there, past the photocopied blueprints and pencil-sketches, the photographs begans. Photographs of men and women in swimsuits, crowded together, holding electric guitars, on a bizarre elongated surfboard. A drummer in a wetsuit. A sopping rock'n'roll band on a sunny raft. The man in front, biceps bulging, dripping forelock, was a dead ringer for Morrissey. Beside him tottered a woman who unerringly recalled Johnny Marr. A tall bro held a harmonica between his lips. There were photographs of the band at dawn, at dusk, on cresting waves under stormy skies. They had flown to Cali, to the Bahamas, to Miami's Art Basel. Dudamel's surfin' Smiths, pretexted and contexted and subtexted. Murray flipped and flipped and flipped. He was imagining this band like a clear fuzzy new old Polaroid memory. He was looking for a URL, a bandcamp or soundcloud, somewhere to hear the songs. "Who is R.E. Dudamel?" he wondered, "a man or a woman? A kid or a geezer?" He punched the name into Google. R.E. Dudamel was from Lufa, Minnesota. R.E. Dudamel was a little-known automotive corporation. R.E. Dudamel was a publicly-traded company. R.E. Dudamel was looking for investors. [buy this terrific record / thanks so much andy]

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Again, I'm soliciting songs for my annual Best Songs of the Year list. What were the best things you heard? Please send me mp3s or links to bundles of mp3s, the very best things, any genre at all, from pop to fizz, rap to folk, jazz to pop. But uh please do a quick search on Said the Gramophone to make sure I haven't written about something from that album already. Thank you so much! I rely on your help!