It’s that time of year again where every magazine, newspaper, weblogger, and opinionated man-about-town weighs in with their best of 2005 lists. I don’t have anything against such retrospection, but once you’ve read one, you’ve probably read them all. I mean unless it’s something incredibly unusual like Top Ten Songs Playing While My Neighbour Had Furtive, Ultimately Unsatisfying Sex With His Girlfriend or Top Six Actors Who Make Me Think Of Tapioca chances are it’s all stuff you’ve seem already.

My favourite songs of 2005 aren’t relegated to just albums that were released this year (though most of them were). These are just songs that struck a nerve, got stuck in my ear, had me quaking in my dancing shoes, or stabbed me in my wimpy little heart and made me bleed a little.

Here’s the list:

1. John Cale - A Child’s Christmas in Wales (1919)
2. Broken Social Scene - 7/4 (Shoreline) (Broken Social Scene)
3. Novillero - The Hypothesist (Aim Right for the Holes in Their Lives)
4. A Girl Called Eddy - The Long Goodbye (A Girl Called Eddy)
5. The National - All the Wine (Alligator)
6. Rogue Wave - California (Descended Like Vultures)
7. Sufjan Stevens - Casimir Pulaski Day (Illinois)
8. Josh Rouse - Streetlights (Nashville)
9. Sigur Rós - Hoppípolla (Takk)
10. The Decemberists - We Both Go Down Together (Picaresque)
11. Spoon - The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentin (Gimme Fiction)
12. Pernice Brothers - Amazing Glow (Discover A Lovelier You)
13. Calexico / Iron & Wine - He Lays in the Reins (In The Reins)
14. Howie Beck - Alice (Howie Beck)
15. The Cardigans - I Need Some Fine Wine (and You Need to be Nicer) (Super Extra Gravity)
16. The Go! Team - Junior Kickstart (Thunder Lightning Strike)
17. The Quantic Soul Orchestra - Pushin’ On (Featuring Alice Russell) (Pushin On)
18. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Nature Boy (Abbatoir Blues)
19. Stars - Ageless Beauty (Set Yourself on Fire)
20. Archer Prewitt - O, Ky (Wilderness)
21. Max Richter - Organum (The Blue Notebooks)

And as a special gift to you all, here’s my first BeatnikPad radio mix featuring these songs. It’s 80 minutes of pure love and it’s my thanks to you for visiting, commenting, emailing, and generally being swell human beings. I’ll probably leave this up for a few weeks as the bandwidth usage might get a bit nutty (it’s 110mbs, after all), but please download it, enjoy, and let me know what you think.

Over the next week I’m going to start going into more detail on why I chose each of these songs. Hopefully it’ll be interesting enough for you to come back, visit, and add your own favourite tracks of 2005.

(Update: Part one is now up.)

Happy holidays to everyone!