Stephen King’s Entertainment Weekly column gives the horror master a place to unleash his cultural musings, which run the gamut from calling TV a wasteland (“all is not LOST“!) to calling for Jon Stewart to head up a US Department of Fun. It follows that EW also provides King safe harbor to pontificate on the year in music, which is fair enough given how masterfully Christine seduced Arnie with choice music selections, and how much ink King gave over to Roland’s fascination with the “Hey Jude” jukebox in The Dark Towers (yep, King factored into our adolescence just a little). But for a man profferring his expertise on the new sounds of the day, Stephen’s musical tastes seem to have ossified some. He writes in the 12/7 issue of EW (via MSNBC), “In truth, your Uncle Stevie was disappointed with this year’s new music, very disappointed indeed, and his year-end list reflects that. I could only find seven albums I wanted to mention…” Only seven albums worth speaking of! Well that’s OK, suppose it’s better and more paper-saving than rattling off an all-inclusive annotated list of 101 or whatever. Economical. Cool. Let’s have ‘em:

07 Southern Culture On The Skids – Countrypolitan Favorites
06 John Fogerty – Revival
05 Ozzy Osbourne – Black Rain
04 Lyle Lovett And His Large Band – It’s Not Big It’s Large
03 Mika – Life In Cartoon Motion
02 Wilco – Sky Blue Sky
01 Steve Earle – Washington Square Serenade

Fogerty, Lovett, Steve Earle, Ozzy. Ozzy? King calls Black Rain the “finest heavy metal record of the year; a true speaker-buster.” Brandon, you need to YouSend him a copy of that Watain. Yes Stephen if these are the only records worth mentioning than this hasn’t been a good year for music — or really, your listening of it. But most puzzling of all, what happened to all that love for Easy Tiger? If Ryan’s “the best North American singer-songwriter since Neil Young,” and “there has never been a Ryan Adams record quite as strong and together as Easy Tiger” … you must not have a very high opinion of Neil Young.

UPDATE: Having got our paws on a physical copy of the issue, Stephen tries to make amends with some mitigating language (“Might I add, while I’m at it, that I’m haunted … by all the good stuff I may have missed?”) and acknowledges there were at least 11more singles than albums that he dug. So a shot at redemption! But then he had to include Avril and James Blunt on it. The list of his Top 18 tracks after the jump.

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Time to make that Easy Tiger press push, so DJ Reggie hooked up with the Apple folks to compile his ten-track celebrity playlist. And we’re hoping he listened to very little of it while writing Easy Tiger. Sonic Youth, Nas, Bonnie Raitt, all good. But there are two that have us singing the rescue blues…

The Fray – “How To Save A Life”
This is perfect songwriting and anybody that says otherwise is a jerk. Amazing hair-raising stuff. I would write songs like this if I had an attention span, but they would have more wizards, problems, and space references, etc…

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