SONGS OF THE YEAR: "Don't Call Them Twinkies" by The Baseball Project

Our Top 21 Albums issue came out Dec. 22, but that doesn't come close to telling you what 2011 sounded like. To help find the devil in the details, we've asked City Paper's critics, friends and family to name some of their favorite songs - be they secret gems on terrible albums, sleeper tracks you missed, huge pop songs that need defending, or just plain good songs everybody already knows and loves. (Ignore the video, this is about the audio.)

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SONGS OF THE YEAR: “Don’t Call Them Twinkies” by The Baseball Project

POSTED: Thursday, December 29, 2011, 9:11 AM

Filed Under: Music Song

Our Top 21 Albums issue came out Dec. 22, but that doesn’t come close to telling you what 2011 sounded like. To help find the devil in the details, we’ve asked City Paper’s critics, friends and family to name some of their favorite songs — be they secret gems on terrible albums, sleeper tracks you missed, huge pop songs that need defending, or just plain good songs everybody already knows and loves. (Ignore the video, this is about the audio.)

It makes no sense that the song that rocked me the hardest this year was Craig Finn’s ode to the Minnesota Twins, which appears on The Baseball Project’s High and Inside. “These are grown men,” Finn pleads. That’s debatable. “These are heroes.” They most certainly are not. “Please don’t call them Twinkies.” Why would I call them anything at all? I stopped caring about baseball when I was 6, right about when I learned the Phillies wouldn’t let a girl be their third baseman. I’ve never been to Minneapolis, and I don’t have much use for Finn’s work with The Hold Steady. But Steve Wynn’s guitar solo is short and sharp, Minnesota native Linda Pitmon’s drumming is even more passionate than usual, and I appreciate the nerdery that goes into writing a couplet like “Oliva hit the singles and Harmon hit the homers / Mudcat Grant won 20 games and they didn’t play in a dome yet.” Aw, well, at least it’s not about basketball.

Posted by M.J. Fine @ 9:11 AM Permalink | Post a comment

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