The Two Zeros: The Best Album of 2001 - Simple Things

"Nothing is real." - Zero 7, In the Waiting Line (Dorfmeister con Madrid de los Austrias Dub)

I'm going to spend much more time talking about Zero 7 (Spoiler Alert! They are likely to be my favorite artists of the Aughties) and Simple Things gets this honor by virtue of this being the first time they came onto my radar. 2001 was before I was blogging, before I followed blogs, before I was on napster and limewire, before I stopped listening to much terrestrial radio. I still made weekly trips to the record store (Tower and Second Spin) and I depended heavily on friends, magazines, and KCRW to tell me what I should put in my headphones.

Simple Things landed on my work desk courtesy of Wilson Yau, a Music Supervisor at BMP. I was the Web Guy for The Real World and Road Rules and a bunch of other stuff and, if I'm not mistaken, Destiny (or maybe it was Distractions) was used in a The Real World episode and we were going to promote it on the site. Wilson was excited about this band. It's one of the things I loved about that job. Music was a big part of it and our music team was passionate about it. So, I popped the disc in my computer, turn my speakers up so my interns could hear and fell in love--with the music and with one featured singer in particular.

But more on that later.

2001 was a great year for music. Aaliyah's Aaliyah (which I've listened to considerably this year); Björk's Vespertine (which battles with Debut as my favorite album of hers); Kelis's never-domestically-released Wanderland (which is still her best album and one that most people haven't heard); De La Soul's AOI: Bionix, Fantastic Plastic Machine's Beautiful, Charles Webster's Born on the 24th of July; Koop's Waltz for Koop; Jay Dee's Welcome 2 Detroit are just some of the spectacular albums to come out that year. Looking at this list, I'm seeing where the seeds of just about all my music listening habits over the course of the decade were planted.

None more than Zero 7's Simple Things. No sense in distracting myself from that truth.