But what band?

Carbon Leaf.

Carbon Leaf, without a doubt, is the finest band to come out of Virginia. I know that’s a bold statement to some, but honestly it’s just true. The Richmond-native quintet have been blending rock, folk, country, and Celtic music together for close to twenty years and with about ten studio releases & two live albums, their body of work largely speaks for itself. For some reason that might plague me to my death though, the band has never truly made it into the mainstream consciousness of music. Some bands never just hit it, but Carbon Leaf just might be the strangest. It’s not like they didn’t get close: they were on the cusp over a decade ago with an American Music Award & performance that marked them the first ever unsigned band to play on national television. They don’t let it slow them down and it’s not like Carbon Leaf doesn’t have its share of fans. With their amazing catalog, indescribable live shows, constant touring, and down-to-Earth appeal, the band pretty much cultivates a following wherever they head. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever been to a concert where I didn’t hear at least five people talking about how they knew nothing of the band beforehand and are now life-long fans. With the world filling up with new & exciting bands every day, I can still say without a doubt that Carbon Leaf is the best & most enjoyable band hovering under the radar. The finest band the average Joe walking down the street has never heard of. Hopefully with this countdown, you’ll be able to see that as well.

Starting a few months ago, I started getting in contact with fans of their Facebook fans and regulars of their message board to drum up interest. The process was surprisingly simple, but hard in the same vein. Anyone (and it was open to anyone) who wanted to participate only needed to send in a ballot of their top twenty-five Carbon Leaf songs in order by the end of the year. Using a reverse ranking system where the number one song on the list got 25 points and the last song on the list got 1 point, I was able to craft a list around that. In the end, we got over 100 ballots submitted and over 100 songs nominated for the list. I’d say pretty much every Carbon Leaf song out there got nominated as well as some of their more memorable covers. The list turned out very surprisingly, but also pretty definitive. There were only a few rankings that would have changed with a ballot or two more submitted, but realistically, the top 25 was pretty much set in stone painting a very clear picture of what’s the best of Carbon. So we have our list!

Allow me the brief moment to thank all those who voted. Aaron Stromberg, Abigal Hulen, Alison Hyatt, Amy Webb, Andrew Janes, Annie Seely, Another Janessha, Antonio Fleury, Barb Bergman, Betty Deville, Billy Urquhart, Blanche Baldridge, Cathy Mccollough, Chad Ambriz, Charlotte Pagano, Chris Graziano, Christopher Gillette, Clarence Bass, Cora Duffey, Dawn Shaw, Deanna Johnston, Deborah Adkins, Deborah Conwell, Dennis Crook, Dennis Fuchs, Doug Nunnally, Douglas Farrell, Derrick Plazane, Eliza Stultz, Elsie Aguirre, Erika Montez, Eva Debose, Frank Escobedo, Frank Neal, Gerald Cathcart, Gerald Kern, Gregory Parmer, Gregory Silvia, Harry Carbone, Helen Kirksey, Helen Louis, Henry Petro, Ian Shaw, Ida Oaks, Jack Perdomo, Jacob Wilkie, Jacqueline Shanks, Janie Abernathy, Jean Brugger, Jeannette Dominick, Jeffrey Shedd, Jeffrey Sthilaire, Jerry Macaluso, Joe Neff, Johnny Burnside, Jose Bower, Kara Thornhill, Karen Connell, Karen Swearingen, Kathryn Tyner, Katie Brown, Keith Absher, Kristen Jacobsen, Lena Geary, Leticia Bowler, Lisa Bunker, Lucy Izaguirre, Lynda Pugliese, Manuel Cathcart, Matt Klinkhammer, Matt Whitfield, Matthew Mcgill, Molly Wright, Myra Shaver, Natasha Hyde, Nathan Lacy, Nellie Corrales, Nicole Cauley, Olivia Mccorkle, Patrice Bird, Peggy Clegg, Ralph Wells, Randy Wunderlich, Richard Hills, Richard Risinger, Robyn Colucci, Rodney Christy, Rodney Farnsworth, Roger Campion, Roxanne Fong, Russell Paniagua, Sally Villalpando, Sarah Nunnally, Sherry Loftin, Stanley Keating, Suzanne Fulford, Tali Mozes, Terri Leboeuf, Tina Hulen, Tom Watson, Vera Dambrosio, Wendy Szabo, Willie Colburn, and anyone I feel stupid for leaving out. Without each and everyone one of your votes, this list would be completely different and probably not as cool.

The countdown will feature multiple entries posted in a day until the top 10 when we’ll slow down a bit to stretch it out. Make sure to check back every day to see what clocked in next on our countdown. If you’ve got a friend who’s trying to get into Carbon Leaf, this is the list for you to show off just what is the best of Carbon Leaf.

Well, enjoy!

So what does this mean until I do get it fixed? Well, keep your eyes fixated on the Recently Updated area to your right when you visit. I keep that updated very regularly so any new content will show up there until I get this fixed. Being a fan of our Facebook page (click here!) can also help you keep abreast of the newest additions here since it’s all posted there too. However, since it has been a while and you may not have noticed some changes/additions, let me run-down some new stuff here real quickly:

– I am doing a Facebook giveaway. If I get to 250 fans on Facebook (currently 30 shy), I will give away my Top 25 Albums Of 2009 for free to download. That’s over a day’s worth of music for free! The best way to help us out is to suggest us to your friends, tag us in your status update, e-mail people, IM people, or whatever else you can do to spread the word. There’s a lot more detail up at this link and keep tuned to our Facebook page because I have stuff planned for reaching 500, 750, and 1000 fans as well!

– The Best Of 2010 List (click here to see it) is constantly updated so keep checking back for more details on it. I am still some 30 albums behind for this year, but I’m getting through them!

– I literally just (as in today) added a columns section with our first column on musical genres. You can see it in the navigation bar above. These are going to be sporadic columns on random topics and won’t be taking away from the actual blog posts. While I may deal with just a song, album, band, et cetera in a blog post, the columns will be broader and structured. Go ahead and check out our first column now!

– If you guys missed it, check out my approved biography. Click here to see it. It’s pretty funny.

– There have been new interviews and reviews added since our last “blog” post so check those out in the section above. I also have more interviews coming up soon with Fang Island and perhaps Carbon Leaf as well so stay tuned.

To wrap up, just some thoughts on the actual blog posting. I will be finishing up The Beatles list, but may just announce the list itself to give people the results and countdown in posts over time instead all at once. It got real old writing about The Beatles every day. Really old. I will also be starting looking at the best music of the year so far and next year, New Music For 2011 will become a recurring post on Balarama. And of course, Frusciante Fridays will return.

So in conclusion, thanks for sticking with Balarama Music. We haven’t been not updating (sorry for the double negative) and I’m gonna keep trying to push the site up with more stuff. If you need me at all, don’t hesitate to get in contact with me through the site or our Facebook page.

Doug

Since the beginning of the year, I have been busting my hump trying to put together a project where fans vote on the top Beatles songs of all time. But, like a lot of people have asked me, why do it at all? Well, for a number of reasons. It’s good content for an obvious reason, huh? Another would be it’s also always fun to get people involved interactively from all places of life about things they all love (in this case, The Beatles). A really good reason brought up by one of the voters is that it’s really nice to have a non-commercialized look at arguably the best band of all time. Sure, many publications have released their list of best songs by The Beatles, but who really votes on those things? The staff of Rolling Stone? The guys who get them coffee? I never understood why a major music publication wouldn’t do something like this solely on fan votes. I know it would be very time consuming & definitely a painstaking endeavor, but the pay-off would be so much better than thirty guys we will never know sitting in a room, making a list, & pissing off half of their audience. So that brings us to Balarama’s list.

What I did starting in January was basically get any & all Beatles fans I could to submit a ballot of their favorite songs. I went everywhere – literally. Facebook, MySpace, Last.fm, Beatles Websites & Beatles Forums, Music Websites & Music Forums, et cetera; if you can think of it, chances are I went there to try and solicit votes. Did I go about it the best way? Yes and no. Some places I handled with tact while others I impatiently blitzed the hell out of. Neither one worked better than the other so that’s a plus and it really just depended on my mood at the time like most things in life. Those means asides, the results I got were great. Considering I started with absolutely zero names & ideas on where to get people, I’d say I did pretty damn well for myself. Of I course I didn’t get as many people to vote as I would have liked, but I will always think we could have gotten more. For my first endeavor into something like this, I’d say it was a success so far. Of course, I didn’t do it by myself and I want to thank a couple of people here real quick:

My fiancée
Not only did she vote & get her Dad to vote, she also put up with me constantly counting votes and lurking for more votes instead of getting ready for dinner and a movie.

Facebook
How they didn’t ban me for the obscene amount of posts I put up is a true testament to why they rule. I’d check out The Beatles fan page and The Beatles Fans Around The World group if you’re on Facebook.

DMbeatles Fourms
This was one of three forums to really help me out in getting votes and the first to truly do so. I got a big handful of votes here as well as the support of others that I really didn’t expect after a bunch of places turned me down or worse. I highly recommend you check the place out and if you want to, just click here!

Muzic Forums
The next place that really gave me a lot of help. Here, some of the staff even jumped on and helped me promote it which was something that really took me by surprise. If you want a place to just talk Beatles, go to DM’s, but for all around Music – definitely go here.

Invisible-Movement
This site and their forums (two separate places so click the links for both) helped me out as well. Not only did the webmaster Iva do the new site layout, but she also tweeted about the subject, let me post about it on a John Frusciante fan forum, and much more to help out. I got a lot of votes from this place as well and I really appreciate it. Learn more about the great site by going here.

And finally – The Voters
Most of you reading this were those who voted in the project and helped me along the way. Some gave me advice on where to go for more places, others told their friends & family to get them to vote, and a couple just kept in touch to see how it was going. Even more so, almost all of you put up with some form of my hounding to get a vote and some re-did them for simple clerical errors just to help out. It was all volunteered and out of the goodness of their hearts too. I really appreciate it from all of you. I have all of your contact information so hopefully I can get something together for you at the end, but if not, hopefully this list and the countdown of it will be enough for you. Thank you all so much!

With that little background done, I guess people want to know how I got the list after compiling all the votes. Well, what I did was ask people who were interested for their top 25 songs by The Beatles in order with their favorite being number one. Using a reverse ranking system where the number one song on the list got 25 points and the last song on the list got 1 point, I was able to craft a list around that. Now, I did run into four problems here and there with them.

The first was that some people sent me a list with only 23 or 24 votes. Others accidentally had listed one or two songs twice. Now, for most of them, I was able to get back in contact with them and they fixed the problem. For others though, I tried, but ultimately couldn’t get back in contact with them. I still wanted their voice to be heard so I still counted the votes. However, because only 23 or 24 were on the list, I ranked them with points that way. That means that if you had 23 songs on your list, I gave your top pick 23 and your last pick 1 just to even it out. 23 was as low as I would take though.

The next problem I ran into was actually pretty easy to solve: different versions of songs. Some people would list Let It Be versions of songs while others would list Let It Be…Naked versions. The same goes for the acoustic & electric versions of “Revolution” (Revolution 9 was counted separate) and a bunch of songs from Anthology. I completely understand where people are coming from, but had I split votes like this, the top 100 would have been drastically different and a little annoying with songs repeating. So I counted them together. I’m sorry, but the good news is that for some that have two very different versions (like “Revolution”), I’ll include both versions when we countdown.

The third problem I had was about medleys. The first one was about what is generally considered to be the “Abbey Road Medley” which starts with “You Never Give Me Your Money” and ends with “Her Majesty” on the second side of Abbey Road. I had a bunch of people e-mail me that that was too much to include and it’s not a true medley, only the last three songs are. Well, I vehemently disagree as do others so I included it this way. I promise to go over why when it comes up in the top 100. The problem was that some people included different songs in their top 25 for them. For example, one person voted for “You Never Give Me Your Money” as well as “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window.” Both votes were going the same place and I couldn’t give the Medley all those points unfairly. For some people, I asked them to re-do their list and they obliged. Others I couldn’t get in contact with, I just modified their votes so they now only had 24, instead of 25, and counted them as I stated above. The other medley problem I had, which was a bit minor but worth mentioning, was that some people put the songs “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” & “With A Little Help From My Friends” together. Now, the first song really does lead up into that one, but in my opinion, no more so than a regular intro in most albums and no more so than most of the other songs on that album. For example, “Good Morning, Good Morning” matches up with the first note of the title track’s reprise and that song runs right into “A Day In The Life.” It’s also the same bleeding that you hear if you listen to “Back In The USSR” and “Dear Prudence” back to back as they were intended. So I counted them as separate songs. Now to accommodate, I took of their 25th pick for ballots, moved the rest down, and put a tie for both songs so that one didn’t get more votes than the other. Had to do it, guys.

The last problem I ran into was when it came time for the list to be done. There were unfortunately a couple of ties. I had to break them somehow so what I did was see how many votes a song actually got and use that to break the tie. For instance, if two songs each got 543 points, but one song got 11 votes while the other got 13 votes, I gave the one with the 13 votes the win in the tiebreaker. Fair and easy actually.

Let me make something clear though. None of these problems were major occurrences or trends. It happened a couple of times each so it’s not like I went around editing votes and what-not.

After doing all of that guys, I had a final list of two hundred songs (yes, you’re reading that right). No, not every Beatles song got a vote, but some really obscure songs did so that was interesting. It was really cool to see the diversity in some people’s votes too as no one really seemed to stick to one type of song or Beatle. That was definitely a cool perk of doing this project.

So we have the list? What now?

Well, starting today, I’m going to start the countdown which will reveal the list bit by bit. I’d like to say I’m going to do ten a day, but really, that would take a lot of effort and I do have a full-time job with lots of overtime. I think the plan will be to do as many as possible a day until I get until the top 10 and stretch those out two a day. With that said, I plan to be done in less than two weeks. Each slot on the top 100 will be set-up just like the regular posts here on the websites. Download link, YouTube video (multiple for different versions maybe), and information about the song that you might not have known otherwise. Of course, my opinion as well as it is my website!

However, just because I have some other songs I want to cover, I will also be doing regular posts during this time. This might break the easy access if you’re just going down the list, but never fear. If you hover on Lists in the menu above and then click the Beatles option, you will be taken to a list that will update each time with the direct URL to the song. Nice and easy, huh?

This has been quite the project and it’s not over yet. Stick around guys, there’s a lot of good music coming your way and I thank you all for your patience once more!

Huzzah!

Anyway, there are some changes and news to the site, but I want to keep them brief:

-The Top 25 Albums Of 2009 are done. Took me forever and I’m sure I missed a few albums here and there, but listening to 40 albums from one year is tiring especially when you don’t care for most of the bands. Smile Empty Soul, I’m looking at you. Anyway, you should check out the list by clicking here.

-The 2010 List will begin sometime tomorrow. I’m snowed in with lots of free time so Spoon, Vampire Weekend, OK Go, & The Bouncing Souls are on my docket. Let’s see how many I can get through!

-I’m still working with Iva on a new layout. We expect to have one by the second week in February.

-We are still collecting Beatles Top 25 Songs ballots and will roll out our top 100 when the new layout is here.

-Just in case you guys were wondering, Nickleback & Creed still suck.

Thanks guys. See you in a week or two for the new site!

Well, right now, I’m working with the lovely webmaster Iva from invisible-movement.net on getting a new design to the website. We’re looking for something a bit fresher, way better organization, and a better system of letting you know there are updates! Check out her website to see some of her work – I’m very optimistic about this.

The new layout will debut with the roll-out of Balarama Music’s Best Beatle Songs list which is currently being worked on. The best thing about this list? It’s fan-made! Anyone can participate and everyone should! Right now, I’m taking ballots from anyone who is willing – all I need is your top 25 Beatles songs in order with #1 being your best/favorite Beatles song! When the new layout comes, we’ll commence with a legen-(wait for it)-dary countdown of the songs with some information on each song here!

In the meantime, you guys still can catch new things here as I am finishing up my Best Of 2009 list (got 5 more albums to listen to) and pretty soon I’ll start my Best Of 2010 list and maybe a review or two (Vampire Weekend? OK GO?).

Until then, thanks for your continued support and if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, feel free to e-mail me at dougnunnally@balaramamusic.com!