Tag Archives: outliers

Lists, Music

The Best Songs of the 2000s: The Outliers

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Jesse
Jesse
Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse
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No one who votes on a best-of list is ever completely, 100% satisfied with the results, and few group lists are as idiosyncratic as the individual ballots that come together to form a consensus (no matter how weird that consensus is). With that in mind, we wanted to give the participants in our recent Best Songs of the 2000s poll to defend their orphan choices—the songs that not only didn’t make our list, but only received a single vote from a single participant. In most cases, the artist in question didn’t make our list at all (the last two profiled here are an exception); in several cases, the artist in question didn’t receive any other votes! (Sorry, Aaliyah, Dntel, and Junior Senior!) Whatever the circumstances, here are a bunch of our writers back for a curtain call, to explain how and why they departed so completely from the crowd.
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Lists, Music

They Might Be Giants Week!

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Marisa
Gripes
Marisa
There are contrarians, there are iconoclasts, and then there is SportsAlcohol.com co-founder Marisa. A contraiclast? Her favorite Springsteen album came out this century, so she is basically a controversy machine.

Also, she is totally not a dude!
Marisa
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Hey, you might’ve noticed, but the team here at SportsAlcohol.com sure likes They Might Be Giants a whole lot! Let’s nerd out.

We re-listened, voted, cried, ranked, and re-ranked until we had compiled a collective list of The Top 40 Best They Might Be Giants Songs of All Time (For Now).

To ease our sour grapes, we also put together a post of Outliers—TMBG songs that received one and only one vote for our master ranking.

Then four of us got together to record a podcast about the band, and how they’ve changed and haven’t changed—and ho we’ve changed and haven’t changed—in the decades they’ve been making music.

Is there a Spotify playlist? Of course there’s a Spotify playlist. (It’s missing two songs though—see if you can figure out which ones!)

And remember: Everybody dies frustrated and sad, and that is beautiful.

Lists, Music

Our Favorite They Might Be Giants Songs: The Outliers

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Jesse
Jesse
Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse
Latest posts by Jesse (see all)

These aren’t runners-up in our list of the Top 40 Best They Might Be Giants songs. Far from it; these are all found much further down the full ranking of 160 or so tunes, because they all received exactly one (1) vote from one (1) participant. In some ways, especially with a band as original and idiosyncratic as TMBG, these outliers will tell you more about the artist than the stuff that nearly made the official list. These were the choices that inspired passionate devotion that, in turn, was not enough. Some of them are from the band’s best-selling record; others are newer songs that may not have had time to gain popular traction; one was chosen by a two-year-old who didn’t get to vote yet. What they have in common is that peculiar, wonderful connection between prolific band and attentive listener. Consider this an alternate top ten (er, eleven).
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