Monday, April 14 through Friday, April 18 is WYEP’s Decades Week. On Monday, all the music played from 6 a.m. until 6 p.m. will be from 1975. On Tuesday, it’s all 1985. 1995 takes center stage on Wednesday. Relive 2005’s best music on Thursday. And wrap up the week with a journey back to 2015.
In 2005, we fell in love with Bright Eyes, heard confessional indie pop from Death Cab For Cutie and jammed to the music of LCD Soundsystem.
In 2005, the rest of the world caught on to the music of Bright Eyes. Conor Oberst had already been in a handful of bands when he formed Bright Eyes at the age of 15. He released his first album under that name three years later and began to develop a dedicated fanbase. In January of 2005, Bright Eyes dropped a pair of sonically different new albums — the electronic-based “Digital Ash In A Digital Urn,” and the folk-centric “I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning.” Both records showed a major growth in Oberst’s songwriting and production, and they gave us a timeless love song that keeps finding new fans along the way.
Death Cab For Cutie released their last truly great album in 2005. After slowly building an audience for their confessional and smartly written indie pop songs and the success of their opus “Transatlanticism” in 2003, the band from Bellingham, Wash. got a major label deal and began working on “Plans.” The record propelled the band into the mainstream, gave them their first Top 40 hit, their first platinum release, and a couple of Grammy nominations. The next year, each of the songs on the album were adapted into short films which further cemented the band’s reputation for making incredibly cinematic music.
Kathleen Edwards is one of those artists you wish the whole world would discover and love. Her songs are passionate and scathing, and her delivery is incredibly believable. The Ottawa native grew up listening to Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and Tom Petty albums, and found in them the inspiration to get her own stories out there and into our ears. Her 2005 album “Back To Me” was praised by fans and critics alike thanks to the record’s title track and songs like “In State” and “Summerlong” which ended up finding a larger audience after being included on the soundtrack to “Elizabethtown.”
LCD Soundsystem came out swinging with their first releases in the summer of 2002. The Brooklyn group fronted by DFA Records founder James Murphy successfully brought dance music to the cool kids on the floor while also dazzling critics and earning a Grammy nomination for their debut album in 2005. That record features the infectiously catchy single “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House” and the song’s video, which pays tongue-in-cheek tribute to the videos for a couple of Daft Punk songs. Yes, it’s more rewarding the more you know about it, but it’s also just a fun song that anyone can enjoy no matter what level of pretense they already have.
My Morning Jacket formed in 1998 when singer and songwriter Jim James needed a place for songs that weren’t quite made for his then-band Month of Sundays, and released their debut album the following year. They hit the road relentlessly, cementing their status as a damn-good live band and released a couple more albums in 2001 and 2003 which built their studio sound even further. Then, things changed. The band played an explosive set at Bonnaroo in 2004 as rain and thunder rolled into the festival grounds that truly marked them as a band you need to see as soon as humanly possible. While the external events of that mythical performance certainly helped the band, without the songs they were working on, it may have meant nothing. In 2005, My Morning Jacket released their breakthrough album “Z” and followed that with a live album when they finished touring behind it. The rest is history, as they say, and they remain a must-see live band 20 years later.
