Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
Available On Air Stations

Songs Of The Year: Best Music Of 2008

This is the 21st year-end Top 10 list to appear here in the last four weeks, so readers can be forgiven if these things have begun to whiz by in an indistinct blur of guys with beards and boundary-crossing jazz. Still, discoveries continue to reveal themselves: Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes turn up again — they'd have sold 20 million albums apiece if everyone in America read this site — but this list also features a bunch of gems that hadn't yet popped up in our Best CDs of 2008 coverage.

Naturally, no year-end music list can be definitive — not even the terrific Top 25 list we based on submissions and votes from NPR listeners — just as it's impossible to rate a year in music using purely objective measures of quality. So here are the 10 CDs this reviewer treasured the most in 2008. Rest assured that, if your favorite isn't on here, it came in at No. 11.

Click here for more entries in the Best CDs of 2008 series.

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Stephen Thompson
Stephen Thompson is a host, writer and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist and guest host on All Songs Considered. Thompson also co-hosts the daily NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created with NPR's Linda Holmes in 2010. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)