Everybody has a list of their favorite albums of 2006, and there were some good ones for sure, but what was your favorite discovery of the year? That one you'd never heard before, but can't imagine being without anymore. The soundtrack to your year. The one you told your friends about. Even the ones who don't care about music, cause you just had to tell people.

Blush Music is that one for me. Probably got the most listens of anything, and is still spinning as my fingers poke at the keyboard. Maybe 2003, no date that I see readily. But from the opening banjo picking on "Cripplegate (Standing On Glass)" ...

in you alone
there is no harm
in you alone

to the beautiful closer, "Story And Pictures", beginning with the sound of a creaky old dock resisting the tide, until it unfolds into a lush piano and guitar ballad, with an ethereal vocal that brings life to the album title through his poignant lyrics ...

your fire burns for me
red as grace
the blush came easily to your face

this album has it all, the emotion, the passion, the color, the grandeur, and maybe most of all, that down-to-earth Appalachian charm I love so much these days. Like a place out of time, mixing old and new, the merging of loops and incidental found sounds with the brooding tales of love lost, and Biblical salvation. Shimmering and cinematic at times, and always leaves you with a lingering taste, just enough to make you want to hear it again .. and again. A "perfect slice of dark and droney, fire and brimstone, forlorn and forgotten, gorgeously damaged, gypsy psych-folk", as described by the good folks at Aquarius Records, also huge fans of that David Eugene Edwards sound, be it in the earlier 16 Horsepower records, or the latest from Woven Hand.

http://www.aquariusrecords.org//bin/...0blush%20music

Favorite lyric? That's a hard one since there are so many lines strewn about that get stuck in my head, but probably have to say the line about the buffalo from "Aeolian Harp", in the middle of the last verse, almost brings a tear ...

do you see the day far on
brothers it is a line
there is no buffalo outside, rifle child
it is more than hunger
that betrays my heart