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Pulling into the final weeks of December, AllMusic's editors and writers have taken a look back at over 50 of the year's finest releases and made some exciting picks for their list of the best of 2009. Several are contenders for major awards, so keep on eye on these excellent recordings!
The year-end season of lists is mercifully nearing a close, but before it slips away, I wanted to make sure my fave raves were shoved down your collective throats one more time! This time it's my favorite songs of 2009. I was trying to get the list down to a reasonable number and having a cuss of a time doing it when suddenly I had one of those rare flashes of inspiration (possibly misguided inspiration, but still...) and decided I had enough really, really good songs to build the thing into 52-song list. A song a week! Exciting, right? Looks as if I liked lots of noisy pop, pretty pop, dancefloor groovers, slick new wave, hip hop jamz and borderline novelty songs...pretty predictable, true, but it kept me happy all year long. What more can you want from music? Anyway, click through to see what my "year in songs" sounded like.
Appropriately for the final year of the decade, 2009 seemed to be the 2000s in microcosm. Every trend of the past 10 years surfaced over the past 12 months: dance divas with irresistible singles mingled with the electro-pop and art-punk vanguard with Lady Gaga bridging the two extremes, new bands rubbed elbows with veterans who either mounted a comeback or proved the value of consistent work. There was a lot that was twee and precious and not much macho, save for some crackling underground metal and the supergroup Them Crooked Vultures. There were seemingly too many animal bands to count -- led, of course, by Animal Collective, the consensus pick for album of the year in many quarters, but followed not far behind by Grizzly Bear, Arctic Monkeys, Bat for Lashes (and, if you're being generous, a resurgent Black Crowes) -- and there was yet another new project from Jack White. In short, 2009 had a little bit of everything of what we loved about the 2000s, and the following lists are what AMG editors loved best over the last year.
![James Horner - Avatar [Music from the Motion Picture]](http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov75/drn200/n299/n29928au7z6.jpg "James Horner - Avatar [Music from the Motion Picture]")
