The story of Tender Forever: Once upon a time there was a young immigrant lost on the streets of Seattle with only $20 to her name. She'd grown up covering sixties pop classics in Bourdeaux, and traveled here with just a sense of adventure. Wandering aimlessly, she then ran into a fellow named Calvin Johnson. Through his K Records she found a place to work on mingling her deeply passionate vocals with mostly electronic music.

Melanie Valera was born in Maurr, France, relocated to Olympia, and is now living in Portland, OR. This celebrated "piano, guitar, keyboards, and saucepan" playing singer-songwriter has stopped the dance groove for her next album, No Snare.

Tender Forever has been known for the great one woman groove attack on tracks like a cover of Justin Timberlake's "My Love" on a 2007 French compilation and also did a brilliantly brittle sonic extrapolation of Mirah's "Make It Hot" on K's remix anthology Joyride. But it was over the course of her breathtaking first two albums, The Soft and The Hardcore (2005) and Wider (2007), that she astonished media like Playgirl who described her as "sweet like Cat Power with lyrics that will make you feel like one tough bitch."

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Sometimes I think it takes me waaay too long to come up with my Top 20 albums of a given year. There are a lot of internal debates and arguments that really have no right answer. Really, you reach a point where all the albums are good but how to rank them gets to be quite the challenge. This year was chock full of good music (not matter what the naysayers might groan). I counted something like 175+ albums worth mentioning in 2007, and that is only a tip of the iceberg when it comes to everything that was released in the year. However, I did whittle it down to 20... well, 22 if you count my 2 EP exception (EP's don't count as real albums).

If you're interested in some sub-lists, like my albums "with apologizes" (albums I didn't hear but should have) or "best imports" or "most disappointing" (hint, the band who made it rhymes with Milo Biley), check it out here.

So, here we go:

#21 The EP's - Two EP's made me happy this year, and really, they would be in the top 20, but it seems unfair to me to include EP's versus albums. They're both UK pop, and they're both brilliant in their own cute way.

Los Campesinos! Sticking Fingers Into Sockets (Thanks to igLiz for this band!)

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Wider is exactly what you might expect from K Records these days: heartfelt, homegrown, and ridiculously charming.

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