Well, believe it or not, my standing Christmas Eve Mass organ gig has come around once more1, so it’s time to decide on this year’s Song of The Year. This is the second post in this series, so please see last year’s post on what this nonsense is all about.

This year’s nominees are (not too many this year):

  • Wooden Ship, from Antarctica — Suit for guitar and orchestra by Nigel Westlake.
  • Penguin Ballet, from Antarctica — Suit for guitar and orchestra by Nigel Westlake. Not really a new track for me, but I’m including it here anyway as it’s been many years since I last heard it2.

And the winner is: Wooden Ship by Nigel Westlake 👏

Album cover of the Australian Composers Series, 'Out of the Blue', by Nigel Westlake, performed by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. Copyright the Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Specifically, the version played by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and released by the ABC. This has been quite a special song for me this year and was pretty certain to be the winner for most of the year. Well, since first hearing it in May, there hasn’t been another one to top it. So bravo!

But that’s not to say there weren’t other tracks discovered this year. The honourable mentions:

  • The Last Place on Earth, from Antarctica — Suit for guitar and orchestra by Nigel Westlake. A good song, but a little too complex for me.
  • “Extremes”, from Music From the Private Life of Plants by Richard Grassby Lewis. Really wish I had a recent link to this (the only one I know of that works is one to a defunct music store, picked up by the Wayback Machine, that previously sold this album).
  • The Knight, from the Tunic OST by Lifeformed & Janice Kwan. Not a completely new album to me, but until now, I tended to skip this track.
  • Epic Grandpa, by Izioq.

  1. It’s the only gig on my calendar actually. ↩︎

  2. And to have at least one other nominee with what was ultimately going to be the winning song this whole year. ↩︎