Gorillaz, P.J. Harvey, Bilal Among Final 10 For Shortlist Prize

10/04/2001 4:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Neal Weiss

(10/4/01, 4 p.m. ET) -- Gorillaz's self-titled debut, P.J. Harvey's Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, and Bilal's 1st Born Second are among the 10 finalists for the Shortlist Prize For Artistic Achievement In Music, a new honor that singles out the best releases of the past year. Other albums to make the cut, announced Wednesday (October 3) in Beverly Hills, are the Dandy Warhols' Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia, Ryan Adams's Heartbreaker, Sigur Ros's Agaetis Byrjun, Jay Dee's Welcome To Detroit, Nikka Costa's Everybody Got Their Something, Talib Kweli & Hi Tek's Reflection Eternal, and Air's 10,000 HZ Legend.

Blur's Damon Albarn, musical creator behind Gorillaz, told LAUNCH about the biggest obstacle in getting the album done. "I really didn't know how I was going to finish it off," he said. "I started it with such an open mind, but these things tend to reveal themselves as you're doing it. So I didn't really worry about that. And as it was essentially me making the music, I just sort of had a lot of time on my hands to make it. I wasn't under pressure. I didn't have other band members sort of, you know, hassling me."

The list was amassed by producers, journalists, radio personalities, and musicians, among them Beck, Macy Gray, the Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl, Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor, Aimee Mann, Mos Def, the Roots' ?uestlove, and Lucinda Williams. To be eligible, albums must have been released after June 30, 2000 and not sold more than 500,000 copies in the United States at the time of nomination. Forty-nine albums were originally selected.

The Shortlist prize winner will be announced in Los Angeles October 30.

-- Darren Davis, New York and Neal Weiss, Los Angeles

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