More than 90 students entered this contest with essays on what music means to them, and six winners were drawn in Mojo's at the River Music Experience on December 17. Winners received a musical-instrument package courtesy of Milan Surplus.

The winners and their essays follow.

The goal: Make an album from favorite songs released in 2009, with special attention paid to the arc and to the relationships between songs.

The rules: one song per performer; artists featured in the previous three years of this project are excluded.

The caveats: I listen to a lot of music, and I estimate this list is culled from roughly a thousand songs from the past year. But I don't hear everything, and my listening is constrained by both taste and work. These are merely favorites.

The results: I had a much easier time selecting and sequencing in past years; the order here is more random than I would like, and it feels like it's missing some connective tissue. But these 16 tracks (totaling just more than an hour) do follow a path. This album puts up a defiant front before revealing its heart, and then it falls into a dark and cold place for much of its second half before recovering a little at the end. A line in the final song is "I believe in growing old with grace," and I think that can be seen as a loose theme running through this collection.

Images by photographer Chris Jones from Monday's Megadeth concert at the RiverCenter. Click on any photo for a larger version.

I have no certainty that the person whom I interviewed late last month is the real Andrew W.K., or the original Andrew W.K., or even that Andrew W.K. as a human being (as opposed to an entertainment entity) exists.

But the guy who called me introduced himself as Andrew W.K. and talked a good game, and he'll presumably be the man performing as Andrew W.K. at a benefit show Saturday at RIBCO. So we'll go with it.

"When someone says you're not a real person, or you don't exist, or that your life is a lie, that's a very strange feeling," he said.

If this sounds a little odd, you've likely not encountered Andrew W.K. I first saw the man on Saturday Night Live in 2002, and the spectacle was so bizarre that it had to be a joke -- some mix of Andy Kaufman's dry meta-comedy and Spinal Tap's sharp musical satire. I was fascinated and bought his record I Get Wet. My wife considered divorcing me.