Homegrown music rocked the 2000s, and local music figures prominently in 89.3 The Current DJ Mark Wheat's 2009 best-of list.

"This decade has been a golden age for the local music scene," Wheat says. "It was a difficult decade to be in the music business, as it collapsed, and we have seen multiple examples of musicians figuring out how to successfully support themselves through their art."

Wheat's list, however, is more a mixtape because of another one of the decade's top trends: the demise of the album, in the old-school sense of a cohesive collection of music.

Artists have stopped making them and listeners have tuned them out, says Wheat. So he instead creates an album of favorite tunes to represent each year musically. This year's picks, he later realized, all address the theme of "home."

That idea is taking on greater meaning to Wheat as he prepares to become a U.S. citizen, 24 years after he left his native England. Wheat waited tables, first in New York City and then in Minnesota, before breaking into radio in each market. In the Twin Cities, Wheat has been at KFAI, the former Zone 105 and the University of Minnesota's Radio K before he helped launch the Current in 2005.

To see Wheat's 2009 best-of list - which includes local artists P.O.S., Mason Jennings and Brother Ali - go to mpr.org or npr.org/music. To hear him, tune in weeknights from 6 to 10 p.m. on 89.3 FM.

Three and out with the Current's Mark Wheat

  • Are you able to listen to the music you play on the air?

Sometimes I don't answer the phone, so that I can listen to a particular track. Sorry, listeners. But most of the time I am listening in much the way that you do in the audience, while you're doing something else. I'm just like a truck driver really; need to keep the gas tank full of tunes and read the maps to know where I'm going and what I'm going to say, then I talk on the CB to my posse every now and then.

  • A few tracks that stick out from the '00s?

The White Stripes' "Your Pretty Good Looking (For A Girl)" off of "De Stijl." Jack White has become my fave artist of the decade.

St. Germain's "Rose Rouge" from "The Tourist." Perfection is hard to follow up I guess, so perhaps that's why we have never heard from Ludovik Navarre since this.

  • Since you grew up in England, an explanation for why Kings of Leon are so big over there?

Good looking boys who can rock with a Brit brashness and an American anthemic style, like this generation's Nazerath!