I Need You To Listen To…

500.Song:Super Sad Generation

Artist:Arlo Parks

Album:Super Sad Generation EP 

“Don’t call me grieving for what we used to be” For a generation that was born just as 9/11 tore everything apart, with the world still struggling to put the pieces back together two decades later, resignation just seemed to be the right response to a climate of paranoia and looming societal collapse. Arlo Parks, British born and wearing more than a little of Billie Eilish’s cynicism on her heart, strikes a perfect chord on this track. Its genius is to call back to old school hip-hop sonics, avoiding dated cultural references and having a keen ear for social detail, combining all times to be of all time. “Generational Anthems” tend to be either overly celebrational or heavily condemning, Super Sad Generation captures the middle ground, the essence of grief infused apathy and the myriad of destructive ways we try to cope with it, but super laid back about it at the same time. “We’re a super sad generation/ Killing time and losing our paychecks”.

499.Song:Dreams Burn Down

Artist:Ride

Album:Nowhere

Most shoegaze records are mystifyingly dense efforts, clouds of guitars subduing whatever vocals manage to pierce through the monstrous veil. Ride is a band that chose to keep things crystal clear so we all would know where they stood, the noise only coming in when absolutely necessary. “Dreams Burn Down”, a song about a failing relationship, has such icy sonics that I always feel chilled to the bone when listening to it. The compressed wails of this song are always teetering on the edge of a cliff, the massive, titanic, bursts of guitar noise hitting all the harder when paired with lyrics like “I just want what I can’t have/ ‘Til my dreams burn down and choke me everytime”. The accompanying melodic guitar lines constantly keep us reaching for release, for an ounce of empathy “She’s effortlessly cool/ But circumstances can be cruel”. From an album whose defining image is of a cresting wave, this song has potently symbolic tides.

498.Song:Life Is A Highway

Artist:Tom Cochrane

Album:Mad Mad World 

Needing a pep-talk to himself after witnessing the ravages of famine in East Africa, Tom Cochrane put the finishing touches on his greatest hit. The iconic opening guitar riffs and thundering drums draw you in as Cochrane spouts platitudes.  His rough vocals are a perfect engine for his potent escapist imagery. “From Mozambique to those Memphis nights/ The Khyber Pass to Vancouver’s Lights” As a sonic road trip throughout the world, one that asks us to carry on, to forge onward towards a higher mode of existence for all, it clearly became more than a mere pep talk for millions. It could have turned out so much differently too, if the original “Love Is A Highway” version trotted out in ‘85 had turned out to be the final cut. As it is, this is an inspirational tune, asking us all to aspire to better the world, to allow us all a chance to travel on the highway of life together. (if you thought that pun was lame, try listening to the Rascal Flatts cover).

497.Song:West End Girls

Artist:Pet Shop Boys

Album:Please 

“Sometimes you’re better off dead/ There’s a gun in your hand and it’s pointing at your head”. The Pet Shop Boys had recorded an early version of this song with producer Bobby Orlando in 1984. If they had stuck with that recording as the official version, they would never have become artists of note. It sounds more like the roughest demo imaginable with horrifically dated drums and bass lines, poor Neil Tennant has to rush his lyrics to barely keep up with the tempo. Still, there was enough potential here for EMI to re-record and thus immortalize it. The new synths and rhythm tracks, added by new producer Stephen Hague, give Tennant’s lyrics time to breathe and flow, the snazzy bass lines and sampled chorals giving the proceedings a glistening sheen. The end result was uncanny, presaging British trip hop by almost a decade, with a guest vocal spot from Helena Springs lending an indelible element of class to crass existence.

496.Song:Tom’s Diner (DNA remix)

Artist: DNA feat. Suzanne Vega/ Suzanne Vega

Album: 7” A/ Solitude Standing

Suzanne Vega has a graceful, waif-like, voice that smooths out across the frequencies. It’s for this reason that the original track was used to heavily test the MP3 compression technique, its finesse qualities exposing bad compression that was then corrected. Fittingly, it was then sampled digitally for the dance floor by DNA and layered carefully over a dark beat sampled from Soul II Soul’s “Keep On Movin”. The result was a monster hit, surpassing Vega’s original by a considerable margin on the charts. Listening to this track today reveals a revelatory mood piece, perfect for relaxing by the window, observing all of the wistful souls walking by. “”It’s always nice to see you”/ Says the man behind the counter/ To the woman who has come in”. We’ve come full circle to fulfilling the purpose of Vega’s original lyrics. Form and function, united by digital manipulation and organic technique.

495.Song:The Middle

Artist:Jimmy Eat World

Album:Bleed American 

After two underperforming album releases, as well as being dropped from Capitol Records, Jimmy Eat World faced a bleak choice, disband or go all in and finance their new album by themselves. They gambled on the latter and won to the benefit of music lovers everywhere. Instead of experimenting with their sound, likely the cause of their previous underperformance on the charts, they kept things lean and mean, eh, maybe “mean” is the wrong word to use when describing any part of this song’s joyous energies. An imitable guitar riff  leans into verses asking you to not “Write yourself off yet” while rolling bass lines drag you along for the ride.. The leaping choruses and tight production help make this a sublime anthem for the “almost there’s” of the world. What a joyous outburst, no song since has captured its insistent propulsiveness. “Everything, everything will be just fine/ Everything, everything will be alright, alright”

494.Song:Torn

Artist:Natalie Imbruglia/ Neck Deep

Album:Left Of The Middle/ Songs That Saved My Life 

I must admit to initially giving this song short shrift, considering it perhaps too fluffy and breezy sounding for my own personal tastes. A random facebook post in my feed convinced me otherwise. You can thank Neck Deep for its cover, and helping me realize the inherent beauty and real importance to others that this song had, and that it now has to me. After all, the covers album that spawned this take is called Songs That Saved My Life. I started to connect with Natalie’s emotional turmoil, how everything coming apart in front of your eyes is so universal that sometimes you need a song to sing it, to pump fists in the air in solidarity as the chorus soars over you. The fragile guitars and drums are the perfect backdrop to her poetic yearnings. Surprisingly, her version wasn’t the original, that being one written by three Swedish artists but initially recorded by Lis Sorenson as “Burned”. Natalie Imbruglia, with her steadfast vocals,  still did it the best.

493.Song:Love It If We Made It

Artist:The 1975

Album:A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships

Can a song be of its time and for all time? Certainly “We Didn’t Start The Fire” by Billy Joel, a song which” Love It If We Made It” is frequently compared to, has dated rather horrifically thanks to its insistence on itself. I think the key to remaining vital, to avoiding losing the listener in an ocean of increasingly dated references, is to center things on a central theme and surround it with sonic warmth. This voluminous song hits these notes with its pleading chorus and glistening synthetic charm. Matt Healy’s lyrics list out a constant row of political and personal chaos, listing out a panoply of the evils of modernity, but brings everyone around to that central theme “I’d love it if we made it”. That’s a far more hopeful note than “We didn’t start the fire/ but when we are gone it will still burn on”. Humanity is the point, without hope we will find ourselves forever mired in the dregs. Here is a hope spring, it springs eternal.

492.Song:Super Bass

Artist:Nicki Minaj

Album: Pink Friday (Complete Edition) 

The appeal of Nicki Minaj’s best work is her gift for superfluous verse, but making each syllable sound as vital as it needs to be. “Super Bass” is a joyous gallop through infatuation, as she raps at a million miles an hour. One of the old jokes about Bruce Springsteen is how he could cram eight minutes of lyrics into five, but Nicki seems to cram a lifetime into three minutes and twenty seconds. It is a game impersonation of the rapid heartbeats we’ve all had when crushing on our loves, even trying to type out some lyrics here would fail to approximate the sheer velocity of the verses. The chorus provides some crucial relief, soaring over events with joyful directness “Can’t you hear that boom badoom boom boom badoom boom bass? (he got that superbass)”. Nicki’s signature brattiness and undeniable zeal carry this song high above its pop contemporaries. I predict its luminous flows will impress forever.

491.Song:Immigrant Song

Artist:Led Zeppelin/ Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross feat Karen O

Album: Led Zeppelin III/ The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo 

Immigrant Song, being one of the few singles Led Zeppelin ever deigned to release to us plebs, hosts one of those pummeling riffs that hoists artists above our mere mortal stations and should help III keep its relevancy to the band’s legendary discography. For this song to work it had to have the talent, and talent it had. Robert Plant’s howls bristle with demonic energy, John Bonham’s drums driving the band forward like a battle cry, all Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones had to do was coast, but they hold their own against the sonic storm. “The hammer of the gods/ Will drive our ships to new lands”. Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross and Karen O. would later capitalize on this song’s darker undercurrents, it is about viking invasions after all, to match its galloping energy blow for blow, beat for punishing beat. In either case, the potent immediacy of this song will always drive the listener towards Valhalla’s gates.

490.Song:Beautiful Day

Artist:U2

Album: All That You Can’t Leave Behind/ 360 At The Rose Bowl 

After alienating the music buying public with the contentious electronic album Pop, U2 felt that they needed to “re-apply for the position of the biggest rock band in the world”. In order to be The Biggest Rock Band In The World, you have to sound like it. Beautiful Day is a globe-trotting, explosive return to the 80’s zeitgeist that the band had left behind with Achtung Baby. Opening with delayed piano chords, subtle guitars and soft electric drums, the song builds tension until the chorus cuts loose with soaring vocal harmonies. “Teach me, love/ I know I’m not a hopeless case” lyrics like this indicate that not all of the poetical flourishes Bono employed were meant to appeal to everyone’s inner Springsteen, indeed, there’s a certain meta appeal to show that the band’s previous excessive eclecticism wasn’t all for naught, “You’ve been all over/ And it’s been all over you/ It’s a beautiful day, oh”.

489.Song:You Better Run

Artist:Jubalaires

Album:Gospel Classics 

The Jubalaires are a group in considerable danger of fading from history, as there is an astonishing lack of complete information available about them online. This is even more shocking because, as recent reddit posts have unearthed, they might legitimately be an important precursor to modern day hip-hop and were a decently popular force in pop culture, appearing across multiple films and daytime television stints. Finding any reliable information about even the exact group composition at the time of recording this very song was a mind-numbing lost cause. Powering through all of the scratches and grime of ancient recording technology is an incredible joy inherent to this record, the vocal talents of the group jumping through harmonies and rising/falling melodies with gusto. It’s an incredible showcase of the very best of the Gospel artists of the 40’s and 50’s, and one you should make every effort to track down before it disappears forever.

488.Song:Ms. Jackson

Artist:Outkast

Album:Stankonia 

Ms. Jackson is a rarity of a song, even outside of its original cultural context it hits the listener at an oblique emotional angle. It is part panic attack, part sincere ballad, a schizophrenic journey through the joys and terrors of childbirth and its effects upon the relationships of the affected parties.. Backed by a swirl of synths, reversed rhythmic samples and a gnarly bass guitar cutting through, Big Boi raps frantically and Andre 3000 sings soulfully,  contributing his own heartfelt plea “I’m sorry Ms. Jackson/ Oooh/ I am for real”. It’s quite a ride, even overpowering any cynicism generated over the corny way he sings that line. The real life inspiration for Ms. Jackson, the mother of his then-girlfriend Eryka Badu, certainly appreciated the meaning behind the emotional mess “She bought herself a ‘Ms. Jackson’ license plate. She had the mug, she had the ink pen, she had the headband, everything”. I think she accepted the trillion apologies.

487.Song:Blinded By The Lights

Artist:The Streets

Album:A Grand Don’t Come For Free

Night Time, an urban lane lit by harsh streetlights. Neon signs. Faded figures blinking in and out of existence in time to the flickering synths. “That’s the one, oy”. Mike Skinner’s rapping is paranoia inducing, “stumble-tripping his way” [1]  through the lines “This night’s a tragedy/ I keep thinking I saw her”. That ragged sense of desperation runs through the whole track. The chorus, with Jackie Rawe singing oddly calmly “Lights are blinding my eyes”, must be a sick joke played on Mike’s character, right? “No That’s not them/ That’s not them either/ and I’m thinking [People pushing by/ walking off into the night]”. As the song progresses, He starts rapping as if has nowhere to go and is in no hurry to get there “My head’s twisted severe/ Body is rushing everywhere”. Eventually, he finds himself exactly where his paranoia and imbibing has left him “What was I thinking about?/ Ah, who cares? I’m mashed”.  “[People pushing by]”.

486.Song:I’m So Sick

Artist:Flyleaf

Album:Flyleaf 

“I will break into your thoughts/ with what’s written on my heart” The moment Lacey Sturm’s vocals appear, in all of their massively compressed clarity, soaring above the crunchy bass guitar riff, is the moment some hidden primal instinct kicks in; the fight-or-flight response towards an impending threat. This entire song feels like an incarnate urge, grimy and infectious. The guitars in the verses ring out as if their strings were laced with poison, the chorus guitars distortion seems to be coated with gauze bandages. Sturm’s vocals, laced with spit that the uber compression can’t help but reveal, cut though this devious mix and pummeling drums as if to apply stitches.”I’m So Sick” is an artifact of its time and place, released in the very peak of the Loudness Wars raging on the radio, but it achieves a feeling of insidiousness that places it far above its nu-metal/post-grunge contemporaries. Just have a good shower after listening to it.

485.Song:Forgive You

Artist:Leon Bridges

Album:Good Thing 

It’s a small detail, about 8 seconds of audio in the intro, a recording of driving along a highway, the muted drums sounding like windshield wipers clearing away the raindrops, but it is a profoundly moving starting point for this neo-soul classic to drift on from. Anybody who has had to take a walk, to drive away after some new detail wreaks havoc over your personal life, will know this feeling. While Leon Bridges sings “Did I not love enough/ To keep your attention on and on?” the warm bass roils underneath, the piano chords striking resoundingly, as if demanding answers. The whole song has a bittersweet quality hanging off of every note, when Leon sings “And I forgive you/ though my friends told me not to” he sounds like a man coming to terms with his own weaknesses. The ones we love are capable of doing great damage to our perceptions of ourselves, but healing begins with small steps towards the clarity of experience. A small detail, but moving.

484.Song:Dirt In The Ground

Artist:Tom Waits

Album:Bone Machine

You can accuse Tom Waits of many things, but you absolutely could never claim that he was a conventional artist. Who else could carry this grave-leaden song with such sincerity? What other voice than his distinctive, guttural, howl, could embody death with such force and stumbling grace? Only him, only this voice. What’s astonishing about this song, and the album it came off of, was how dark and gloomy it was compared to the PEAK OF THE GRUNGE MOVEMENT happening concurrently. I kick myself sometimes upon realizing that. “Dirt In The Ground” succeeds at the mythic metaphor level of popular art, it is precisely what it says on the tin. However you imagine a song with that title playing out, this goes exactly where it means to. This is despite how sparse the musical accompaniment to Wait’s singing is. Light touches of percussion, some detuned bells and creaking floorboard taps, and funeral procession piano. Only him, only here.

483.Song:Have Love Will Travel

Artist:The Sonics

Album:Here Are The Sonics 

You’re not you when you are horny. But, you know, sometimes you need music for the down and dirty aspects of life, and very often you need that music to sound as raw and unhinged as your base instincts. “Have Love Will Travel” is one of the earliest songs where I can confidently state that love in and of itself is not the point, it’s a side effect of the thing to come. Boy, does the song sound raw and unhinged, this the output of a band that would rip studio foam off of the walls to get a “more live” sound. The vocals regularly peak the microphone and the drums are recorded so roughly that they seem to shake the very walls with their volume. Just listen at 40 seconds in, “I’m looking for a woman that will satisfy me”, until the era of the loudness wars fully overtook us, these were the loudest sounding drums in music. The sheer chaotic, pummeling, energy of it all is still awesome to behold.

482.Song:Cannonball

Artist:The Breeders

Album:Last Splash 

I find it hard to process this track, the way it starts and stops as if asking for trouble, the undeniable distorted beauty broken up by those psychedelic guitar wobbles and stuttering chorus riffs. Maybe this is why the Breeders never had another hit, the world is still trying to figure this one out. But hey, the band would end up tearing itself apart soon after this record stunned the alternative rock community, so maybe that was the point all along. Perhaps we should have expected no different from Kim Deal, of Pixies fame. She finds herself accompanied by oddly contorted harmonies on lines like “Spitting in a wishing well”, cooing with intense distortion at seemingly random points, and even cutting off all effects starkly on “Crash, I’m the last splash”. This makes for one of the most bizarre yet compelling listens in the history of rock, more than worthy of analysis, even if mostly just to find out what the hell it all means.

481.Song:Rebel Girl

Artist:Bikini Kill

Album:The Singles 

“Be my rebel girl”. In a world where Queer relationships are very visibly becoming an accepted part of establishment culture, the lyrical meaning behind this song has lost some of its punk edge. But we are not here to sieve through lyrics and anoint them as essential verse, we are here to listen to songs and “Rebel Girl” has lost none of its potent energies in that field. The almost literally screaming guitars, Tobi Vail’s militant drums threatening to march on the bastille, Kathleen Hanna’s vocals on the bleeding edge of riot grrrl manners, it’s a soundscape of incandescent passion. “When she talks, I hear the revolution/ In her hips, there’s revolution”,  all throughout, the latent energies threaten to boil over. There’s no room for doubt, no subtlety to any of this, this is a song that will pin you in the corner and scream to the heavens “That girl thinks she is the queen of the neighborhood/ I’ve got news for you, She IS!”.

480.Song:Old Skool Love

Artist:Divine Brown

Album:Divine Brown 

There’s a neat psychological effect happening in the opening verses of this R&B gem. Listen to the way that Divine Brown sings, the way that she almost seems to be tripping over the words,“Just when I started to get myself together again/ Thoughts of you come creepin’ in”, rushing them along over the warm bed of dry drums and steady guitars. This buildup of tension allows for the chorus to pour on smooth, like syrup over pancakes. This whole song is a masterclass in understated production. There’s no soaring chorus, no booming instrumentals artificially pumping up the emotions, only a warm, intimate, embrace. The loudest element in the mix is an incredibly dry drum kit, the snare and hi-hat doing their best to relax in the corner, like an approving parent shepherding the proceedings along. Divine Brown is given the maximal amount of space to breathe, and she capitalizes with a performance remarkable in its assuredness.

479.Song:Waiting Room

Artist:Fugazi

Album:13 Songs  

That opening bass bar, does it set you on edge? Is the way it seemingly stumbles into the rest of the band a wake-up call? Here we have a punk song rebelling, but not against the system. No, it is poking and prodding you, attempting to get you off of your anxious, depressed, butt. This is why the main guitar riff has a vaguely threatening aura to it, why the band halts for half a bar in the beginning before kicking right back in. It is letting you know, through songwriting technique, that you can overcome your self-imposed limitations. There’s no need for you to wait around, stuck in a morass of malaise, as if the perfect time is going to stumble into you at your convenience. Sometimes, the system that is ripe for rebellion is the one you’ve concocted for yourself. Carpe Diem. “I’m gonna fight for what I want to be/ And I won’t make the same mistakes/ Because I know how much time that wastes”.

478.Song:Someday

Artist:Carpenters

Album:Ticket To Ride

Being a pop star is an exercise in willing public humiliation. The artist is asked to lay bare their soul every time they perform for a crowd, or write a song to be digested in intimate personal settings divorced from intent or control. No wonder some of the biggest stars live tragic lives and sound like it. Karen Carpenter was such a sublime vocal talent, here she leaves you curled up on the floor, balling your eyes out as an emotional wreck. Opening with her brushed drums and Richard Carpenter accompanying her on piano, she soothes us along heartbreaking lyrics such as “One day, when I am able to love you/ I’ll come back from wherever I’ve been to”. The grand orchestral sweeps that come in serve merely as anchor points for her voice to soar over, eventually the volume swells to the point of distorting the track. She remains serene in the middle, like the protagonist of a broadway musical, caught alone in the spotlight.

477.Song:Sleepyhead

Artist:Passion Pit

Album:Manners 

We each process our personal miseries in different ways, for Ayad Al Adhamy, his emotions are almost literally a swirl of barely intelligible screaming sessions. It’s almost how a …”Sleepyhead” would process someone berating them for sleeping in. Hmmm. Perhaps this is why the sample of Irish folk artist Mary O’Hara doesn’t process correctly, sounding rather adroitly like “Please, Unicorn/ Eat tacos with me” instead. However you hear those lyrics, the intent comes across correctly. What follows is a glittering dreamscape, with synths that dance around the speakers and up and down the octaves. The sparkling bells that accompany lines like “They couldn’t think of something to say the day you burst” allow for a lucid suspension in the listener, carrying us away on dreamlike imagery. Here is a song that sounds like nothing else, as if fetched from a dream. “You were one inch from the edge on this bed/ I drag you back, a sleepyhead”.

476.Song:Little Red Corvette

Artist:Prince

Album:1999 

One thing I’ve struggled to reckon with when listening to this song is a tiny, negligible detail of the mix. In the pre-chorus, and occasionally throughout the rest of the song but especially there, we hear a very distorted Prince sing “But it was saturday night, I guess that makes it all right/ And you say” What’ve I got to lose””. Every official studio version of this song has this distortion while some remixes have cleaner vocals, so it was a deliberate choice. For anyone listening in headphones this can be off-putting. Taken in from the perspective of Prince as THE artist that he is, I very much get it. This is a song about a one-night stand, passion can ramp up very suddenly in these situations, silly limitations such as recording levels are no impediment to those emotions. I guess it helps that the rest of the song has a warm bed of synths, frenetic guitars and champagne drums. I Respect the artistry of it, even if my ears start bleeding unexpectedly.