I Need You To Listen To…

450.Song:Rainbow In The Dark

Artist:Dio

Album:Holy Diver

In metal, cheese can be an advantage, as strategic deployment of carefully crafted mountains of it can help cement a classic. Take these precise, oh so eighties, synth leads as a veritable buffet. That isn’t the main strength of this song however, they are merely icing on the cake, rinds on the fromage. No, what makes this song ascend into heavy metal’s illustrious canon is Ronnie James Dio’s fantastic vocal performance, his charisma and edged yelps propelling a tale of darkness and hope to its glorious conclusion: A face melting guitar solo of righteous proportions. The third concert I ever went to was an Iron Maiden event in Edmonton, just a few weeks after Dio’s death in 2010. As Bruce Dickinson sat onstage, a titanic roar of “DIO!” filled the air, an onslaught of noise and a mark of respect to the late giant of metal. That Iron Maiden went on to perform this very song, well, you can call that a send-off of the highest order.

449.Song:Umbrella

Artist:Rihanna ft. Jay-Z

Album:Good Girl Gone Bad 

The pop cliche of the Good Girl Gone Bad shouldn’t have applied to Rihanna, after all she didn’t exactly have a squeaky clean, family orientated image to uphold beforehand. She was famous for exactly the sort of dance music this new album was stuffed with, but a rejection of this song by Britney Spears opened up a curious new mode for Rihanna to capitalize on, pop perfection. This song has no right to be this good. With its gigantic bass line, thundering along with an unstoppable momentum, amidst piles of glittering synth lines, and Jay-Z showing up to introduce us to our new pop queen with an opening verse of immaculate braggadocio. This is one of the great earworms in pop history. Refusing to leave the skulls of anyone who catches its strays, even those who have never heard it can faintly grasp at its demonic energies with the endless memes generated since: “You can hide under my Umbrella-ella-ella”.

448.Song:This Kiss

Artist:Carly Rae Jepsen

Album:Kiss 

If any singer in the history of pop can lay claim to having “Sugary” vocals, it’s Carly Rae Jepsen. Just listen to the ways that her voice curves around words such as “And you know I’ve got a boy”, or how she glides over the pumping bass lines and blasting percussion with “you know you’re just my type”. Producers Redfoo and Matthew Koma maximize those talents, surrounding her with a crunchy, glittering soundscape of synths, sickly sweet electric guitars and a crushed-candy digital sheen. Carly’s vocals are run through a gamut of impact edits, stuttering perfectly on beat, compressed to the sky, allowing even her breaths to hit with maximum emotional impact. All of this combines to create a breathtaking momentum that Carly expertly shepherds us through. While “Call Me Maybe” will have more nostalgic cachet in the future, deservedly so since it’s an undeniable banger, “This Kiss” deserves to also be remembered as a perfect pop gem.

447.Song:Purple Rain

Artist:Prince

Album:Purple Rain 

The legend goes that, upon hearing that his 2007 Superbowl performance was going to have a heavy downpour threaten to overwhelm it, Prince asked the showrunners if they could “make it rain harder”[1]. Listening to the song itself, and viewing that performance in its entirety, you get a sense that Prince was an artist with his own reality distortion field, that famous saying about certain manic geniuses such as Steve Jobs. Whatever was in his head, he willed into being, whatever was in his way was just affirmation of his god-given rights to steamroll over them. So it goes that we have this song, threatening to explode out of the disc into its own stadium field (there are even crowd whistles mixed in near the end as if to prove my point). The generous amounts of gated reverb on the drums, the delays added to Princes’ vocals, the lush guitars, put together it all puts the “Power” in power ballad. “I only want to see you underneath the purple rain”.

446.Song:Mr.Sandman

Artist:The Chordettes 

Album:Single

It can come across as trite, this song describing the ideal man as one with “lots of wavy hair like Liberace”, but there comes a point where we, as a music loving public, must simply accept joy at face value. The Chordettes vocal harmonies throughout this song are so warmly produced that even phrases like “Give him the word that I’m not a rover/ Then tell him that his lonesome nights are over” escape cynicism. Like, seriously, the warm bass line that bubbles up underneath, the occasional Celesta notes popping out like stars in the night sky, the one time where Mr. Sandman himself interjects (“Yes?”); The famous hand-clap rhythm that opens the track giving the whole track the feeling of a bottle of Champagne ready to pop; Those vocal harmonies, there are so many instances throughout where emphasis is placed with aplomb, where reverb is allowed to ring out strategically, that this is one of the great repeat listens in pop history.

445.Song:Unforgettable

Artist:Drake & Young Jeezy

Album:Thank Me Later 

“Let me know/ Let me know” Aaliyah sings, her voice fading into guitar distortion, soft synth pads hit and echo in the background. After Kanye West released 808’s and Heartbreak, it only took a few years for an artist to bring the concepts of that album to their fullest fruition. Drake’s rapping against that background of sparse synths and drum machines, his voice laced with autotune, collates and condenses that album experience into this atmospheric gem. I do have to state that this track is really Young Jeezy’s show, as he takes up the entire back two-thirds of the verses, his rough boomy vocals overtaking Drake’s understated presence in the chorus as well. But the emphasis on sonic beauty wins through in the end as Drake checks back in “I just really hope that you think of me/ cause I’m trying to be unforgettable”. Then Aaliyah joins us one final time, fading back into the warm distorted guitar bath.  Young Jeezy: “Timeless, homie/ Unforgettable”.

444.Song:Grace, Too

Artist:The Tragically Hip

Album:Day For Night 

“Grace, Too” is a gorgeous slow burner, like watching a David Lynch film, the interpretation is left to you while the music hits you at an oblique emotional angle. Hence, the snakelike bass line that opens draws us inwards to a warm bed of acoustic guitars and dry drums, tinged with electric guitar distortion as Gord Downie sings “He said “I’m fabulously rich”/ C’mon just let’s go”. The backing vocals sound like a flock of loons, menacingly hanging over the proceedings as the chorus threatens to prematurely explode, before settling down into a seething calm. “Armed with will and determination/ And grace, too”. Near the end, as Gord Downie devolves into yelping fits, the rest of the band goes slightly psychedelic, arguably psychotic, beefing up the soundscape with wide volume sweeps and guitar feedback. Clearly something ominous is happening, we aren’t quite sure what it is or how to avoid it. Then it just fades out quickly, as all bright lights do.

443.Song:Personal Jesus

Artist:Depeche Mode/ Johnny Cash

Album:Violator/American IV: The Man Comes Around 

At the exact moment I sat down to write this blurb, one of those annoying pop-up ads appeared on the Genius webpage. As this song thundered forward, the ad turned out to be for a series of winter jackets, white puffy things with blood red inner linings. Serendipitously, the jacket opened by an invisible hand to reveal said liner, looking for all the world like an angel being gored and opened up out of the corner of my eye.”Reach out and touch faith”. In this era of digital perfection and AI uncanniness, “Personal Jesus”’s soundscape is all the more powerful. Seriously, that guitar riff is so ploddingly distracting that it has to mean something right? “Someone to hear your prayers/ Someone who cares”. Johnny Cash taps into some spooky vibes on his take, with his faltering voice seeming to grasp at every note, as if he actually needed that personal jesus. Both takes are essential in the ways that they both call for and desperately need to receive absolution.

442.Song:Rich Man Poor Man

Artist:The Gladiators

Album:Back To Roots 

One of the unfortunate realities of living in a first world nation is being insulated against the realities of life in other, less fortunate, polities. The sufferings of others can only be related to in an abstract, exceedingly partial manner. This is why music can help bridge gaps in understanding. Even if differences between languages are still a tough barrier, differences within a language are much easier to bear. This is why, I believe, reggae had such a monumental effect on world music. It was punk via joy, externalised pain turned into spiritual uplift. “Hey, everything will soon be okay/ As soon as the war is over”. The Gladiators, a band as chained to that hypnotic emphasis-on-the-two beat as Reggae’s best, add in a soulful warmth as the group sings in harmony “Don’t cry my brothers/ Don’t cry my sisters/ These tears won’t change the situation”. A deep belief in the power of music is present here “Have some faith/ Have a little faith”.

441.Song:Tornado

Artist:Jonsi

Album:Go 

Reading through Anna Karenina for the first time, I have been struck by how, when given proper form, the inner world of human emotions can help others deal with their own little miseries. As that novel states in the beginning “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, a song like “Tornado” is unhappy in a way that makes it universal. With lovely, churning, piano chords adding a glisten to every chordal movement, and strings chiming in to add a sickeningly sweet emotional foundation, It can be hard not to get taken in by its awesome emotional reach. For sure, Jonsi’s lyrics are a bit of a literal mess “You sound so blue/ You now are gloom”, and they are vague in specifics, but when he reaches the finale “I wonder if I’m allowed/ just ever to be”, you have gone through an emotional gauntlet. His vocals are the serene center, reaching high into the heavens and keeping us there with a shared understanding of all of our little miseries.

440.Song:Stronger

Artist:Kanye West

Album:Graduation 

“You should be honored by my lateness”. Kanye West, the man, the myth, the musical legend. His mind is a myriad. He can hear a Daft Punk song, focus in on a five second chunk and realize its potential for a chart-topping hit. Slowing down said sample turned out to be just one more affirmation of his ego, it had to be his and only his insight that made the song pop. The sound of “Harder, better, faster, stronger” is rich, dynamic and, most importantly, flexible. Its syllabic clarity, and handy pre-processed qualities, allow for a seamless construction in whatever forms needed. Kanye’s unerring ear for an unstoppable hook ensures maximal impact as he raps “Let’s get lost tonight/ You can be my black Kate Moss tonight”. This is braggadocio harnessed to its ultimate conclusion, a perfect sample run down into the muck only to emerge polished like a diamond in the end. This Kanye realizes: “Bow down to my greatness/ ‘Cause right now, thou hast forsaken us”.

439.Song:Here Comes The Rain Again

Artist:Eurythmics

Album:Touch 

“I want to talk like lovers do/ Want to dive into your ocean/ Is it raining with you?” One thing that strikes you about the UK is the constant overhang of heavy grey clouds, always threatening to drown the world in a cascading deluge. Eurythmics, a duo of Scott Annie Lennox and Brit Dave Stewart, composed songs rich in sonic detail but devoid of warmth, as if the rain had seeped into their bones. “Here Comes The Rain Again” is their most complete song, one where the most prominent bass lines are taken up by synth strings in the right speaker and Annie Lennox has full reign of the reverb on the left. It’s a neat setup, provided that the archness of it all doesn’t bury us in procedural songwriting. All credit to the structures then, for the dynamics of the song remain standing despite a constantly shifting foundation. Ingenious note placements, impeccable rhythms on the synth leads and drums, this is one of the pinnacles of 80’s synth-pop.

438.Song:Recite Remorse

Artist:Waxahatchee

Album:Out In The Storm  

Listening to the steady organ crawl, to the guitar glissando’s chiming in every now and then, to Katie Crutchfield’s vocals peering through the musical mists, a funerary air of inevitability is palpable. A very real sense of suspended animation is created as Katie’s lyrics prep us for ascension: “For a moment, I was not lost/ I was waiting for permission to take off”. At each utterance of permission throughout, a new musical element bursts forth, like flowers blooming suddenly in the fields. The most effective of these elements is the bass guitar, played by Katherine Simonetti, which first beckons us along, and then thunders forward, carrying the rest of the band along its mellifluous tides. Always the guitars hover around the soundscape, dropping notes like raindrops glistening in the sun. “I Was out of my body/ Reciting lines of remorse”, lyrics like these anchor us, reminding us of what lies just out of reach, but to never stop reaching.

437.Song:Since U Been Gone

Artist:Kelly Clarkson

Album:Breakaway

By all accounts, Kelly Clarkson arrived to meet with Producers Dr.Luke (Yechh) and Max Martin expecting to collaborate with them on writing the song. It turns out that she had been lied to about the collaborating part [1]. Knowing this is one of those cool factoids that can’t help but improve every moment of listening. When the song is building up with its dry electric guitars, corked electronic drum kits and Clarkson’s codeine vocals, you get the sense that something special is coming. “But since you been gone/ I can breathe for the first time”. There! A moment of pure emotional catharsis. Kelly’s in the moment rage transformed into a generational breakup song. She sounded hurt, because she was, you sound elated, because you are. Nothing seems able to contain her here, in this living, breathing, explosion of a moment. After the final chorus the energy seems to peter out, as if we and her are all coming down from the biggest possible contact high.

436.Song:The Wanderer

Artist:U2 Feat. Johnny Cash

Album:Zooropa

During a break in their meta-universe freak show world tour Zoo TV, U2  had energy to burn and a suddenly available Johnny Cash with which to record this, arguably their most emblematic record. The album Zooropa was notable for how wild its mood swings were, to close on this apocalyptic note was somehow enlivening. Crunchy, arcadey bass, barely there hi-hats and a backing soundscape of angelic oohs and aahs, the sound of it all coming together is so absurd, it should not work at all. As the book Into The Heart notes: “It might sound potentially like a thin joke…until Johnny Cash opens his mouth”. Singing a batch of lyrics inspired by The Book Of Ecclesiastes, Cash pins this song to the heart. Whatever you may think of U2’s undeniable habit of overreaching musically, “The Wanderer” connects it all to their need to reach as high as possible for spiritual uplift, using whatever means necessary; unfathomable alarm blips and all.

435.Song:Space Oddity

Artist:David Bowie

Album:Space Oddity 

“Planet Earth is blue/ And there’s nothing I can do” In his multi-decade career, David Bowie always found a way to connect the loners of the world with a mass audience. In this way he could arguably be called the progenitor, not just of many more great rock acts to come, but of the incisive bite of emo and the humanist grime of grunge. In light of those highly intimate offspring, “Space Oddity” is a track that is pretty far out there in terms of production and lyrical conciseness. Floaty woodwinds collide with soaring saxophones, mimic electric guitars, a constant atmosphere of floaty acoustic guitar bedding and Bowie’s liquid vocals. “This is Major Tom to ground Control/ I’m stepping through the door”. This potent mixture was covered by astronaut Chris Hadfield in 2013, but after Bowie’s death in 2016 it became a touching, everlasting, tribute to the man that found humanity amongst the stars.

434.Song:Shame

Artist:PJ Harvey

Album:Uh Uh Her 

Leave it to PJ Harvey to have the last word on love and hate. She hates how much she has to have the subject of her devotion, recoils from the raw vulnerability she emits. “I’d jump for you into the flame/ Try to go forward with my life/ But just feel shame, shame, shame”. Her voice beds itself in low growls and leaps to operatic yelps, covering every melodic inch of the wretched earth, screaming into herself in the name of love. “You changed my life/ We were as green as grass”. Watching the music video for this song is equivalent to witnessing a ghostly lava lamp undergo a psych evaluation. Seeing PJ Harvey’s face weave in and out of the liquid imagery, hearing the cruddy distortion effect on the guitars, realizing that the drums really are just panned off to one side of the stereo field. All of this is an imperfect mirror held up to our amorphous faces, after all: “Shame is the shadow of love”.

433.Song:Imprisoned (Original Mix)

ArtistShogun & Emma Lock

Album:A State Of Trance-Yearmix 2010

One side-effect of listening to lots of different genres of music for this playlist is simply that so many songs refuse to adhere to naming  and labelling conventions. Take this song, which has at least three mixes that I know of, all of different lengths and structures. At least in this instance I can clearly name the superior version, do all you can to track down the “Original Mix” of at least 7:58 length. Here you can really appreciate all that made Trance such a dominant electronic music genre until dubstep and other forms subsumed it. Emma Locke’s soothing vocals gliding above throbbing bass lines, teasing us along as the synths climax underneath “Throw caution to the wind/ I guess I need something to believe in”. Shogun does relent, allowing the listener crucial space to breathe and appreciate the interlocking chordal and melodic structures that build towards that famous “State of Trance” that the genre has found few equals in

432.Song:If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It)

Artist:AC/DC

Album:Highway To Hell

One of the most astonishing things you come to realize when listening to AC/DC’s output on Highway To Hell, is how strikingly modern it sounds. The production is so crisp, so muscular, that cynicism simply fades away before Angus Young’s titanic riffage. What’s even more baffling is how this song in particular has received almost no love from either the music listening public, or the band itself as it does not appear in any of their “Greatest Hits” collections or sheet music compilations. For sure, it does strike a similar vibe to the classic “It’s A Long Way To The Top If You Want To Rock N’Roll”, and yes it does follow many of the band’s well worn songwriting conventions, but damn; it really is the prototypical deep cut. From the start-stop opening riff, alone with its reverb in the opposite speaker, to Bon Scott’s seismic vocal performance, this is one of the most raucous, most outright fun times you are ever going to have listening to hard rock.

431.Song:No More Tears

Artist:Ozzy Osbourne

Album:No More Tears 

“Crazy Train” gets a lot of the love in Ozzy Osbourne’s expansive discography, but “No More Tears” deserves more thrown its way. It has every bit of what made “Crazy Train” sound epic in its time; with the added benefit of rich, modern, production to throw its weight more judiciously. Guitarist Zakk Wylde gifts the song with some huge slabs of meaty riffs, Ozzy being one of the best at recognizing guitar virtuosos when he hears them. Ozzy himself gives arguably his best vocal performance as his weird, high ranged, style breaks through the sonic walls of metal surrounding him. What gets crazy is how the song simply stops at 3:17 and goes on a Meatloaf-esque piano ride until 4:30, and still never feels like it has skipped any beats as Zakk goes hog-wild in a guitar solo for the ages afterwards. A true epic in an influential career packed with hits, this is Ozzy’s best solo work.

430.Song:Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)

Artist:Neil Young

Album:Rust Never Sleeps

Here is a guitar tone that will put some hair on your chest. Listen to the way it seems to bubble with a boiling intensity, almost frothing over at every moment of emphasis. There’s something to be said about how a live setting can let loose demons that would never fly in a recording studio. Surely the alchemy at work here couldn’t be captured on tape when confined in those boxes, only out in the open does it have the space it needs to pummel you to death. “And once you’re gone, you can’t come back/ when you’re out of the blue and into the black”. Neil Young’s lyrics turn into a merely symbolic gesture, half overridden by events on the stage and half slurred out by his uniquely flat vocals. It would be funny if it didn’t have a deranged energy to it unmatched by all but the most insane of musical geniuses. It might be weird to say this, in light of the recording quality, but I urge you to listen to this with some really good headphones.

429.Song:I Want It That Way

Artist:Backstreet Boys

Album:Millenium

Virtually every site that I visit has the same thing to say about this song, that its lyrics are abstract and vague; too muddled to get a clear handle on their meaning. I find that funny, because the thing about music is that we have a whole song to listen to to impart said meaning to us. I’m autistic and even I can figure out that this song plays as it means to mean. This is clearly in the tradition of The Beatles “Yesterday”, the vagueness is the point, because love is too messy for clarification. Written by pop guru Max Martin and Andreas Carlsson, this is one of the great singles of all time, better alone than its entire parent album. The lush vocal harmonies that punctuate the chorus “Ain’t nothin’ but a heartache” are sublime and the immaculate production allows them to shine.. “You are my fire/ The one desire”, that moment of suspension in the bridge, before the final chorus, is far too beautiful to be unclear. It is what it means to be.

428.Song:Panama

Artist:Van Halen

Album:1984 

Asked to explain why I love Van Halen so much, without the excuse that I was practically raised on them, I took to pointing out the band’s mixing. Eddie Van Halen, one of the most transcendent fretboard talents of all time, used to always be mixed to the left of the stereo field. Stuck in this sonic space, and usually given some reverb on the right both to slightly balance and to give him an outsized sonic presence, it was Van Halen against the world, and he won out every time. “Panama” is one of the band’s biggest bursts of machismo, Diamond Dave’s train-whistle charisma giving us some swagger and the drums pounding precisely to the beat.  The bridge on this monster is the closest rock has ever come to making a guitar sizzle and burn, and Dave sounds like he is close to bursting into flames himself as he works the gear shaft. Everything about this track exudes the sort of intensity that powers the engines of hard rock, a perfect showcase for Van Halen.

427.Song:Born To Run

Artist:Bruce Springsteen

Album:Born To Run 

One thing to recognize about Bruce Springsteen is not that he gave full license to artists to bring every emotion to the top of the wall, even though he surely did, but that he was an artist whose best work almost always teetered on the edge of calamity. Listen to “Born To Run” and sincerely try to tell me that the instrumentalists aren’t hanging on for dear life on the scaffolding, Bruce filling in the structure with a multitude of lyrics.”Just wrap your legs ‘round these velvet rims/ And strap your hands across my engines”.  If the slightest element was out of place this would be an unlistenable sludge. But precisely because everything is just where it needs to be at the moment it needs to be there, this song glitters with a thousand points of light. The audacity of Bruce to insist on himself, to bring out the inner optimist of a lyricist who absolutely cannot allow for brevity or sense, that’s the American Dream. As told by the Boss himself.

426.Song:Blue

Artist:Joni Mitchell

Album:Blue 

Half a century on and we are still finding comfort in songs such as “Blue”, off an album so packed with songs that explore our infatuations and innermost desires that it has now been almost universally recognized as one of the best albums ever made. But here, in “Blue” the song, we find a call from another time and place poking through the mists of eternity. From a time of hippies and road trips, divorced from constant media and emotional saturation. “Crown and anchor me/ Or let me sail away”. People found their ways through depression differently back then, but the song remains the same. Joni Mitchell’s melismatic singing allows each note, each emphasized syllable, to drift alongside the piano chords, beautifully recorded by the way, like a seed borne by the wind.  As time moves on, we may find newer songs, newer artists, that speak to our most vulnerable moments just as well, but I doubt many will better “Blue” on the terms it gives us.