I Need You To Listen To…

275.Song:Sinnerman (Live In New York 1965)

Artist:Nina Simone

Album:Pastel Blues

“Oh, sinnerman, where you gonna run to?” While jazz is a fine genre for exploring the manic flights of musical experimentation, or meditating on some moody feelings, you don’t often get jazz epics as controlled and proportionally explosive as this. Every aspect of the composition expects you, the listener, to allow yourself to be dragged up the workman-like structures, to arrive at the expected denouement as if you couldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else but here; basking in Nina Simone’s vocal mastery as she yells “Power (Power to the lord)”. For someone with only a one octave vocal range, her tonal mastery becomes all the more impressive, even especially as she interacts with the rest of the musicians. At one point they all find themselves stuttering, staccato-like, as if they are ascending physical steps. Even if you aren’t a religious person, you can surely find some inspiration in this spiritually titanic gesture.

274.Song:Nemesis

Artist:Arch Enemy

Album:Doomsday Machine 

Trying to wrap your head around the walloping riffage of Arch Enemy guitarists Michael and Christopher Arnott is like trying to cite poetry in front of a riot. Some will get the meaning, but the rest are here for violence. So it seems that, in the tradition of the best thrash bands, Angela Gossow seems content with blunt ferocity “We are enemy/ Opponent of the system/ Crushing hypocrisy/ Slaying the philistine”. Harnessing all of this sonic power for, essentially, punk energies, Gossow’s growls stand in contrast to the hyper-melodic guitar lines during the chorus, which come in as if to float hope above the anarchy. Listen to how some of the lead guitar elements seem to flicker like the flames of a riot and tell me you aren’t impressed. Female fronted melodic death metal bands are a rarity in a hyper masculine, balls-to-the-wall genre, but Arch Enemy proves here that raw power is gender inclusive. “One for all/ All for one/ We are strong”.

273.Song:Common People

Artist:William Shatner

Album:Has Been 

If you find yourself sniggering at the suggestion that any song featuring William Shatner can be anything but kitschy slop, then I kindly suggest you give this populist anthem a listen. Not only is it vastly superior to Pulp’s original recording, it succeeds in being as sincere as Shatner’s peculiar mode of speaking can allow. Producer Ben Folds, not completely insane and brimming with compositional talent, surrounds Shatner with a preppy power-pop atmosphere, letting the original working class lyrics bristle with vigorous energies. “You will never understand/ how it feels to live your life/ With no meaning or control”. Everything and the kitchen sink from the power-pop palette is thrown into what effectively becomes part-tone poem, part melodic deluge; meticulously placed synths, acidic guitar parts interposed with melodic chordal movements and even a choir thrown in for good measure in the end. Kitsch? Maybe, but profoundly moving nonetheless.

272.Song:93 ‘Til Infinity

Artist:Souls Of Mischief

Album:93 ‘Til Infinity

Sampling the fusion song “Heather” off of the Billy Cobham album Crosswinds (from roughly 5:58 to 6:14 with a pitched up final note near the end and a low pass filter throughout), Souls Of Mischief laid down a backing track so smooth, with vibes so immaculately chill, that it still sits comfortably astride the 808’s and Heartbreaks crowd. Passing the verses around the crew like a good blunt, each member gets their moment and none disappoint as they lay down a blueprint for rap domination. “Yo, Crews are jealous cause we get props/ The cops wanna stop our fun/ But the top is where we’re dwellin’”. What keeps this experience glued together is the camaraderie on display, through each verse you hear the rest of the group cheering the current MC on, adding emphasis where it matters, letting the rhymes breathe when needed. If only the world could be as chill as this group “This is how we chill from 93’ Til [Infinity]”.

271.Song:Sunday Bloody Sunday

Artist:U2

Album:War 

People tend to forget that U2 started out as a post-punk band, with a grim aesthetic and rough sound to match. Their heart was still huge, even if the sound to match their intentions wouldn’t catch up until years later. Thus, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” is the definitive early U2 song. The military style drumbeat that opens the song is front and center throughout, keeping the emotional core focused. The guitars are distorted in such a way as to suggest that they’re close to pulling themselves apart. Distant celtic strings surround Bono as he wails against political violence. Despite the explicitly political nature of the song, the lyrics are careful to not get too specific, (it almost began with the lyrics “don’t talk to me about the rights of the IRA”) enabling it to become a clarion call for the disaffected of any generation of listeners willing to dive deep into U2’s discography, dredging hope out of mankind’s eternal darkness.

270.Song:Wrecking Ball

Artist:Emmylou Harris

Album:Wrecking Ball 

Country music as a genre has found its singers laying bare their hearts for all to hear. Emmylou Harris knew this when she sang the opening lyrics from the Neil Young original “My life is an open book/ you read it on the radio”.  This is a song that sounds achingly delicate, like it’s about to be torn down at any moment by a particularly strong gust of wind, or, dare I say it,  a wrecking ball. Perhaps this is why Larry Mullen Jr., of U2 fame, was called in to do the drum work, any other drummer could have busted the structure beyond repair and his familiarity with subtle arrangements is well utilized here. Glistening guitar arpeggios accompany Emmylou’s fragile vocals, she often finds her voice slightly overpowered in the mix by her background vocalist Neil Young, but she remains the heart of this gorgeous, moving, lament. Her voice slightly slipping of off each syllable, like she is barely holding on within this silvery dreamscape.

269.Song:Whole Lotta Love

Artist:Led Zeppelin

Album:Led Zeppelin 2

Much has been written about how much studio wizardry was packed into this track, but I don’t intend to bore you by repeating such well worn details. Indeed, in an era where anyone with a laptop can turn any song into a digitally warped soundscape, studio effects such as this become less important as time moves on. The reason this song remains vital, essential listening even today, is how all of that manipulation plays into the lived symbology of the listener. After all, we’ve all been in  punch-drunk love, a state of being where our mind reels under the pressure. “Whole Lotta Love” is that gut feeling.  “I’m gonna give you my love/ I’m gonna give you my love? Wanna whole lotta love”,  how else can that famous bridge, where the sonics seem to scrape across the stereo field like a woozy fever, be read? We can talk about the minutiae of production and recording technique, or we can all have a moment together. Live in that moment. Need that love.

268.Song:21st Century Schizoid Man

Artist:King Crimson

Album:In The Court Of The Crimson King 

It opens with a steam whistle-like organ effect, like the song is barrelling towards you with all the momentum that a freight train would imply. Greg Lake’s vocals, laced with distortion, come across like a madman screeching about the latest calamity. The horn section seems unable to come up for air as the notes shoot out with a machine gun cadence, the drums and bass matching this pace note for note, often flitting in and out of hearing like a mental flashback. Much like the mental illness named in the song’s title, “21st. Century Schizoid Man” wallops you with an ever-shifting soundscape, you never quite feel like you are on stable ground for long. Written as a protest against the Vietnam War, it fits into a weird amount of modes of both protest and embodiment. Certainly very few songs achieved the screaming momentum on display here, and fewer still are monuments to all of our sins quite like this.

267.Song:1979

Artist:The Smashing Pumpkins

Album:Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness 

The Smashing Pumpkins make big, beautiful, clumsy records. Even their best works can’t help but get in their own way. Take “1979”. It’s a whole verse too long, a large chunk of its running time is taken up by sonics that are the exact same verse to verse, and Billy Corgan seemingly has to tuck in his chin to be able to hit the lower notes. None of this matters. Perfection is unattainable as the lyrics would seem to suggest, live life as recklessly, as headstrong as you can. “The street heats the urgency of now/ as you see there’s no one around”. Those samey sonics? They are enthralling enough to lull you into complacency, as Corgan’s poetic lyrics build you towards a bridge that releases the tensions of our collective youths. “Faster than we thought we’d go/ Beneath the sound of hope” Coming off an album where Metal epics collided with soft spoken guitar ballads, “1979” was, and remains, the right song, at the right place. Beautifully flawed.

266.Song:Hey Ya!

Artist:Outkast

Album:Speakerboxx/The Love Below

When Andre 3000 asks “What’s cooler than being cool?” and a crowd of his clones answers “Ice Cold!”, you are pinging off of this musical stunt as he descends into “alright,alright,alright,alright,alright, {etc.}”. Is all of this deliberate attempt at constructing joy a bit too much? “You think you’ve got it” he states, as if he is battling with himself via imposter syndrome. Maybe this is why the music video was famous for that aforementioned army of clones, each placed in their assigned position to generate musical harmonies, or why the sound of the song has a bittersweet edge to it beyond its lyrical themes of a failing relationship. Even the rhythmic structure seems to have to halt to catch its own breath as the 6/4 bars collide against the more traditional 4/4 beats (Everytime you hear a handclap in the first verse is where the 6/4 extension comes in). “Shake it like a polaroid picture” captures the essence of these collisions, clumsily and poetically.

265.Song:Bad Reputation

Artist:Joan Jett & The Blackhearts

Album:Bad Reputation  

You can picture whatever raunchy, explosive, chaotic music video you want instantly, the guitar chords are so raucous and the drums so effortlessly bombastic that imagery can’t help but be carried along in your head, and that’s before Joan Jett even opens her mouth. As if you needed any good reason to be here, she belts out lyrics like “A girl can do what she wants to do/ and that’s what I’m gonna do”. Then the chorus where she is accompanied by furious doo-wops “Oh No (no no no no no no no)/ Not me (me me me me me me me)”. Learning all of the lessons of the pop-punk movement, the roaring guitars don’t sound like roughly worn industrial scissors, they are gunpowder propellant to the timeless verse, no more, no less. I suspect it wouldn’t have mattered to Joan, after all “”I’m only doing good when I’m having fun/ and I don’t have to please no one”. Like a mirror-image to Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want To Have Fun”, just louder.

264.Song:The End

Artist:The Doors

Album:The Doors

A lot has been written about the creepy, Freudian aspects of this song (“Mother I want to…Unintelligible screaming), so I will leave that aspect alone for others to elaborate upon. What makes this song so deserving of its high position in music culture is its uncanny ability to feel epic and soaring without actually going over the top, until juuuuust near the end. It earns its climax through mystical guitars darting in and out, the constant, left panned, drums booming occasionally for dramatic effect, and tasteful organs surging throughout. This distinctly dark musical soundscape, soaked in absolutely titanic amounts of reverb, is almost all that is needed as Jim Morrison goes insane over the 11:35 running time.  But we are talking about The Doors here, without Morrison flailing around biblically, they wouldn’t have had this opportunity to flex. Adore this, their crowning achievement. This monument to their own contact highs.

263.Song:Churchill

Artist:Samantha Crain

Album:Kid Face

“My fortunes never made sense/ So I assumed neither did I”  Listening to Samantha Crain’s Kid Face has us reckoning with how many unnoticed talents there are in the world. A record recorded with a budget of saved up tips from her job at a now shuttered restaurant [1], where the fiddle player you hear delicately touching the harmonics throughout this song couldn’t even hear the songs he was recording, having to go off of memory. Making art as warmly personal as this takes courage, the strength to face probable failure and fight through, all for the chance that somebody, anybody, hears your work in its best light. And oh, what a beautiful bed of noise “Churchill” is; Rolling acoustic guitar arpeggiation followed by bass lines so warm you could wrap yourself up in them and drift asleep, with slide guitars slipping into the dreamscape as delicately as gossamer threads. “So blame me for what I cannot finish” you finished it, you won at life.

262.Song:The Gallis Pole

Artist:Lead Belly

Album:BD Music Presents Lead Belly 

Giving an artist from the 1930’s credit for releasing any music at all, in as ridiculously influential a genre as the blues, can get tiring to the casual music listener. Like, how on earth can music from nearly a century ago be as good as music coming out now? And with vastly better recording quality to boot? Answering these questions has become even more vital in this age of convenience, where we can switch songs the instant we don’t feel any good vibes from them. With “Gallis Pole”, I will have to lean hard into the archaic nature of its recording. After all, it’s hard not to get a rustic, spooky, vibe from how the acoustic guitar pierces through the surges of recording noise, Lead Belly’s vocals are the clearest element, even peaking the microphone at times with their dynamics. The theme of escaping the gallows with pure old-fashioned bribery will always catch a revolutionaries ear. As vital as it was upon release all those years ago.

261.Song:The World Has Turned And Left Me Here

Artist:Weezer

Album:Weezer (The Blue Album)

The Blue Album was chock full of genre defining songs, from the wacked out folk rock of “My Name Is Jonas” to the brooding alt-rock of “Say It Ain’t So”, even some nostalgic boomer bait with “Buddy Holly”. However, as influential as all of those records are, I would put this tune as the album’s most quietly influential. Sonically dense, emotionally wounded, fountains of angst that emo would drink deeply from. In its distortion bathed muscly power chords, you can find the seeds that would sprout snarky power pop (Fall Out Boy). In its emotionally naked lyrics and River Cuomo’s soft moanings you can hear the siren calls of the Rainer Maria’s. In its acoustic additives and folksy vibes, Tegan And Sara would find purchase. Rarely do you find a song that encapsulates an entire genre’s worth of stylings, textures and intents. Rarer still  are the tracks that still vibrate with the intensity of their moment. Let the world of emo leave you here, breathless.

260.Song:Autumn Leaves

Artist:Frank Sinatra

Album:Where Are You? 

I could have stuffed this list with Sinatra joints, packed it to the brim with swinging swagger or forlorn ballads. Arguably the most popular and influential performer of the twentieth century, Frank has such a fine command over the emotive power of his vocals that he acquired the nickname “The Voice”. While he did his best work under the auspices of arranger Nelson Riddle, birthing the modern album era in the process, it is with this song, arranged by Gordon Jenkins, that he reaches his emotional peak. Cascading strings and woodwinds replicating the feel of the autumn wind,  swirling leaves around on its currents. Sinatra sings as if he has lost everything, as if love is no longer possible, as the seasons shift to winter’s song. “I miss you most of all/ My darling/ When Autumn leaves/ Start to fall”. Like the omnipresent pop star he was for half a century, one way or another, Sinatra’s voice will continue to glide over us all.

259.Song:Love Story

Artist:Taylor Swift

Album:Fearless

Fearless is an album packed to the brim with perfect country-pop, where the sheer momentum of the songwriting carries you away on tides of awe; “Love Story” succeeds on the level of the songwriting craft and the mythic appeal of its storytelling. Consider the lyric “Marry me Juliet/ You’ll never have to be alone”, the culmination of every arc that the song has been frothing the audience up to. The key even modulates upward to give it an extra soaring push towards its stadium sized conclusion. Whatever flak you might give Taylor Swift for her vocal abilities at this point in her career, the aching vulnerability and breathy fragility she imbues into every syllable can’t help but give the whole affair a sense of emotional authenticity often lacking in Country’s usual aesthetics. While she would later cash in on the goodwill engendered with songs like these in her pop career, let us never forget that Taylor Swift was a Country artist first.

258.Song:Another Man Done Gone (Live In NYC)

Artist:Odetta

Album:At Town Hall 

Odetta is an artist forever paired with the Civil Rights movement, the list of accolades relating to such on her wikipedia entry is impressive, her level of influence on blues and folk even more so. But we are not here for me to recite the wiki, we are here because we want to listen to great music, regardless of context. So I give you this, this most stark of performances. Her, alone, before a crowd, baring her soul as a monument to all souls lost to injustice, nothing but a steady handclap to accompany her.. This is the most wounded vocal performance in music history; you get the real sense that the audience simply couldn’t afford to breathe, lest they disturb the solemnity of moments like “I didn’t know his name”. When her voice devolves into a primal whine on lines like “They killed another man”, the abyssal depths to which racism can carry a society comes into full view. An unforgiving, unforgettable, recording.

257.Song:The Times They Are A-Changing

Artist:Bob Dylan

Album:The Times They Are A-Changing 

It’s curious that Bob Dylan, a man who famously hated being dubbed ‘The Voice Of A Generation’, would find himself recording a song so unabashedly an anthem. According to the book Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions (1960-1994), music critic Tony Glover asked him why. Dylan responded “It seems to be what the people like to hear”. How can something born from such a cynical mindset sound as vibrant and alive as when it was first recorded? How can those guitars sound so crisp and bell-like, never interfering with Dylan’s uniquely nasally treble? “For he who gets hurt will be he who has stalled/ The battle outside raging” Maybe this proves that maybe, just maybe, Dylan knew the power of his voice. As the Civil Rights movement raged around him, he knew he needed to give them something to work with, a rallying cry for a revolutionary time. However sincerely he meant it, there’s no denying how well he succeeded.

256.Song:Helena Beat

Artist:Foster The People

Album:Torches 

“Helena Beat” is the sound of someone tackling their inner demons head on. Mark Foster certainly has a honed ear for weird constructions, as every element of this song seems on the verge of vomiting. Consider the drums, Mark Pontius’s performance here suggests a rhythm one wrong beat away from collapsing the scaffolding. The wildly frenetic granular synth leads that flail about throughout this track are perfect for capturing the mentality of a shut-in nutbar, various synth pads are tonally wobbly, detuning even as they are being played. The closest this song gets to conventional is the bridge that feels like it is leading you on towards your own destruction. Coming from a band most famous for a song about a school shooting, “Helena Beats” showcases a healthier way to vent your frustrations about yourself and your capabilities. Even if things get really weird, you can always write a song capturing your unique view of the world.

255.Song:Dreams

Artist:Fleetwood Mac

Album:Rumours

The best music often flows like a dream, from the liquid ethers of our imaginations, the aim is to extract what we can from fleeting dreamscapes. This is what apparently happened for “Dreams” in the recording studio[1]: Stevie Nicks was bored in the studio and asked for some keyboards to noodle around on, only to come back to the recording sessions with “Dreams” ready to go. Demo’ing the track before the rest of the band, they all started joining in. The resulting guide vocal from Nicks was apparently good enough that she couldn’t repeat its magic, despite repeated urgings from Audio Engineer Ken Caillat. Sometimes all you can extract from the creative mind is the golden thread that enlivens the capabilities of your collaborators. With “Dreams”, we have something approaching perfection coming from an imperfectly recorded test recording, with the rest of the band sounding as warm and comforting as a soft bed. Magic!

254.Song:Protection

Artist:Massive Attack

Album:Protection 

It is my humble opinion that Tracey Thorne had the most gorgeous singing voice of all time in the 90’s and early 00’s. The many ways her dulcet tones wrapped themselves around every syllable, every register of her contralto dripping like honey through the headphones. Small wonder that Massive Attack partnered with her for this track, which might also contain the best verse intro ever; just listen to how the drums decay out at :40 and how she sings “This girl I know/ needs some shelter”. Chills!. This trip-hop epic, lasting almost eight minutes, finds the group crafting just the right atmosphere for her voice, that voice of angels, to glide over the proceedings. Bending gender conventions throughout, she alternates identifying as a boy and a girl as the lyrics demand, the song finds middle ground in the ever shifting sexual dynamics of the dancefloor. “I Stand in front of you/ I’ll take the force of the blow/ Protection”.

253.Song:Them Bones

Artist:Alice In Chains

Song:Dirt 

Very few times has the name of both a song and its parent album come together in symbolic unity as well as on this pummeling tune. The opening guitar riff really does sound like shovels hacking away at the dirt, trying to uncover some unfathomably evil bones underneath. “Some say, we’re born/ Into the grave” Layne Stayley’s vocals harmonize demonically as the guitars shift into a different mode, exuding a buried menace as they strike out five paces, only to find themselves hurried in the chorus, as if they are unprepared for what they have dug up. Writer and Guitarist Jerry Cantrell wanted to write a song that confronted mortality, taking as grim a topic as death head on like this serves as a life-affirming method, even if Layne Stayley would ultimately provide his own grim epitaph for the band, and this song in particular. Small wonder then when he sings “I feel so alone/ Gonna end up a big ol’ pile of them bones”, we believe him.

252.Song:Here’s Where The Story Ends

Artist:The Sundays

Album:Reading, Writing & Arithmetic 

“It’s that little souvenir, of a terrible year/ That makes my eyes feel sore”. Maybe it’s a good thing this song was released before the shoegaze and grunge waves hit the world like a hurricane, the traumas eeked out of those desolate, screechingly loud soundscapes would certainly have overwhelmed this delicate structure. Harriet Wheeler’s waif-like vocals bounce around with enough energy to fool a casual listener into believing that a fairy-tale world exists that the jangly guitars are helping to conjure. The lyrics put a halt to that. How can it not with lines like “I can see how people look down/ They’re on the inside”? This is cafe-core, a unique dream pop aspect that appeared in the late eighties and was extinguished by the loudness wars of the 90’s. Suzanne Vega with “Tom’s Diner”, Edie Brickel with “What I Am”, all facets of this observational diamond, brought to its fullest fruition here.

251.Song:Fever

Artist:Elvis Presley

Album:Elvis Is Back! 

“Never know how much I love you/ Never know how much I care”. The timeless appeal of Elvis Presley was multi-layered. On one hand you had his intense physicality and showmanship, on the other you had his undeniable singing talents. Here, he showcases all that made him the biggest rock star in history. All apologies to miss Peggy Lee, whose version of this song is recommended by most music critics as the definitive take, but Elvis definitively steals the spotlight here. The way his voice slinks up and down, warbling at all the right times, the notes he chooses to linger on, the ones he cuts off at the moment of tension. He lathers up the listener, seduces them with sheer charisma. “What a lovely way to burn” . The backing bass and percussion exist merely to drift along his tantalizing tides. Say all you want about other singers takes on this jazz classic, no one, not a single one, has convinced me they care about your needs as much as the King.