Brandon thinks this list is "boorish and untimely"
And, on to the not-awaited, completely unrequested epic redux. Download links at bottom.
1.Bon Iver – Re-Stacks
As I've noted many a time, the last line in this song, Your love will be / safe with me is probably my favorite lyric of all time, the way I want to be when I'm most fully my ideal self. This song balances itself with infinite gentleness on the tip of a pyramid, never quite resolving, a phone lifted subtly in the silence of the track's very end. This song has everything a favorite song needs: obscurity, beauty, accessibility. It's just ephemeral enough to let you in immediately, without gorging to the point of saturation.
2.Third Eye Blind – Semi-Charmed Life (album version)
The velvet it rips / in the city we tripped / on the urge to feel alive. I can't listen to this song if I'm not drinking with my little sister. Luckily, we drink together on a regular base, and when the urge to manufacture some enthusiastic nostalgia strikes, nothing suffices as effectively as this piece of adrenaline-laced art for children of the nineties. The four right chords could make me cry, you know. We'll scream it out; we'll wake the upstairs neighbors and the downstairs neighbors from jumping up and down. There isn't a bad lyric here. I'm not listening when you say goodbye.
3.LCD Soundsystem – All My Friends
No song gives me such a simultaneous rush of enervating sadness and happiness. Even though half of the lyrics don't make any sense, somehow this song contains the potential ecstasies of being in the world with people. That's saying a lot. The galloping multi-tracked piano beat and the nostalgia-laced poetry hits me on every level. I wish I weren't as nostalgia-prone / regret-scarred as I am, but I still aspire to James Murphy's I wouldn't trade one stupid decision / for another five years of life.
4.The Beatles – Golden Slumbers – Carry That Weight – The End
It's probably a cheat to collapse these songs into one, but, no one ever listens to only of them at a time, and they lead directly in to each other, and are (tenuously, I'll admit) linked lyrically, and most importantly, I get to make the rules. The muscular call for sleep against a pervasive homelessness on Golden Slumbers sets the tone; the regret-inflected Carry That Weight bursts into The End's frantic jam and tempo increase. If we're homeless by definition from which the only respite is sleep; the question: Are you going to be in my dreams? emerges naturally. The End, featuring arguably the finest drum solo, riff, and guitar solo of the Beatles' career, finally dissolves into the diaphanous final message, and ultimate philosophy of the Beatles, if only ever loosely implemented: the love you take is equal to the love you make.
5.Josh Ritter – To The Dogs or Whoever
There aren't many songs that inspire in me such confidence of the goodness of life, the inevitability of beauty's return in the face of the failure that undermines everything. Though half of the lyrics reference pointlessly obscure Americana & whatnot (such as Joan of Arc), the other half is pure poetry. A boat that could love the rocks and the shore / could you love me like the crosses love the nape of neck. And who can resist yelling the chorus—I thought I heard somebody calling. In the dark I thought I heard somebody call—no one!!!!
6.Azure Ray – Rise
There aren't many iterations of love that I find compelling. In the face of failure, death, the dissipation of desire, every mechanism (and there are plenty) that steadily tears us apart, somehow this song patches over the sadness, takes responsibility, and emerges with acceptance of loss. Rise is perfectly gentle, resigned, as ethereal as love itself. As everyone knows, romance is tied by necessity to the possibility or the inevitability of failure; somehow, when I'm hearing this song, I don't mind what is lost or the losses to come.
7.Jens Lekman – Black Cab
Loneliness in its purest distillation. The solipsism, arrogance, insecurity, semi-suicidal recklessness, and self-absorption of loneliness. I love every lyric in this song. If I could get away with it, I'd put this on every mixtape I'll ever make. You don't know anything / so don't ask me questions / you don't know anything / so turn the music up / and keep your mouth shut.
8.The National – Fake Empire
Bluebirds on our shoulders. The National's 3rd album, Boxer, is one of the best albums to come out in the last ten years, and the first track is worth the price of the whole CD. A lot is made of the National's curious mix of mythic imagery and personal evocations, and this song brings them together perfectly, a clanging piano melody, the tintinnabulation to end the song, the beat-anticipating drums. No other song so perfectly evokes winter to me, the loss of love.
9.M Ward – Here Comes the Sun Again
Another perfect blend of battle-scarred optimism and serene melancholy. M Ward doesn't say much, talking about weather and driving. This is one of those simple songs I want to play first when I meet someone new.
10.Wilco – Poor Places
This song is a perfect example of what made mid-career Wilco great: meticulous, with a painstaking commitment to concentrated production, a deconstructed melody. Beginning in what seems to be a hospital, over the steady beep of a life-support machine; through four successive changes of modulation and instrumentation, pianos and guitars trading the melody; a hot dissonant fourth carried through the first two minutes of the song, building to the climax two minutes in (which never does exactly resolve), dissolving finally without resolution in a wave of electronic noise.
11.Townes Van Zandt – To Live is to Fly
This song isn't very interesting musically. But is philosophically perfect. I subscribe to every lyric, even if taken line by line it's nothing more than a mess of cliché. Van Zandt's delivery is world-weary and worn-out, and has the unvarnished feeling of hard-earned truth. Risky, inimitable; somehow, I love it.
12.Third Eye Blind – Jumper
I break eardrums singing this. Who doesn't?
13.Bob Dylan – Simple Twist of Fate
Of all the paucity-of-love songs in the world, this has to be one of the purest distillations. Dylan recaps the entire relationship (one night), and this encapsulation, this mix of idealizing memory, instant-and-then-gone expectation, thwarted communication and the temporal nature of desire—ah, it's beautiful. He told himself he didn't care / pushed the window open wide / felt that emptiness inside. I've been there; fuck it, sometimes I think I live there.
14.The Hold Steady – Stuck Between Stations
Massive. So epic, it's heroic. She was a damn good dancer but she wasn't all that great of a girlfriend. And twenty other one-liners. As big as all of classic rock and fully literate.
15.Israel Kamakawiwo’ole – Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Everybody's heard it, everybody's cried to it.
16.Belle & Sebastian – The Fox in the Snow
Who doesn't dig the pure adolescent existential infuriated lassitude of this song? Even now, from time to time, I completely empathize with the boy on the bike: As you cycle round the town / you're going up / you're going down / you're going nowhere. It's not as if they're paying you / it's not as if it's fun / at least not anymore. Not to mention that the melody is achingly beautiful, laid down with fingerpicked guitars, pianos and violins.
17.Jenny Lewis – It Wasn't Me
Guilt is a motherfucker, and Jenny Lewis's lullaby description-of/critique-of/skewering-of her body of self-destructiveness and regret resonates fully with me. It wasn't me / I wasn't there / I was stone drunk / it isn't clear / and it doesn't count / cause I don't care. But of course everyone knows you do. It's still nice to hear someone sing about, though.
18.The Mountain Goats – No Children
It's rare that a song this unvarnished is ironic and bemused. Pure hilarity and unstinting reality all at once. I hope I cut myself shaving tomorrow / I hope it bleeds all day long. When you've been squeezed dry of every last drop of concern, and you don't give a fuck anymore, the only thing left is sarcasm and blunt dissociation. Darnielle's classic track is designed to make disaster seem aggressively fun.
19.The Shins – Those to Come
Apparently, I'm drawn to songs that make reference to relaxed morning-after underwear-lounging. Something bad inside me / went away. I could do without the wide-lens existential ruminations on the ongoing nature of human life that serve to close the song, but, really, this is a perfectly beautiful track. The bearers of all good things arrive. Not to mention the melody is Cat-Stevens perfect.
20.The Eels – Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues
Acceptance is hard. Getting thrilled about the state of the world is even harder. Especially when you're reciting a laundry list of desolation, waste, dissociation, insanity, regrets, and failure. But E somehow makes it happen. I like juxtapositions like this. I like feeling grim with the uncompromising truth and excited about the beauty of life at the same time. Goddamn right / It's a beautiful day.
21.Sufjan Stevens – Casimir Pulaski Day
Sufjan is annoyingly sincere. Still, no song reminds me of growing up more than this—probably the most tragic and intricately literary of any song I know. Ergo, no song has made me cry harder (with the exception of Verdi's Requiem, and that was a long time ago), and that counts as a lot in my book. The fact that I have to respect the music, and that it's unambiguously beautiful—well, that's just bonus.
22.The New Pornographers – From Blown Speakers
This song, less than three minutes long, culminates in one explosive, ecstatic moment 2/3rds of the way through. I bang enthusiastically on my air-snares and double-kick air drums. A perfect illustration of tension and release. I can't really recommend it for any other reason: I don't really know what they're talking about, though I've sang the lyrics many a time.
23.Wilco – Jesus Etc.
The definitive Wilco track; a triumph of old-fashioned songwriting. The stars are alternately rising and setting. You were right in both cases. At this moment, genius is the art of taking the unsaid obvious and making it heartrending: Our love is all we have.
24.Cat Power – (Can't Get No) Satisfaction
The funny thing about this Rolling Stones cover is that Chan never actually sings the famous chorus. Quite literally, the listener gets no satisfaction. There is no rock-and-roll in this track: one hears an empty room and a sad woman with her guitar. But this subtraction only highlights the brilliance of Jagger's lyrics, the cynical emptiness at the heart of the rock star experience. Beautiful.
25.Wilco – Handshake Drugs
Best lyric ever: If I ever was myself / I wasn't that night.
26.Jesus & Mary Chain – Just Like Honey
Shoegaze love song. Everyone not bored or offended was rocked into a stationary frenzy of Borgesian nostalgia-for-the-present by the conclusion of Sophia Coppola's Lost in Translation, and, as with so many poetry-vulnerable filmgoers, those trawling Tokyo shots are linked indelibly with Just Like Honey's regret-laced evocations. As with Nietzsche and his friends, my love for this song rests in my inability to qualify it. So I'll stop with the trying.
27.Alexi Murdoch – Orange Sky (EP version)
I prefer the super-slow percussion-and-piano-free EP version of this song (almost impossible to find at this point, though it was featured on a few soundtracks in the early double-oughts) to the over-produced souped-up easy-listening adult-top-40 album version. My heart's been broken / sometimes my mind is too strong. Even if your heart's not broken, when you're soaking in this song, it is. Chalk one up to mirror neurons. Mirror neurons make life worth living.
28.Etta James – Stormy Weather
Etta's voice is too triumphant to let any song wallow in depression, misery-riddled lyrics be damned; a doo-wop piano and sashaying orchestrations lift the track further. I sense a pattern emerging: I like exultant expressions of disappointment.
29.Regina Spektor – Fidelity
I don't participate in the mass-hysteria Regina Spektor lovefest with your average simian-smart neu-indie Grey's Anatomy-viewer, but, if you concentrate when you listen, you'll love this song's perfect demonstration of the craft of meta-love-song, mercifully free from most of the cutesy lyrical ephemera that mar most of Spektor's tracks. The pizzicato strings that comprise most of the musical backings behind warm (if synthesized) horn sections make for a flawless combination of levity and warmth, meshing exactly with Spektor's pitch-and-tempo perfect stairstepping chorus.
30.My Morning Jacket - Golden
A song about driving and wasting time. And being in bars, dreams, feelings, heaven, and other things. If you like driving at night (my favorite thing), along deserted highways (favorite squared), while sinking into self-satisfied nostalgia (cubed), this song is perfect. Reverb'd to the max, and a steel guitar, which aren't recipes for easy-access joy, when hitched to the pitter-patter car-tire beat and Jones' soaring vocal instrument, well, it works.
31.The Mountain Goats – This Year
Ready for the bad things to come. My nostalgia alone would demand the inclusion of this song. But beyond this is a triumphal future-tense assertion of the value of life. My broken house behind me / and good things ahead / a girl named Kathy wants a little of my time. I know of no more uncompromisingly anticipation-oriented articulation of self-determination. And the denouement: There will be feasting / and dancing / in Jerusalem next year. Fuck yeah. One of the most-quoted-by-me and inspiring songs I know.
32.The Strokes – The End Has No End
Not the best Strokes song, maybe, but, it's a long-time favorite for reasons that remain obscure to me. Casablancas delivers subtle insults, that's always appealing. It's got the requisite detached Strokes delivery and the frantic shouting and fuzzed-out guitar solo, too. The source of my “I'm relaxed” mantra: I can do a lot of things / but I can't do that. I recall clearly at 18, listening to this song for ten consecutive hours, and I still dig it when it comes on.
33.Spoon – Black Like Me
Spoon's minimalistic acoustic-symphony aesthetic culminated on the completely effective Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga album. Black Like Me, the album's closer, is a minor masterpiece of the effective culmination of ten thousand minute production decisions: the rotating strings, indescribable interplay of clattering piano and droopy horns, the simple riffs and the tension built, stretched, tattered, and finally resolved in a Day in the Life crashing orchestral melisma. And, for reasons that I don't want to understand, All the weird kids up front / tell me what you know you want is a personally incisive lyric.
34.Sam Cooke – A Change is Gonna Come
Essential.
35.Weezer – El Scorcho
From the perspective of “Rock History” maybe the Sweater Song is more necessary, less contingent (and at least equally ass-kicking) but, this whining, shouting, garbled track is the epitome of a successful pre-emo personal-general description-of, plea-for and consideration-of a frontman's adolescent love, with enough whimsy to avoid the ponderousness and self-seriousness of “love” as commonly construed, while retaining an unparalleled heartfelt shriek.
36.Scissor Sisters – I Can't Decide
This song isn't representative of my tastes at-large in the slightest: a dance-y, angry, bitter, enthusiastic tumultuous-love murder-fantasy. But, you have to dig this ironic takedown of desire, the almost impossible balance of bemused indifference and hysterical mania. And when the chorus comes on, with a big anticipatory inhalation, circus-clown percussive asterisks, fuzzed out voice effects and frantically picked banjos: it's damned catchy and hilarious, the perfect antidote to heartbreak. I won't deny I'm going to miss you when you're gone. Indeed.
37.Shearwater – The Hunter's Star
An underrated contemporary classic of piano-rock mopery. Unabashedly saturated in big emotions, simultaneously sad and lifted, as necessary to me as the Raindrop prelude or the 2nd movement of the Sonata Pathetique. Jonathan Meiburg's eccentric vocal modulations lend a purely musical effect here, deliciously balancing against the warm woodwinds and swirling piano chords.
38.Radiohead – No Surprises
Probably Radiohead will be remembered for their bleak vision of contemporary capitalistic dissociation (and No Surprises' theme of suicidal alienation-resignation certainly participates in that project), but they are equally profound musically, picking out a soaringly beautiful melody from a huge empty space. Strictly to be played after midnight.
39.Iron & Wine – The Trapeze Swinger
A nine-and-a-half minute utterly heartbreaking acoustic ode to lost love, the passage of time, the shambling elegance of life in the world, objects filled with angles of brown twilight. Dylanesque in its melodic repetitiveness, a scale moving endlessly downward, but expanded with the constant addition of subtle instrumental complications: a doubled tambourine here, a walking upright bassline there, untuned box pianos, an entire mad palate of run-down layered gothic noises. Pays huge dividends case of preexisting latent sentiment.
40.Vampire Weekend – Ottoman
The pizzicato chamber strings epiphanies of Walcott appear here in my favorite form, without the annoying piano clanging. Yes, every infuriating bourgeoisie ballroom upperclass reflex is in full jerk here, but, it's so sweet and seamless, full of the confidence of craftsmanship, you can't resist.
41.Tom Waits – Mr. Siegal
Take the violent nihilism of swordfishtrombones-era Waits and mix with the biggest Howlin' Wolf-style bluesy-Americana rollick around the blue guitar and piano, and you've got Mr. Siegal. When it comes on, I can't help but grin, then leer, then conduct the air-orchestra, punching the air. Hearing this song live inspires an irresistible joy, a mandated saunter. If you were me, you sing along like you're really curious: Why are the wicked so strong?—taking up the mantle of unrepentant evil for a walk around the block, feeling the perfect power of unabashed wickedness for yourself.
42.Nick Drake – At the Chime of A City Clock
Weird little beautiful song. Punctuated by saxophones and a full string section. Obscure ruminations on the nature of beauty, urban isolation, death, a blurry protagonist's psychological disorders. The chorus is a brilliant chord progression: ; the entire song is infused with a piquant, resigned inevitability. In the light of a city sky / find a face that's fair / and keep it by your side. Nice, right?
43.Rilo Kiley – Science vs. Romance
Early-period Jenny Lewis was obsessed with the constituent aspects of love, ruminations delivered with a kind of exaggerated vulnerability and self-conscious world-weariness. The cutesy vocal stylings are maybe too twee for some palates, but, her delivery of it's cold out there / but I'm telling you / I'm lonely too, broken chord, minor sixth whole tone scale, is perfect.
44.Mason Jennings – Nothing
No song lends itself to postmodern critiques of meaninglessness and a turning against silence quite like Mason Jennings' pre-Jack Johnson-ing stab at comprehensibility in the face of the every kind of failure, from things unsaid to brown tap water. Jennings here turns to the simplicity of his broken heart, a “new place” that “seems strange,” an unabashed embarrassment. Please know what I mean / When I say / Nothing. Perfect. Plus you can sing along and feel pure happiness.
45.The Hold Steady – Your Little Hoodrat Friend
The Hold Steady's work pre-Boys And Girls In America is challenging and (somewhat) abrasive. A huge bar band (complete with two-headed guitar and honky-tonk organ) blasting Thin Lizzy-style jams. And the Craig Finn doesn't sing so much as he slur-preaches. And the songs are convoluted multi-page mythologized poems about adolescent parties, fantasy-images of lost loves, where the fucked-forever mentally unbalanced lunatics and wannabe-hard suburban kids just wading into voyeuristic drug addictions meet. But this shit is just profound, I just fucking love it, even when the mythology would take too much work to figure out. It burns being broke / and hurts to be heartbroken / and always being both must be a drag.
46.Modest Mouse – The World At Large
Did I want love? Did I need to know? Perfect philosophy for your dissociated po-mo-obsessed non-achievement-striving inveterate starter-over. Even if starting over's not what life's about.
47.Neko Case – Star Witness
Star Witness is a perfect piece of songwriting, featuring a definitive and effortless and soaring vocal performance by Case. Definitive understated pop music, unwrapping a tragic love story line by line. A rough causality of destruction is allayed, finding the universe itself at fault: Trees break the sidewalk / the sidewalk skims my knees.
48.Fleet Foxes – Meadowlarks
On an album of perfectly crafted acoustic artifacts, Meadowlarks finds the Fleet Foxes pushes into open spaces, a more straightforward chamber pop elegance. Every movement in this song is crafted to nudge this cloud of arched sound forward: the sweeping hums of the chorus, the modulation in the third verse, the rising arpeggios of guitar at the end. Robin Pecknold's imagery is characteristically pastoral and archaic, punctuated by existential lamentations. What's here is essential: anything else would be gratuitous.
49.The Shins – New Slang
I'm looking in on the good life / I might be doomed never to find. The common and abominable practice of naming the song after the least-defensible lyrical abstraction contained therein so as to lend said abstraction some nascent symbolic heft or generosity is in full effect here. But that doesn't even rise to the level of quibble. New Slang is too perfect to me to bear conversation, so I'll quote it: If you took to me / like a gull takes to the wind. The regret—the fact that she didn't—well, so what? The rest of our lives will fare well anyway.
50.Grizzly Bear – Two Weeks
Layers of indomitable pinking piano pop with all the spaciousness and harmonic intertextuality we've come to expect from Grizzly Bear make for a delightful and almost necessary construction.
51.Panda Bear – Take Pills
Half of this song is a drawn out introduction; the other half is an exultant lullaby on top of a collection of looped sounds, skateboards, bubbling water, washing machines, a subway arrives and leaves. Over before it begins. The sound in this song bounces around a huge open space, as if Lennox set up his microphones in the back of an airplane hanger and sang top-of-lungs across the open space; made to be heard above shafts of light and empty concrete floors.
52.Stars – Your Ex-Lover is Dead
This conceit behind this song has fail written all over it. Duets are miserable; relationships long-since-over are boring; I-win and you-lose lyrics are annoying; salvaging something serendipitous from the larger wastes is some combination of infuriating arrogance and cloyingly simplistics. Plus there's these lavish romantic orchestrations and Sarah Records guitar lines: a turn-off. But, actually, this song is fucking awesome, even if it takes a few listens to groove with the somewhat herky-jerky melody. And the final verse is the purest expression of sane acceptance in the face of the failure of love. I gave what I gave / I'm not sorry I met you / I'm not sorry it's over. You just have to listen to it.
53.Andrew Bird – Tables and Chairs
Songs are good for launching obvious truths to the space of emotional engagement. Tables and Chairs performs this function for me. The lyric Just don't let the human factor / fail to be a factor has always dropped on my ears with the weight of revealed truth, even if it only means that we must be wide in our vision. As I've grown older I've come to appreciate the rest of this song, too. Even the whimsical utopia/dystopia description of a post-financial landscape in the song's second act is refreshingly light.
54.Titus Andronicus – My Time Outside the Womb
You'll spend the rest of your life trying to forget / that you met the world naked and screaming / and that's how you'll leave it. New Jersey garage rock delivered in Conor Oberst's tremulous tones. A three-minute autobiography heavy with epigrammatic existentialism and fear-saturated street-smarts. One mistake is all that it takes.
55.The Eels – Grace Kelly Blues
The actress gave up all her old dreams / and traded up. The Eels are preoccupied with articulated affirmations of happiness to the point that one understands viscerally the shadow of loss behind their surface-level affirmations of happiness. Grace Kelly Blues recovers the ambiguity and disaster, the tragedy of regular life in a series of keenly observed set pieces. When E describes himself: I think you know / I'll be okay it's impossible to ignore his skepticism about the nature of happiness. Yes, but what does being okay look like, in a world this demanding of melancholy?
56.The Beatles – Here There and Everywhere
The Beatles are known as purveyors of love songs, but this is the only one I'd ever play and believe and feel with the same part of my mind that believes in a slow, strong constant iteration of love. That it espouses codependency is secondary: these harmonies are pure love.
57.The Doors – Riders on the Storm
Pretend with me that you've never heard this song before. That's not easy: like Fur Elise or the Moonlight sonata, so ubiquitous, obvious, and saturating, its slick genius is easy to ignore, and that it is weirdly definitive (just of what, I'm not quite sure) is clear to me. A masterpiece of atmospherics, with Morrison's flat baritone (and hidden whispery hissing double voice), noodling keyboards & bass, washed out rain & thunder effects, crazed keyboard solo, glockenspiels; and that riff, fast and controlled and rotating, and then the sinister hi-hats: hyperactive tic tic tic tic tic as fast as rain, the brain-squirming actualized in the track. Imagine George W Bush, bourbon in hand, riding in the back of a huge open-air SUV into a flat hot Texas thunderstorm, while god blasts this track from a height of two-hundred feet. Not to be all crazie-go-nutz or anything.
58.Tapes ‘n’ Tapes – Insistor
Running through this song is a fine wire of high tension. Galloping drums, torn acoustic noodles on guitar, surf baselines, hollowed out, crazed, nonsensical vocals. The chorus demands a fit of shouting, bailbonds, Harvard Square, holding hips, all that. But it's the bridge, whispered and rushed, then muttered, then shouted, yips, shouts, then the vocals are doubled, and it's all over. An infuriated paean to the end of irresistible love.
59.My Bloody Valentine – Sometimes
Washed-out loops of white-noise-distorted electric guitars beneath a simple strummed acoustic line create a canvas of slow-moving sonic textures, achingly slow, adrift. Keven Shields's buried ruminations on love, waiting, hiding, being alone, floors, up and down, are simply countermelodic spikes in the equalizer.
60.The Magnetic Fields – Strange Powers
Stephen Merritt has a genius for love, and an amazing literary talent for setting the scene of love, displaying a flair of feeling. When we kiss it feels / like a flying saucer landing. The basso-profundo of Merrit's reverberations juxtaposes beautifully with the drum machine and jangly guitar, but, the magic of Strange Powers rests in the Merrit's portrayal of the anticipation of love (so superior to whatever might be construed as the real thing)—a world-weary set of cultural considerations and the sweet self-conscious openness of the good things to come.
61.JJ – Things Will Never Be The Same Again
This song seems to exist on a higher plane, a higher register, not deigning to even approach the earth. Clouds of sparkling violins lead us in and out of each verse, vague hiccuping tribal drums, 32nd shakers, a sashaying piano bridge, and a voice that seems to be beamed from clouds, singing about the passage of time. This ship will still sail on / long after I'm gone. I can't resist this kind of thing.
62.Man Man – Whalebones
Hold a tenor sax note for seven seconds, aaaaand, in a split-second, a minor seventh chord broken doing down: BAM: a slow lope of weaving mitzvah-vaude-rock and Honus Honus's 3-pack-a-day croak. But this song transcends its mazey instrumentalizations, offering up a poignant narrative about love & dependency, the bizarre spaces of human need. In a repeated chant above the final verse, a light soprano counterpoint offers: Who are we / to love at all escaping the narrative, implicating everyone in a global frailty.
63.Emily Haines – Winning
Haines in her solo efforts puts together surprisingly a unfeted lyrical portrait of the bizarre little internal spaces that make up much of consciousness, describing complaints, conditions of satisfaction, conclusions, and categories of approaches to experience, if that makes sense. In other terms, this is non-cute slow romantic-era classical solo piano with impressionistic vocals.
64.My Morning Jacket – I Will Be There When You Die
Apocryphally said to have been recorded in an East-Kentucky grain silo, with noticeable tape-hiss and almost painful sudden increases in volume when Jim James supports the high notes. The one-off feel of this recording, the atmosphere, well, that's nothing more than a feature of what would be a great song recorded in any pro studio. But somehow essential; the sparse fragility of these tones are a strange, delicate gift.
65.Regina Spektor – On the Radio
Spektor is so sincere that even when she's singing pure blended nonsense we let it slide, and when she's singing about stuff that seems to mean something, it comes down with the weight of revealed heartbreaking truth. Besides, she knows her songcraft, breezing past the bullshit and lingering on the good stuff, with a simple arrangement that privileges the beauty of the melody without the baggage of mainstream pop's bulky histrionics.
66.Conor Oberst & Gillian Welch – Lua
I'm choosing the 2009 duet re-recording to represent this song. In it, Oberst has excised his voice-cracking crying-into-my-guitar affectations, and the result brings the focus back to the songwriting, which is nothing short of brilliant, a compelling narrative of closely-observed mutually-assured personal and relationship destruction. The poetry is transparent and moving, too: When everything is lonely I can be my own best friend / get a coffee and the paper / have my own conversations / the sidewalk and the pigeons and my window reflections. In my ideal world, the closing recapitulation wouldn't be so re-, but I always thought Mozart used too many codas too.
67.Bonnie Prince Billy – I'll Be Glad
Undoubtedly Will Oldham will go down in music history as a purveyor of death-flecked earthy acoustics. But in this unironic prayer for guidance Oldham gives himself over to god in a moment of earnest purity, and it's the most strictly beautiful thing he's allowed himself to write. The church-organs and steel guitars in the instrumental breaks foreshadow the choral “amen” at the end, a full-throated embrace through the song's final fifteen seconds, a peaceful moment of holy thrall.
68.Imogen Heap – Hide & Seek
Any song this huge and gorgeous demands inclusion, authorial solipsism, overwrought evocations, the sense one is being manipulated, a slew of nonsensical lyrical legerdemains, tear-jerking montages on bad television and legions of appalling fans be damned.
69.The White Stripes – Hello Operator
A duet between Jack and his guitar. Straight-up electric-guitar genius.
70.Rogue Wave – Eyes
Another acoustic solitary-contemplation-of-love jam with requisite fetishization of the other and a distinct sense of interiority. I respond-to and empathize-with renderings of interiority. This comment isn't in any critical, but, for reasons I don't understand, this song makes me think of Christmas. That's important to me.
71.Liars – The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack
Simplicity itself.
72.Portishead – Wandering Star
The bass on this song is so huge and so filthy, I can throw this on at any moment and dig. Also, the record scratches are sui generis.
73.My Morning Jacket – Into the Woods
A good shower head / and my right hand / the two best lovers / I ever had. The song starts with the echoy sounds of children in an aviary, a bouncing organ, and Jim James's trademarked reverb-hollow vocals talking about a “kitten on fire” and a “baby in a blender.” Probably one of my favorite songs in terms of performance poetry, this is staid and straightfaced high-irony deliberate dissociation, laid down above a perfect circus march oompa-oompa . As the narrator invites the wolf into his bed and disappears into the woods, a Russian-thick choir comes on to bade him farewell, cymbals crashing. Just perfect.
74.Talking Heads – Burning Down the House
What really establishes the Talking Heads to me is the lean and muscular nature of their production; though there's no shortage of frantic bongos, flat-80's style drums and impossibly jumpy bass; the sound is sparse and intricate, a light bridge thrown over a open space. The emphatic yelping punch of Bryne's delivery almost compels fist-pumping singalongs; no easy feat over the trampolining instrumentalization.
75.Muse – Starlight
If you put this on repeat it's a song that never seems to end, with these ostionato circular riffs that cap the song on both ends, and that's the way to dig this song. Bellamy's melodramatic vocal tics—usually overweening and syrupy—are here the perfect counterpoint to the saw-steady to-the-point-of-danceable riffs.
76.Nick Cave – Dig, Lazarus, Dig
This frankly crazy scholarly punk about a contemporary Lazarus will knock your head back. It's abrasive, aggressive as unforgivable 1, reductive, with one jagged riff played over and over and over, (with requisite subtle production modifications). Cave describes the best lunatic villain in rock history, trumping even Tom Waits' notable circus of crazies.
77.Ben Folds – Late
Ben Folds' tribute to Elliot Smith somehow carries the plaintive presence of Elliot Smith's project than any specific Elliot Smith song to me. Ben Folds' pop instincts are always honed; and even here, in the middle of an indulgent dab of pure sentiment, they do not disappoint. The line about “your hard-earned peace of mind” has one of the most effective switch-up harmonies I've ever heard.
78.Emily Haines – Telethon
More or less the model of songs I'm guaranteed to love and be slightly embarrassed for loving. Super-slow, thoroughly schmaltz, beautiful, obscure, with a profound little lyric at the center and a chorus that takes you by the throat. I'm going to take my time / night by night. So am I. (Almost falls off the list for referencing Billy Joel, though.)
79.The Decemberists – Billy Liar
Maybe this song is too weird and perverted and literary (does Molloy feel empathy for his Billy Liar? I don't think so.)—but in the same moment a general ecstasy of disaster-laced love appears. There's no desire as piquant as that borne from hopelessness, incompetence and loneliness. But to enjoy this song, you don't have to dig Billy Liar's lyrics (in point of fact, maybe it'd be better to ignore them), you just have to want to hear a good-time good-cheer bit of summery indie pop. And the chorus is eminently singable: that's important to me.
80.Pulp – Common People
Probably too obviously written on a typewriter, this short-story length fantasy about transgressing low vs. upper-class caste barriers via theft and sex is off-putting, obvious, and annoying. And, passionate, existential, frantic, resigned, hopeful, with a lyrical motif that gains momentum like a drunk-driven late-model used truck going down a hill. If you aren't a person who feels the urge to learn lyrics and sing along, it'll probably skip off your atmosphere. Recommended for the oppressed politically-conscious post-emo kids; and me.
81.Madeleine Peyroux – Don’t Wait Too Long
Most optimism is over the top—it's too loud, too bright, it doth insist too much. Not so with this straightforward iteration of a future happiness. These strings of good-faith self-help platitudes may not have any critical mass, but, this understated jazz-pop makes up for its obviousness with an unblemished acceptance of the things to come. I've loved it since the turn-of-the-century Dockers commercial.
82.Beirut – After the Curtain
Certainly one of the more subtle songs that I love, if you can even call it a song. More of an epilogue than anything else. A veiled consideration of habit and freedom. But in all truth, I love it because it's beautiful to me. And there's all those people cheering and clapping. It moves.
83.Madonna – Ray of Light
I can't decide if it's the chorus (And I feel / like I just got home / and I feel / and I feel), or the propelled 64th note tremulous arcs, sirens, crickets, squawks, tweets, and jet-engines that lead the beat, Madonna's wheeling performance, or the mixing—which grabs and skews the track back and forth between the speakers—that make this song so compelling. It's a just fast as fuck, and puts in me in a hyper-manic tight-focus zone. My two fastest minesweeper times have been occurred when this song was playing, and that's no joke to me.
84.Leonard Cohen – Famous Blue Raincoat
You're living for nothing now / I hope you're keeping some kind of record / yes. I'm not sure if this interpretation is borne out in established rock criticism, but I can't help but see Cohen's variously damaged characters/auters as exploring some kind of ideational apocalypse, the endgame of a bizarre bohemian experiment, its damaged narrator's flattened monotone reflecting his stunted traumatized internal states. The dirgelike quavering backup singers set the song up perfectly, too: here is a frozen motionless blasted madness.
85.Franz Ferdinand – The Fallen
Probably the loudest song on this list. Lyrically, a bunch of Jesus-in-Manhattan party-animal romanticized self-destruction tropes and random lines thrown in there as filler or to buttress some incomprehensible symbolic paradigm. I yell all the lyrics I can understand, I mumble the rest. So they say you're troubled boy / just because you like to destroy / all the things that bring the idiots joy. How could someone like me not appreciate that level of deluded self-protecting arrogance?
86.Aimee Mann – Save Me
I loved this song before the lyrics actually applied to my life. I loved this song when I was in high school, when I didn't know my ass from my heart, and would have announced my studied boredom and superiority over any considered study of the complex length of adult life, the minor emotional mazes that are simply built-in with the passage of time, the incredibly fraught oddity of living more than a few years as a person without the excuse of ignorance. If that makes any sense. Plus, it's a really good song.
87.Donovan – Colours (long version)
Beautiful. Featured prominently in Rules of Attraction. (You remember....the scene where the girl and the guy are getting ready for class, meeting serendipitously in the hall, falling in love, all that). As in every case, I prefer the slower, more sentimental version. If you don't know, now you know.
88.Dr. Dog – The Breeze
Songs like this one often come in to my life and burn out just as quickly. Unremarkable dust-in-the-wind existentialism on Crosby-Stills-and-Nash classicism. But I like the lyrics completely, the advice-for-the-weary, a balanced combination of hopelessness, awareness and acceptance, so rarely linked in life or music; like one of those poems or a life-changing essay: you just have to revisit, reify it to yourself, every now and then.
89.Serge Gainsbourg – Cargo Culte
I don't speak French, and I have scarcely a clue of what Serge Gainsbourg is talking about in this song (yes, talking: there are barely ten sung phrases on the whole album) beyond his love for Melodie Nelson and ritual tribal fantasies. What is clear includes grimy electric guitars, layered chromatic scales, grinding baselines, a full chorus shrieking open syllables. Too much slow-burn fun to bemoan the loss of any meaning in translation.
90.Tony Bennett – The Good Life
The most irony-saturated song I've ever heard—not bad for appearing fifty years before our oft-lamented contemporary golden age of irony. All the more heartbreaking for its world-weary awareness. A sly elegy for isolating freedom.
91.MGMT – Kids
I don't know how the lyric take only what you need from me can sound so victorious. Get up, y'all.
92.Elini Mandell – Moonglow, Lamp Low
Required: the bourgeois apparatus of relaxation: tea, a day off from work, a deckchair outside, music on-demand. This song is a dose of a simple mood; in fact, is so simple and earnest anyone could write it. But that's what I like about it. If Sinatra had sang it, it'd be a “performance” buried beneath an orchestra, but who wants that? This is music for a stripped down mood; execrable “soft jazz,” demanding of cool air and a refrigerator full of drinks through the glass doors in the house waiting.
93.Norah Jones – The Nearness of You
A classic rendition of a gold standard.
94.Underworld f. Radiohead – 8 Ball
This song isn't going to end up as part of the official Radiohead canon. That's okay. The lyrics don't add up to anything that even remotely hints at meaning. It's pretty much a chill-out house track: not your usual recipe for preferred heartbreaking moments of crystalline beauty. Somehow, though, it works to create an awareness of the goodness of life, a hyper-lit bit of fascinated hope. Proust's meditation on the madeleine this is not, but, a similar first-person access to happiness is constructed here. Going on and on with this nonsense description of random people on the city street. A subtle build-up over eight minutes, guitars coming in like rain, the chords resolving and the beat drops, and suddenly the whole is more than the sum, access to the immediate.
95.Coldplay – Clocks
It's probably not fair that Coldplay is as huge as they are, but the reverbed piano in this song is like light breaking through clouds, wind through rolled-down windows.
96.O.P.M. – Heaven is a Halfpipe
In large part, you can count on the songs on this list to provoke one or another specific emotional response in its purest distillation. Usually I enjoy the ideal forms of contemplativeness, outright despondency, or tenderness, as I find these experiences most fraught with bubbles of unlabeled meaning. Only rarely do I dig a song like this one, whose sole purpose is getting dumb, straight rocking, twisting-out mad happiness. I don't skateboard and rarely smoke drugs; I don't care about “the man” when he “fucks” with the “shit” I want to do; and I don't condone skipping biology. But I'll stand out a sunroof going down Main shouting joy when this comes on my itunes clone.
97.Jason Mraz – I'm Yours
To complete the irresistible-irritating trilogy I present: Jason Mraz's mega-ubiquitous I'm Yours. In contrast with other songs I hate to love (on account of the company I'd share, or those evil little popsong tics that drive me crazy), here the lyrics are front and center of my ambiguity. For starts, Mraz sings the word “scootch,” as in scootch on over closer dear. Ugh. Nor would I follow that ghastly phrase with the equally cloying and let me nibble your ear. Cringe-inducing. But! Beyond that, I'm Yours is a trenchant plea for immediate love, built on nimble wordplay and an overdose of truisms, which are always fun when set to music that seems to animate.
98.Green Day – Warning
I get why it's easy to sneer at Green Day's uncomplicated pop offerings. I sneer, all the time. I sneer while I'm getting down and grinning like some kind of glue-sniffing idiot. The hummingbird part of my mind wants to hear this song at least once a year: three chords, a rhythm straight out a punk-obvious drum machine and all a sudden I want to shout. On the line between desultory adolescent anthems and heavy-handed postured political statements, Warning is almost meaningful, only slightly self-righteous, 100% everything that's wrong with convenient language of pseudo-intellectualism. What? I can't justify it. This song is crap. It's infuriatingly bad. Such good infuriatingly bad crap, though.
99.The Eagles – Desperado
I know where the Eagles stand in the continuum of artistic merit: somewhere narrowly in front of the Backstreet Boys and a critical light-year behind the Beatles. I'm not proud of having committed the sin of soft-rock. Like so many songs on this list, I enjoy this song for what it tries to be, for pretending to stand-alone, irrespective of history, for flailing pathetically toward sincerity. (Even if it is an easy mass-communicable sincerity). I get that it's played out, (except that it's not played out to me). Sometimes I'm moved by it. That's it.
100.Okkervil River – Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe
This song probably doesn't deserve a spot on this list when you consider the fact that every time I turn it on, I'm trying to decide whether or not I hate it or love it. The singer's voice is annoying in full emo-rock mode, and the lyrics that aren't inept make no sense. (Or, rather: they're so scattered so as to obviate any careful parsing). But it's really passionate. Really, really passionate. I'm always won over by this approach: even if you're out of your g-d g, as long as you say it with conviction, really commit, you know, you can't fail completely. How do I not give props to that?
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[102 tracks; 597 MB; compressed in .zip]
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