by popular reqvest:

he's a rebel [the crystals]

i cite this as my favorite song less often now than i used to, but it still stands as one of the most perfect artifacts from pop's (nth) golden age. it's a weird one too, with its lopsided rhythm (i've always heard it as a musical representation of "the way he walks down the street"); decidedly awkward scansion; sudden, cascading pre-chorus ("my, he holds his head up high"); unorthodox structure (the initial doubled AB verse melody is never repeated after the chorus; the sax solo progression appears nowhere else in the song), etc.all of these contribute to its charm, but the real clincher is the (fittingly complex) message contained in the lyrics, which transcend the surface combination of puppy-love cliches and "parents just don't understand" whinging to form a two-minute sermon on a kind of tolerance that i cherish above most other human attributes.

tracks of my tears [smokey robinson and the miracles]

hard to say if they're my favorite motown group yet (the supremes still reign rather, well, eponymically over my allegiance; "some things you never get used to" was a close contender for this list), but my apprecation for the miracles has grown considerably even well past my oldies-radio junkiedom. i attribute this largely to smokey's indelible songwriting, and his ballads in particular. "tracks" is nothing less than a paragon of the form; an eminently singable salve for whatever blues you got (and also probably the zenith in the canon of "sad clown" songs.) the rhapsodic, meandering melody allows plenty of breathing room for the arrestingly conversational lyric, with nary an obvious rhyme to be found. it's addressed, with heartbreaking directness, to the object of the narrator's quashed (but not quite dead yet!) hopes, and somehow comes off as simultaneously pragmatic and desperate, considered and confused, slyly boastful (almost) and wincably self-effacing. and then it gets even better: just as you think it's about to coast into a fade-out , with an ad libbed "hey, hey, yeah" and a looped two-chord vamp, smokey starts getting really emotional, ultimately breaking down in a stop-time stutter ("my. smile. is. my. make. up.") before the final, resurgently impassioned chorus.

me and julio down by the schoolyard [paul simon]

this might have to be my pick for best song to sing, ever. (whenever, but especially on hiking trips and such.) sure, the recorded version's got that ineffable chunky acoustic guitar going for it (has wes anderson ever used this? oh, he has? i had to check. [reason #17 why i need to rewatch t.r.t.]), plus that funky, unreproducible hoot'n'handslap breakdown, but much as i love (s/t) i'm sure i've sung it unaccompanied at least ten times as many as i've listened to it. the scatty internal-rhymed quasi-nonsense lyrics just roll off the tongue so nicely, 'specially if you mimic paul's vocal inflections, and that falsetto jump on "ro-ooo-sie" is irresistable. and then there's the whistle break, which is clearly the whole point of doing it a cappella - i've honed my rendition to the point that it's possibly better than the record. the song's major problem is that it feels unfinished: the second verse is distractingly half as short as the first. to this day it occasionally trips me up if i try to remember what comes next. the loose narrative of the lyrics doesn't offer any ready explanation for this abrupt termination - now, i'm not saying the song needs to go so far as to spell out what, exactly, the mama saw, but a little more closure would be nice. surely making the cover of newsweek can't have been the end of the story.

alison [elvis costello]

i was seriously considering not including any elvis on this list, but i figure if i'm going to claim him as my favorite writer i better represent. "alison" might seem like a blindingly obvious choice, but actually i've never considered it to be among the better examples of his lyrical prowess or his deft way with harmony - besides which, it has a (to me, kind of embarrasing) tragic flaw: the "i don't know if you've been loving some-body / i only know it isn't mine" line, which tries too hard for a not-clever-enough pun on "body" that fails because the difference in pronunciation is too great to make the necessary linguistic leap intuitive. but then, this mostly sticks out because of the song's inherent delicateness - unlike "sulky girl," "distorted angel," "human hands," "i'll wear it proudly," or any of the other highly-wrought micro-opuses that i'd lovingly dissect as truer testaments to el's undying genius, "alison" is a concise, crystalline statement. two verses, two choruses, it gets in its nostalgia, its caustic bitterness, its self-contradictory bewilderment and repeated declaration of ambiguous intent ("my aim is true…"), and then it's all over but the lovely guitar noodling. honestly, the lyrics never made all that much linear sense to me (i can only assume they're not supposed to), but damn if the (almost painfully exaggerated) chorus melody doesn't jerk ones heartstrings so. plus, i love how it makes use of one of the campiest tricks in the book: the music stopping on the word "stop" (someday i'll make a list of songs that do that.) in concert, el often vamps "alison" into "tracks of my tears" (and "tears of a clown" and back to his own "clowntime is over," though never, to my knowledge, "everybody loves a clown"), which just shows that we're on the same wavelength.

my old school [steely dan]

for once i'm not going to harp on about the lyrics, even though they are pretty awesomely sardonic, and occasionally complemented by the music in a really nifty way (that wonderfully illustrative sax cascade after the line "california tumbles into the sea"). come to think of it, the words bear a weirdly strong incidental similarity to "me and julio," despite the two songs' diametrically opposite positions vis-a-vis their respective schoolyards. this song made the list specifically because of its arrangement; how many cool instrumental bits it has, and how well they're pieced together, from the cheeky (but still deathly cool) stride piano intro to the guitar fills in the prechoruses, interjected so casually and lightning-fast you probably missed them, to the impossibly tight horn section which gradually overwhelms the track, its punctuations of the vocal sections growing more and more vigorous until it bursts out with a surprisingly laid-back, but still swaggering soli section. the horns also provide the backbone of the song's recurring climax: the punchy, upbeat-pounding riff that's gotta be one of the most slamming shout choruses ever written, not to mention a sublime backdrop for solos. 'course, dan being dan, the guitar solos they hit us with are plain untouchable, tasty (if a notch beyond tasteful) bluesy bombast. that section happens thrice - teasingly briefly after the first two choruses, and then more fully as the track's final blowout. even this fades out after a mere minute, making way (on the album) for the drastic about-face of a lush (and equally sublime) country romance - but it could easily keep on going for another ten or twenty, and i sure as hell wouldn't complain. more cowbell, anyone?

following through [the dismemberment plan]

gotta start by talking about the drums, 'cuz they kick off the track with an almost unbearable urgency. and they don't let up: this song builds musical tension like nobody's business, and joe easley's jittery, oddball groove, which sounds like no other drum part i know of (excepting ifrb's "dress up," for which i ripped it wholesale), hammers out the bedrock of that instability. sounding so unstable while actually being so solid is what makes it so mindblowing - did you ever catch them live? dude's sick, and left-handed to boot, which makes his inhuman precision behind the kit seem all the more alien. but this is just the foundation for a gradually constructed edifice of interlocking parts. for the first minute it's just drums and guitars (two of them: one all precision flutter and chiming arpeggiation, the other plodding to keep pace with its cautious two-note slurs), then we get tambourine (just a sprinkle here and again there - ooh, check it in headphones for the delayed pan) and bass (deliciously minimal: three quick eighth-note stabs every other measure.) everything coalesces, for a moment, for a chorus, then back down again (guitar one swaps to intervallic triphammers) and so it goes; rising action, climax, denouement.

but wait - you've caught on by now that a tune better have mouth where its music is to cut it in this elite batch. i mention tension - it's not so much in the sense of creating discomfort as of propelling the listener forward, and that is but precisely what is demanded by the lyrics of "following through." i've heard the words disparaged as inane, and i won't deny that some of them read as cheesy, but in context they strike me as closer to profound (it's a thin line), by virtue of their clear-eyed simplicity. dammit, i like "it coulda been off the hook now." where i will not brook argument is with the anthemic payoff of the ebullient hell-yeah chorus. does language, does music, get any more self-affirming than this, delivered in breathless falsetto, no less?: "i can do it anywhere with anyone at any time don't you forget this is my life and it's gonna be good."* goddamn.

*(possibly this is just about sex, but we can generalize, can't we?)

when you were mine [prince/crooked fingers]

i don't really think it's cheating to include two versions of the same song (listing "independence day [elliott smith/david byrne]", as i was considering at one point, would definitely be worse), especially because taken together they emphasize that it's the song itself, and not any particular rendering of it, that's so special. there have been many covers of this (a lot of people list it as "when u were mine," which is either incorrect or a courteous updating, since the song predates prince's orthographical paradigm shift), but it's hard to imagine one more befitting the devastation of the lyrics - or one further removed from the cheekily blithe original - than crooked fingers' ultra-spare rendition. freed entirely of its dance-pop roots, slowed down to a crawl, scored for banjo and cello (one carefully picking out broken octaves and arpeggios, the other outlining the harmony in long, lugubrious strokes), and intoned in eric bachman's dour, gritty drawl, the thing bleeds pathos. which is hardly a stretch. the words already make whoever's singing it comes off as a total pitiful sap. first he suffered (my word, not his) through this charade of a relationship (honestly, does it sound like there was ever a time when she was actually "his"?), and if he wasn't suffering then he damn sure is after the fact. even though, strictly speaking, he's still not complaining ("i never was the kind to make a fuss.") if we want take the words at surface value - "i know that you're going with another guy; i don't care, 'cause i love you…" - his capacity for selfless love is truly remarkable. or else, yeah, he's still just a spineless wimp. it's open to interpretation whether a) he didn't love her enough at the time, and that's partly why he lost her, or b) he loved her plenty then (and she was just heartless, or uninterested, or whatever - even more than pity for the singer, the song inspires appalled disbelief at the behavior of the ex-lover) but having lost her only makes his love stronger. i'm going with the latter, but either way, he's paying for his obliviousness now.

of course, this isn't just some guy; it's prince, and therefore we're going to get some frank sex talk injected with our bathetic bawlfest. there's the off-hand admission that "i used to let you wear all of my clothes," and the starkly poignant accusation "you didn't have the decency to change sheets" (it's heartbreaking how meekly he slips that in.) but the real crusher, and the indispensibly princean moment (it's delivered a cappella in the crooked fingers version. for maximum effect): "when you were mine…you were all i ever wanted to do." you can just see prince winking through his tears to make sure you caught it. oh yeah, and speaking of the purple 1, his inimitable original take made this list for a reason too. although it doesn't, perhaps, project the most apt ambience for ruminating on ill-advised unrequited love, it's an impeccably tidy slice of funked-up dance-floor fodder, and a neat showcase for his under-praised guitar prowess to boot. dressing up tales of woe in perky melodies is a time-honored pop tradition, and there's nothing wrong with appending them to synth-funk grooves either. it's shamefully rare to find a song that (as d.byrne sez) can make you dance and cry at the same time.

anything you want [spoon]

i wrote a couple-sentence micro-rave recently calling spoon, among other things, "the best rock band going" - it'll air this week in stylus' top 50 o' the '00s - and i firmly believe every hyperbolic word (more so than with the wilco blurb), even the assertion that kill the moonlight is their so-far crowning achievement (which i didn't use to admit.) but i've never had any doubt that their best song is this slight masterpiece, just two minutes and change, the unassuming centerpiece of girls can tell (which, fun fact: is the first piece of music i ever wrote about on reminced.) "anything you want" boasts another perfectly pitched arrangement built from interlocking parts. it sounds so simple that it's hard to say why it feels so intoxicatingly fresh, until you realize that the roles are all screwy. almost all the instruments are basically fulfilling rhythmic functions - the stuttered organ open-fourths hit on all four beats, which should be irritating as hell but is somehow sublime instead; the piano doubles the bass (except for the part where it riffs "hot blooded" - unintentionally we presume); the bass doubles the bass drum; the guitarist lays out for most of the song, except to occasionally double (er, quadruple) the bass as well; the drums provide as much subtle embellishment as anything else. the effect is a groove that's so spread out and diffused among the instruments that it permeates the song almost subliminally. and even with all of that going on (verse two adds more stuff: tambourine, for instance, and i bet you never even noticed the kalimba - plus there are sly production tweaks everywhere that i'm still picking up on) it still sounds sparse and airy, partly thanks to a blissfully laid-back tempo.

all of which creates a impeccably well-tailored backdrop (a fitted shirt, perhaps?) for the deceptively casual lyrics. casual delivery, i should say - britt drawls 'em out like he has all the time in the world, pausing for measures between lines and still, half the time, falling a bit behind even this forgiving beat…up until the final line that is, when he suddenly breaks into a sprint to cram in a desperate, insignificant mouthful before the song ends, as if hit too late with the realization that maybe this could really be it. he was so confident before. he knew nothing could really change in this too-far-gone relationship he's resigned himself to endlessly replaying. why's he even talking? (if there's anything you want…) as if she didn't know he'd take her back in a heartbeat (come on back 'cause it's all still here) - he's too stuck in his ways (i'll be in the back room drinking my half of the beer), even though he's got no romantic illusions left (if you and me is so right, why's it the same thing every night?). to deny that history will repeat (it's just a matter of time; it's almost measurable). he's not singing this for our benefit, you know - he doesn't bother to let us in on that history, which makes verse two harder to parse (not to mention some trademark daniel-isms - adds all up right is no fall in love to down on the street, but tell me that's not just words tripping on themselves.) but to sleep in a bed of lies is a tellingly resonant image of making do and settling even when you know it ain't all right, something we can do to ourselves (i've made my own more than once or twice) just as easily as with others'. ultimately we all make our own bed and sleep in it, that's why we feel so alive when we feel so alone. i don't know if this song is romantic or deluded or desperate or satisfied, or all of those, or if they're all the same thing - i guess it can be whatever (anything) you want it to be, and that ambiguity (or flexibility) is a lot of why this song is so true.

california girls [the beach boys]

i almost swapped this out at the last minute for "wouldn't it be nice", whose sentiment speaks to me a bit more directly. but ultimately i'm going to have to stick with "girls," not just because its gloriously frivolous lyrics and, y'know, not being on pet sounds often deny it the attention it richly merits, but because when you get right down to it it's just that little bit more magical a song. (meanwhile, "god only knows," which should probably be the obvious choice, seemed a little more sacred than i was ready to deal with.) so that means this list is lacking a side one, track one (S1T1), and i'll have to make an entirely new selection of ten to keep the championship vinyl blokes happy. whatever. the first twenty seconds alone are enough to guarantee immortality. i can't even tell what instrument that is (guitar? weirded-up harpsichord? okay, it's a guitar), but it's unreal how quickly it conjures heaven. those oh so cautiously placed cymbal-bell strokes. the bass entrance. the saxophone swell. oh my god. [beats "wouldn't"'s out of tune harp hands down, plus it's longer] and then… (the hymnlike opening slows to a slight rubato. pause. could be anything…) enter chipper, bouncy organ; "---well east coast girls are hip!" whoa, weren't expecting that. (is he being dismissive with that "well…"?)

let's get this clear, i adore the lyrics to this song. however, their brilliance is really best experienced directly. i'm going to pretend to take the beach boys seriously in a couple seconds here, but i realize that attempting to rigorously analyze the words of such a unpretentious, manifestly shallow song is about as incongruous and goofy as the regional taxonomy of womanhood contained therein. i mean, i can't say for sure how straightly this would have been taken by the beachkids of the day (the 'boys, notoriously, weren't surfers themselves, and conceivably might not have known a whole lot more about the subject at hand here than the song suggests) but from this vantage point it seems goofy enough that it would take a pretty darned stereotypable feminist to get offended by it. still, it's a little bit amazing that you could get away with this kind of thing on mainstream radio, even in 1965 - but then it really shouldn't be, considering jay-z's virtual rewrite "girls girls girls," which raises considerably more hackles and doesn't have any knuckleheaded innocence to help acquit it. that innocence (interestingly, probably more evident here than in "wouldn't it be nice" or "god only knows") is so wholesome, so unflaggingly pure. the tidy classification system of chicks from here and there comes off sounding like so many memorized facts a toddler will reel off about dinosaurs. when the singer boasts: "i seen all kind of girls," you just want to nod and pat him on the head. (most toddlers haven't actually seen any dinosaurs, and even those who have probably don't much understand how they feel.) and hey, if the other kinds all knock him out so much, each in their own way, what kind of diversity-hatin' fascist is he, wanting them all to conform to the criteria of a single class of babe-dom? on the other hand, maybe that's the whole point. actually, he does know what he's talking about, and cali girls really are, without exception, tanned, "french bikini"-rockin' blond bombshells, and it's just us northeasterners that are missing out. right, gals?

i should stop being so cheeky, because i don't actually think of this as a mere novelty song, contrary to appearances. after all, the intro isn't such a fake-out. the unfettered jubilance of the song proper threatens to overpower it, but the yearning, devotional character of the opening continues straight on through. it's all over the lyrical subtext: as cock-sure as it sounds, this song is slack-jawed and helpless in awe of the women it celebrates. this may be insidiously pseudo-feminist, but this song is all about reverence. xtc sing of a "church of women"; you can be sure this is in the psalter. of course, the intro isn't a fake-out in musical terms either - the feeling is there in the luscious backing vocals, and the triumphantly martial chorus orchestration. and then there's that moment, just before the end, when the solemn, wondrous calm of the opening is fully restored and remembered, if just for a second: everything else drops out and a lone organ pipes out the song's central syncopated motif (with glockenspiel highlights.) and then it's overwhelmed again, by honey-thick wilson bros. harmony. who's really gonna complain about that.

this must be the place (naïve melody) [talking heads]

the order of this list is fairly arbitrary - even the initial quasi-chronology is a fluke preserved from a discarded effort to rank the list preferentially - and the selections are far from definitive (duh), but whatever it means to have a number one for-sure favorite song, this is it for me. so i thought i'd save it for last. it's not intentional that these blurbs are growing progressively longer either (although i haven't discouraged it) - i definitely didn't expect this whole enterprise to take so long, either, but there you go. so.

i don't have all that much to say about the music of "naïve melody" (as i usually call it, and in fact i usually forget which part is the subtitle). it's simply, perfect. it has a killer bass line. the bass line is so awesome it just repeats for the whole song and that's a good thing. it has really cool flutey synth things going on. the synth solos are beautifully understated and make excellent, non-gimmicky use of pitch bend. it has really sweet harmonies, especially in the sublime a cappella live ending. the guitar is really funky, especially the occasional slides up the neck. and, basically, it has all of the amazing, complex, intoxicating, dancey polyrhythmicness that makes this the best era of the talking heads [and therefore the best era of any band ever*], only with even more subtlety than the all-out dance bangers. the album version (on speaking in tongues) has enough in common with the stop making sense version that i don't need to discuss them separately, except that obviously the live one is preferable for all the reasons that sms makes the otherwise highly commendible sit pale and redundant by comparison; also the bassline is a bit more prominent on the live one.

so far so awesome. the lyrics, people. there isn't a single bad line in this song, independently or in context. i always thought it went "you're standing here beside me/i note the passing of time," but apparently it's actually "love." i prefer my mishearing, partly because he says "love" again in the next line. but whatever. i love that he takes the time out to mention the passing of time, in that way that even the most banal things can be magical when the world is properly transfigured by love, or curiosity, or happiness. which is what the song is about. it's not the naïveté of childhood, it's the recovered naïveté of eternal return, entering again into a childlike state of grace and wonder after a period of doubt and frustration, a lifetime of misdirection, that renders this rediscovery both heartrending and heartmending, achingly blissful, unbearably right.

the bemused bewildered benevolence, the rightness-with-the-world, the utter content, that this song exudes, seem even more profound in context. it's the first song the talking heads wrote that might be called a love song; it's almost their first song that to seem even happy. and it's unabashed. think about the emotional chasm that separates this from the stifling paranoia of their debut quasi-hit.

or never-mind that. i love how this song conflates and confounds love of person with love of place. (in stop making sense, david sings the song to a floor lamp - a thing - thus completing the equation.) the unspecific (thus limitlessly ascribable) "you" is anthropomorphic, even fancifully so, but also gets unhesitantly metonymized with "home," and vice-versa. to the point that it can't be determined, and it doesn't matter, whether this is a love song about a person or a song about being in a place

all of the things that music, at its best, like love, can do to me - make me dance and make me cry and make me laugh and smile and stand in awe, make me feel the pain of what i have lost, and soothe it with the reverie of what can never be taken away; ultimately, make me human - this song does.

*the very last paragraphs of this entry talk about more about the personal significance of the t'heads and this era in particular.

close contenders
a case of you [joni mitchell]
a journey to reedham [squarepusher]
adrenaline! [the roots]
ain't too proud to beg [the temptations]
around the world [daft punk]
brimful of asha [cornershop]
get me away from here i'm dying [belle and sebastian]
hyperballad [björk]
i wish [stevie wonder]
let's stay together [al green]
no surprises [radiohead]
one by one all day [the shins]
red [okkervil river]
stockholm syndrome [yo la tengo]
such great heights [the postal service/iron and wine]
the fool [call and response]
work it [missy elliott]

home is where i want to be
pick me up and turn me round
i feel numb
born with a weak heart
i guess i must be having fun
the less we say about it the better
make it up as we go along
feet on the ground
head in the sky
it’s ok
i know nothing’s wrong
nothing

hi yo - i've got plenty of time
hi yo - you've got light in your eyes
and you’re standing here beside me
i love the passing of time
never for money
always for love
cover up and say goodnight
say goodnight

home is where i want to be
but i guess i’m already there
i come home
she lifted up her wings
i guess that this must be the place
i can’t tell one from another
did i find you, or you find me?
there was a time before we were born
if someone asks, this where i’ll be
where i’ll be

hi yo - we drift in and out
hi yo sing into my mouth
out of all tose kinds of people
you got a face with a view
i'm just an animal looking for a home
share the same space for a minute or two
and you love me till my heart stops
love me till I’m dead
eyes that light up, eyes look through you
cover up the blank spots
hit me on the (...)
head
i go: oooooh