#101) "Time For Me To Fly" by REO Speedwagon - There's something about Kevin Cronin's voice when he's not warbling a diabetic love song that appeals to me. 1978's Time For Me To Fly has a distant, restless sound that suits not just the subject matter, but his thin vocal quality and featureless Midwestern drawl, and the middle 8 guitar section sounds a lot like a long, helpless sigh.
If you really think about it, there aren't a lot of songs like this on the radio anymore. When was the last time you heard a heavily barbed break-up song in the Top 40? Plenty of songs about self esteem, about eternal love, about sex ratcheting the frequency of body and soul up into the stratosphere, lots of songs about friendship and drinking and clubbing, some cheating songs, and in country music the usual complement of redneck puns...
No songs about two people at an impasse, and the long helpless - and a little sarcastic - sigh it engenders.
"I make you laugh and you make me cry..."
#102) "Little Jeannie" by Elton John - This is one of Sir Elton's under-appreciated songs. Released in May 1980, to me it would seem to serve as a bridge between his wacky sunglasses/Donald Duck costume days and the more staid and matured performer he became in the 1980s. Staid, I guess, until he put on the powdered wig for his Australia concert in '86. By then it clearly was not as shocking (or interesting) a thing to do as it once was, more a caricature. He was looking a lot like a middle aged man dressed like George Washington, even if the songs he was singing were already well on their way to becoming 'classics'.
Little Jeannie is one of them. Nothing flashy, nothing dramatic, it falls like gentle rain through the time and space of a time and place in history.
"And I want you to be my acrobat / I want you to be my lover..."
#103) "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" by Green Day - What haunts me about this song isn't the lyrics or Billie Joe's boyish vocals delivering them, it's the string section, notably the viola, the way it seems to seep up from the ground, how it drives the sentiment home with a bittersweet sandpaper edge that rubs against the grain and always draws a shiver up my spine. Reportedly never intended to become, as it has, the official anthem to every single momentous occasion in our lives - from weddings to proms to graduations to bar mitzvahs to potty training - Good Riddance is emotionally complex. It is the conjoined sorrow and relief over the passages that punctuate our lives.
'Good riddance' indeed, but I won't forget.
How could I forget...?
Still, good riddance...
"It's something unpredictable, but in the end it's right..."
