One More (?) Go Around: A Hundred Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50

 #351) "Wide Open Spaces" by The Dixie Chicks - How fresh this song. 

Even two decades after being abandoned (as everything is) by a society that moves forward ceaselessly with precious little time or inclination for looking back, and a musical industry and fanbase that within a few years of this song's release, decided it'd had enough of singer Natalie Maines' right to free speech, "Wide Open Spaces" still spritzes finely, freshly, a sun-dappled rumination, two parts hope, one half part melancholy. It was popular when I worked in "hot country" radio - as were The Dixie Chicks - and will always have a place - in my eyes - among the gold standards of 90s country music - a softer, more reasonable, less blustery (and less manic) approach to all things "country".

Some might say too soft, too "pop"...and come to think of it, I might have been one of those during the many weeks in late 1998 when this song dominated all-request Friday nights. But 20 years is a long time, plenty of time to realize your big mistakes. The message of the song has outlasted the generations. There are lots of country songs about the redneck lifestyle and patriotism and trucks and bars and zippity doo da, but precious few in the genre, from any decade, that touch on such a specific, but intimately important, and grandly timeless, theme, whether you're a city mouse or a county mouse: setting out on your own for the first time, and all the anticipation and anxiety, all the joy, surprise and sometimes sorrow found there.

"But now she won't be coming back with the rest..."

#352) "Hello It's Me" by Todd Rundgren - Todd Rundgren is on my short list of musical geniuses, those individuals who make innovation and real step-outside-the-box creativity part of their brand, who are successful at creating a musical signature that simply could not be anyone else.  Rundgren has had a hand producing some monumental albums for other artists over the years, among them Meat Loaf's "Bat Out of Hell" and XTC's "Skylarking", but his own music is just....I don't know...perhaps it's most accurate to say it's difficult to describe, but impossible to ignore. 

Nowhere is this more true than with "Hello It's Me", one of his radio hits from 1972's Something/Anything?   All of the bizarrely charming elements that make a Todd Rundgren song are at play here - odd chord progressions, a masterful command of harmony and self-effacing humor, a flat vocal style that - again - you can't really stop listening to. 

Difficult to describe. Impossible to ignore.

"'Cause I never want to make you change for me..." 

One More (?) Go Around: A Hundred Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50

#349) "I Let Her Lie" by Daryle Singletary - The best country songs are the ones that don't spew redneck braggadocio, or self-righteous nonsense about bad behavior and good times being strung together by the uber patriotic act of keeping a job and raising kids, but instead paint a reliable portrait of rural or small town life as it actually exists. Make no mistake, this doesn't always have to be a portrait of misery and sorrow, in other words, the woman doesn't always have to be leaving and taking the kids and the dog with her, but life is a shit sandwich sometimes, and I know from experience there is a unique flavor to the main ingredient of that sandwich when you live in a small town, which is not always captured by every country ballad that comes down the pike. I've said it many times: the best country ballads, the ones that really get at the heart of a matter, tell truth in a moving, memorable way, are as much folk songs as anything.

There's no braggadocio in "I Let Her Lie", not much of anything deserving to be called drama, for that matter. Just an anguish as intimately dull as a cloudy Wednesday afternoon on Main Street, where traffic is never anything more than light and the local gift shop didn't have a single customer all morning. It is here, in the town where the pace is a little slower because not much ever happens, where a romantic relationship that has started to show signs of its death throes bears its sharpest claws.

There are lots of songs about breakups and failed relationships, particularly in country music, but "I Let Her Lie" has always struck an especially potent chord with me. Maybe because it concerns itself with the response, rather than what is happening. In the song, the woman is cheating, the man is suffering - all too easy in this bad ol' world to shrug and say, "Natch." - but in this instance, the man's response isn't all that decisive, because in real life it wouldn't be. It would be informed - distracted - by a host of complex and contradictory emotions, and it's this balk that has created the heartache, the regret, the confusion. There comes the inevitable gossip, because it's a small town after all, and the more talk there is floating around a small town, in and out of bars and work places and that Main Street gift shop, the owner of which almost certainly knows someone who knows someone who knows you, the harder it is to make the move you know you will eventually have to make.

I get it. In some measure, to some extent, long ago, I was there. "I Let Her Lie" will always serve as a totem to that specific time in my life.

And isn't that what songs are meant for? ;-)

"We were that small town scandal, but she was my only world..."


#350) "Goin' Up the Country" by Canned Heat - It's all in the voice, I'd say. The late but fairly great Alan Wilson lent his distinctive vocal style to the two Canned Heat songs most people remember. Wilson overdosed in 1970 (a member of that lamentable "27" club, actually), but left behind the quintessential counterculture anthem, although in actuality, the song has a deep musical history dating back to the 1920s. But this version, with updated lyrics that reflect the times in which it was recorded, has other nifty things going on - a spunky bass line and spritely flute line are held together by the tautest drum line, all of which weirdly (but splendidly) complement Wilson's froggy vocals. Fifty years on, "Goin' Up the Country" is simply fun to listen to, and though on one hand it's pretty dated, from another point of view it's entirely timeless.

"We might even leave the USA / 'Cause there's a brand new game that I don't want to play...."

One More (?) Go Around: A Hundred Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50

#347) "Cult of Personality" by Living Colour - Our uber-PC world might not accept talk like this today, but back in the late 1980s, a black rock or heavy metal band was a novel concept, something most of the people I knew at the time, among family, the underclassman sweat sock gang at school, and even those on MTV, were talking about before talking about the song itself.

Of course, we were also jamming, because "Cult of Personality" is killer. To me, this was positively electrifying in 1988, and 30+ years on, I think it sounds just as fresh and urgent and of the moment as it did when I was fifteen. And what it's saying about the world we live in, our relationship with our leaders, our influencers, our movers and shakers, is no different today than it was back then. In fact, it's probably three times more relevant today.  "I've been everything you want to be...", indeed.

Great song.

"I tell you one and one makes three..."

#348) "All Through the Night" by Cyndi Lauper - Ask ten people what their favorite Cyndi Lauper song is, most them will say "Time After Time", and that's fine as far as it goes, but I've always been partial to "All Through the Night", and while most of the reason for this has to do with specific memories in childhood, like "Cult of Personality", I think it could also be said that it still sounds fresh, has managed to last all through the night, as it were.

It's one of those sublime blends of instrumentation, rhythm and vocals that can't really not hold up over time, it's just so well done, and therefore naturally preserved. Although it's a beautiful melody in any context, Lauper's re-stylized version greatly eclipses the original by singer/songwriter Jules Shear (always noteworthy to me, when a cover manages to pull this off), and I was pleased to learn recently that the magnificent falsetto at the end, one of hallmarks of Lauper's version (and always the element, outside of perhaps the lyrics, which has provoked the longest thoughts in me), is Shear himself.

"Until it ends, there is no end..."

One More (?) Go Around: A Hundred Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50

#345) "Rattlesnake" by Live - They've been around for a long time, but I barely noticed Live back in the day. In no way is that meant as a dig at them, more an acknowledgement of their surprisingly long carrer spent flying just under the radar, never taking their place among the more prominent bands of the 90s, even though their body of work is pretty rock solid. They are that band, where you hear a song, you remember it, remember loving it even at some point in your past, but you're not sure whose song it is.

In fact, were it not for a buddy, I'd never have heard "Rattlesnake", from 1997s Secret Samadhi, though when I did, it quickly became, and has remained, a seminal song for me, a dark and cryptic but completely accurate portrayal of my existence when I was in my twenties, I guess everyone's existence in their twenties - that lull in the action, when you're no longer a kid, but not doing anything particularly interesting or dynamic, when, without fail, the party starts becoming a little lamer with each passing week, month and year.

"The rack is full, and so are we, of laughing gas, and ennui..."

But it's more than that. "Rattlesnake" has always made me think of the tenuous grasp we have over what we know as reality, how fleeting our sense of place in that reality actually is. I think a lot about that these days, as I've aged, faced mortality in a steadily dwindling sphere of time, but even twenty years ago, when it was still all before me and I couldn't see the top, bottom or sides of the sphere, this song inspired those thoughts. There but for the gentle breath of a butterfly's wings go I...as I think I know myself.

"In another place, in another time, I'd be driving trucks my dear / I'd be skinning hunted deer..."

#346) "Wrack my Brain" by Ringo Starr - Far and away, my favorite post-Beatles Beatle song, "Wrack my Brain" was written by George Harrison, and if you know anything about such things, you won't be surprised by this. The album, 1981's Stop and Smell the Roses, is further evidence that in a way, the Beatles never really broke up, or at least almost certainly would have reunited at some point, were it not for Lennon's assassination. Each of the other three lads either contributed to, played on or produced at least one song for Ringo, and that was the case with many of their solo albums throughout the 70s, and 80s. Each was a lingering presence in the others' solo careers, sporadically, over time.

"Wrack my Brain" is great, if for no other reason than being unmistakably a George Harrison song. Not quite as spell-binding as "Something" or "Here Comes the Sun", it nevertheless sports that light breath of transcendentalism paired with equally gentle humor that so often found its way into Harrison's lyrics, wrapped in a winsome melody constructed on the bedrock of exquisitely anguished-sounding chord progressions, which were also hallmarks of the "quiet Beatle". Almost makes me wish George Harrison had recorded it, rather than Ringo. Although at the same time, Ringo's "aw shucks" persona lends something to the song, so I guess everything happens for a reason.

"With a will, there's a way, but there's no way I can see, coming up with something you'd enjoy as much as TV..."