Yet ANOTHER Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50

#267) "When the Stars Go Blue" by Tim McGraw - Tim McGraw made this Ryan Adams song a hit in 2006, and he's to be applauded for it, as it's neither a typical country ballad, nor typical of McGraw (although he did do a stupendous job with "Please Remember Me" a few years earlier, kind of an off-beat ballad itself, so perhaps this was not totally out of left field). If the word "gorgeous" can ever be used to describe a song without sounding like overkill (or in the case of country music, overcompensation), this is it. "Please Remember Me" is lush and lovely, but it might be said, by those with no taste for ballads of any kind, that it's a bit fruity.

Whereas there's nothing fruity about "When the Stars Go Blue". To me, it seems naturally placed wherever it's heard. It drips like rain off the roof on a gunmetal gray afternoon...or maybe it's the sound of the light that cascades down through the clouds when they break up later in the evening. Maybe it's the overnight.

Or the sound of a new day. Maybe the new day's rain.

"Where do you go when you're lonely? Where do you go when you're blue...?"

#268) "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying" by Gerry and the Pacemakers - There are some songs that just seem to come from a faraway place, a place you know is remote, a place people neither travel to or from very often.  For me, "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying" is one of those. Out of its very arrangement (full of wispy strings, totally uncertain-sounding horns, overly cautious percussion, and an oboe that sounds as though it's contemplating whether there's any reason to go on living) broadcasts an unavoidable (and undeniable) sense of remoteness that, for my money, can only get anywhere by riding the light through the vast sky. In other words, like "When the Stars Go Blue", "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying" is uniquely gorgeous.

But it's also odd as hell for how Gerry Marsden sounds as he's singing it. Maybe it's my imagination, but for a song of hope, Marsden sounds intractably cold, and wholly unsympathetic to whoever he has caught crying.

Maybe it's merely the best a hard-bitten Liverpudlian can muster in the emotions department. It could also be intentional, I guess, a vocal stylization if you will, to match the haunting melody. If so, here's a song that truly captures the nuanced subtleties of the human condition: "There there...it's okay to cry, just....okay, come on, all right then, you're good...let's get up now, pull yourself together...hey, stop it... stop it..."

"We know crying's not a bad thing, but stop your crying when the birds sing..."

SUMMER PROJECT: Songs That Will Definitely NOT be Coming Along on 1/48/50

Music, like all things creative, is a very subjective thing. I know that this list of "road songs" I've been cobbling together for almost three years now is not the last word. I know everyone would have a vastly different group of songs to place on something so ceremonial as a road trip mix.  I like to think I have fairly eclectic taste, fed by an open mind. If something moves me, it moves me. I don't generally get bogged down in image or genre.  But there are some songs I simply cannot get on board with.  

Sometimes they try too hard. 

Sometimes they don't try hard enough. 

Sometimes they don't make any sense...or make too much sense (which usually leads back to trying too hard...)

Sometimes they're just boring..."different ways of yawning", as my brother has said.  And boring me is really the only way I can be offended.

Sometimes it's a song from a band or an artist I otherwise dig. Sometimes this one left turn into a musically bad neighborhood is an aberration.

Sometimes not. Sometimes it's the start of a descent into the career-killing abyss.

Sometimes a certain song is so horrible, so insulting to its genre, the artist performing it, and the LISTENER, it makes my skin crawl, even pissing me off a little, if I'm stuck listening to it long enough. 

Sometimes it just reminds me of a time in my life I don't wish to remember. Music hath charms, good and bad.

Here are a few of the musical lemons that will not be coming along for the ride on 1/48/50.  I won't comment beyond the listing.  Readers can take them for what they will, not take them at all, decide I don't know what I'm talking about (if they haven't already), or cry out 'Hallelujah!'.  ;-)


❌ "Indian Outlaw" by Tim McGraw

❌ "Locked Away" by R. City

❌ "Shut Up and Dance" by Walk the Moon

The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)

#152) "Please Remember Me" by Tim McGraw - A woman I worked with in radio years ago was not impressed by this song when it came out. "Tim McGraw should not be accompanied by an orchestra!" she cried, insinuating (f I understood her correctly) that with its lush string section and long, dramatic notes, Please Remember Me was a corruption of the country music business model. I'm sure she wasn't the only one. I'm sure a lot of traditionalists agreed.

Fair enough. But McGraw's version of the song, written by Rodney Crowell and Will Jennings (who interestingly, yet I guess not surprisingly, had a hand in writing Celene Dion's My Heart Will Go On), was released in 1999, at the tail end of an experimental time in country music - when loftier, cinematic themes naturally led to loftier orchestrations, weightier arrangements, and more expected of vocals than just the snap of a Southern drawl. It was a trend that would continue until 2001. The best way to describe the difference between glittery 90s country and the gritty, post-9/11 movement might be to compare Gretchen Wilson 4-wheeling through the mud and doing Kid Rock's laundry in her underwear (er, you know...the video for 2004's Redneck Woman...) and Faith Hill writhing around in silk sheets in the video for Breathe (1999)...looking good to be sure, but not all that 'country'.

In fact, Wilson's refreshingly raw vibe seemed to incite Faith Hill to quickly strip down her own image, which had begun to wallow a bit in so much glitter and foof, and constructing herself anew with the 'down home' Mississippi Girl in 2005. I don't know if it landed in quite the same way. It didn't with me.

But I digress.

Another co-worker at the station, a dude, tried to insinuate (jokingly) that I was a drama queen when I announced I liked Please Remember Me. I'm not. But I do appreciate any song I feel captures the greater drama coursing through all of us. The human story going on day and night, which we all can relate to, even though the details may be different for each of us.

In other words, there's a difference between the self-indulgent personal drama getting deposited on Facebook and the universally shared epic story we're all a part of, that powerful play Whitman wrote of. Please Remember Me captures a little piece of that. We all want to be remembered; we all want to rest assured there will be some acknowledgement that we were once by this way, and that we had an impact on someone or something.  And we all watch days come 'without fail'.

"When I can't hurt you anymore..."

#153) "Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground" by Willie Nelson - This just might have been what the lady at the radio station was talking about, what she expected of her country music, and felt Please Remember Me ran so afoul of.

And I can't say I disagree. For my money, Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground is among the greatest country songs of all time, a brilliant exercise in the old adage less is more. A splendidly sparse arrangement and instrumentation coupled with Nelson's equally sparse but always reliable vocals helps this simplified hurtin' song pack a potent emotional punch, every bit as deep and moving as Please Remember Me.

Without all the bellow and bluster...and begging.

"And I patched up your broken wing, and hung around a while / Trying to keep your spirit up, and your fever down..."

The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)

#150) "Where the Green Grass Grows" by Tim McGraw - Someday...someday...when all my battles have been fought, all my goals met, plans carried out, all the 1/48/50's driven at least twice, when the gray now merely peppering my five o' clock shadow has come to define my look, this is how I'd like to have things play out.

And I like any song that throws direction into the mix.  Point our rocking chairs toward the west, indeed...

"I don't know who my neighbors are, and there's bars on the corner and bars on my heart..."

#151) "Cant Get There From Here" by R.E.M - Years before their mainstream success sort of turned them into mush, R.E.M was a cutting edge band struggling to survive but achieving legend status through relentless touring. Can't Get There From Here is for my money the best example of the band's pre-success greatness. Fun and savvy, it's almost hard to believe this is an R.E.M song. No offense, but when it comes to R.E.M, I was left, through no fault of my own, sometime in the early 1990s at the height of their popularity, with the indelible image of Michael Stipe crawling into a pile of stuffed animals and assuming the fetal position to sing Everybody Hurts.

After that, word is they got back to their roots and stayed there until disbanding in 2011. Sadly, by then I had stopped listening.

But Cant Get There From Here just kills it...kills it dead. I was 12 years old when this song came out, and felt pretty hip grooving to it.

I wasn't...but I felt it.  Still do.  Even though I'm still not.  ;)

"When the world is a monster, bad to swallow you whole..."

The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)

#148) "Roll Me Away" by Bob Seger - Oh, would that it were this easy.

But alas, the story told in Roll Me Away is so far-fetched, so implausible, it's difficult to suspend disbelief. I mean really, come on, he just steps outside one day, looks down a road, and decides now is the time to go? No destination is given, no details as to what he's leaving behind, only that he's 'tired of his own voice'...he meets a girl, she's convinced, and together they speed off into the high plains.

More believable, perhaps, when one is young and prone to (or capable of) believing romanticism and idealism are soul mates.

I still like Roll Me Away, though. It's the song that started it all, back in that motel room in Madison, Wisconsin, when I was thirteen.The piano introduction, strung together by a thin orchestral wire, always stirs something in me...and there are parts of the story that ring quite true. Notably the fact that the girl he meets in the bar, who at first is pulled in by the idea of taking off, eventually can't keep going with him.

"She said she missed her home / I headed on alone..."

That's part of what my road trip will be about. I can talk all day long about responsibilities and being sensible, but it is a little bit true that the innate fear of stepping away, even temporarily (much less permanently), from what's familiar, has kept me around. 1/48/50 will be about marshaling that...for a little while.

"I too am lost, I feel double crossed, and I'm sick of what's wrong and what's right..."


#149) "My Next Thirty Years" by Tim McGraw - Back in my DJ days, I was twice wrong about Tim McGraw.  First, I predicted that his career was not likely to survive Y2K, because Indian Outlaw was the dumbest song I'd ever heard, and would prove to limit the scope of his career to that of a novelty artist.

My second prediction was that he and wife Faith Hill would not last much into the 21st century as a couple. This was inspired by the heavy blast of duets they recorded and released in the late 1990s, each one sappier than the last, that listeners just couldn't get enough of. It's Your Love might have been the most requested song at our station in 1997 and 1998.  I didn't (and don't) have anything against them personally, or as artists, just a knee jerk 'get a room, you two...' mentality at the time, and belief that celebrity couples, particularly in the music industry, are almost always doomed.

I obviously didn't know what the hell I was talking about. Twenty years since Indian Outlaw, McGraw is still active in country music and taken his place among the revered. And against all odds, he and Faith Hill are going on twenty years. Good for them.

2000's My Next Thirty Years is also a kind of fantasy, how you hope things will go as you cross the dreaded threshold from your twenties to your thirties. But unlike Roll Me Away, it doesn't have to remain mere fiction. It's possible to achieve what the song is talking about, if you fashion the right circumstances in your life, smartly and incrementally relinquish certain lifestyles and viewpoints in the name of the growth required for smooth transition of life stages. I like that kind of optimism, and I gotta say, I've been able to make a little bit of it true.  I don't want to get old, I don't want to die, nobody does...but so far my next thirty years have been a lot more enjoyable than my first thirty.

"Maybe now I've conquered all my adolescent fears / And I'll do it better in my next thirty years..."