My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #390-381

Here are the next ten entries in the list of my 500 all-time favorite songs. Don't get sidetracked by the big numbers: I love these songs...

390 FOREVER IN BLUE JEANS...Neil Diamond
This early 1979 song wasn't one of Diamond's biggest hits, but in my opinion it's the most romantic one. And that's saying an awful lot considering some of the songs he had produced previously.  It also brings up various associations regarding my own life at the time of its popularity...music can be a great memory aid in this regard...

389 THINGS WE SAID TODAY...the Beatles
When I was a kid during the 1964-66 Beatlemania years my parents, also Beatles fans, would buy each succeeding album as they came out.  In mid '64 when the movie A Hard Days Night hit the screens, United Artists issued the same-titled album while Capitol released Something New, containing an overlap of songs with the other album.  We ended up with the United Artists version, meaning I missed out on Things We Said Today, a Paul McCartney composition and what I might call a "pensive" love song.  Wish we'd got that album instead...

388 WORDS...Missing Persons
In the fall of 1982 when this song was played on the radio, the New Wave music movement was in full bloom, one of its Los Angeles success stories being the band Missing Persons, featuring Dale Bozzio as the vocalist with a Betty Boop singing style and a top-notch guitar/synthesizer/drum band to back her.  Words has several great lines such as "You look at me as if you're in a daze, it's like the feeling at the end of the page when you realize you don't know what you just read"...

387 NOVACANE...Beck
An example of a song I discovered many years after its initial release, Novacane is one of Beck's hilarious nonsense pieces...this one's from his acclaimed 1996 Odelay album.  But it was its hard-driving, relentless nature along with the sharp guitar breaks that won me over to it when I first heard it just a few years ago...a good tune to take along with my training runs.  Its ending, though, you may want to cut off since it deteriorates into ear-splitting noise.  Here's one of those classic Beck lines..."Mission incredible undercover convoy, full-tilt chromosome cowboy, X-ray search and destroy, smoke stack black top Novocaine boy"...

386 DANSE WITH ME GEORGE...Ambrosia
Ambrosia was one of those obnoxious late-1970s love ballad groups that fared well on the pop charts...but not with me.  But then comes this bizarre track...a tribute to the Polish classical composer and pianist Chopin...off one of their albums.  It's about 7:20 long and is good listening throughout (and very different from other Ambrosia songs) but the really interesting "plunge down the rabbit hole" begins at 4:14. By the way, the "George" in this song refers to Chopin's long-time love interest, the novelist Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, better known as George Sand.  There's some pretty dazzling piano playing going on here...I'm sure the band hired out for it.  It's one of the strangest pieces I've heard: give it a listen and see if you don't agree...

385 TOUCH AND GO...the Cars
The unsettling beat, which as a music theory dunce I looked up as being polymeter, stands out in this minor 1980 singles hit for this great old Boston-based band...sad to know that both singer Ric Ocasek and bassist Benjamin Orr have passed on.  And the keyboards in this underrated piece are simply haunting...this might be a good song to spring on people on Halloween.  This is another example...like #390...of a singles release that should have been a major hit but only resonating to a lesser degree with the general public...

384 LODI...Creedence Clearwater Revival
If I ever get around to learning guitar the way I want to, this is one of the first songs I want to learn to play.  And while I'm at it, I want to sing it just the way John Fogerty belts it out.  Lodi, like Johnny Mathis' I'm Coming Home earlier on this list, is about the singer lamenting of his disillusionment at trying to make it big and only wants to go back to his old home town...I bet a lot of people have gone through this kind of experience: the rat race isn't for everyone and it sure as 'ell isn't for me...

383 DON'T CROSS THE RIVER...America
Still another minor, highly underrated hit from a major band, Don't Cross the River was getting its brief radio airplay back in March of 1973.  I invariably associate it with my struggles at that time (on my high school track team) to transform my body into that of a long-distance runner...something that I eventually abandoned in 1976 but resumed in 2009 and am continuing to this day.  But this kind of struggle is fun and this song has an inspiring feel to it, making me want to keep on running and not stopping no matter what my sore legs, feet, aches all over my body, and fatigue are telling my brain...

382 DARE...Gorillaz
Speaking of running, back in 2011 I collected all of the British alternative act Gorillaz's albums and transformed them to my MP3 player, listening to them on shuffle mode while doing my neighborhood training runs that year...Dare, from their 2005 album Demon Days, is one of their best tracks and suggests a sense of vertigo you might get from one of those up-and-down, revolving thrill rides in a theme park.  What I also like about Dare...as well as many of the other Gorillaz songs...is that it's pretty funny without necessarily meaning to be so.  You never can be too sure what you're going to get when you first listen to one of their songs.  More from Gorillaz to come...

381 TALK TALK...Music Machine
Talk Talk, the group Music Machine's one big hit, came out in late 1966 and got a lot of radio play in the beginning of the following year.  To me it's the rallying anthem for anyone who ever felt they were despised outcasts in their everyday existence.  Have you ever undergone such an experience when, without any good reason, you seem to have derision heaped upon you from all around and even those who you thought were friends turned on you?  Dig these words from the song: "My social life's a dud, my name is really mud, I'm up to here in lies, guess I'm down to size".  I didn't fully appreciate this song when it came out...only years later when I finally carefully listened to the lyrics and said to myself, this bro's speaking some truth!

Next week: #380-371...