My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #330-321

There's a couple of songs on this week's entry of my 500 all-time favorite songs you may never have heard of, a few you have...and maybe some you just might have forgotten.  I got a big kick out of hearing all of them again during the past week...they're all winners to me...

330 PITTSFIELD...Sufjan Stevens
This song is from Sufjan Stevens' 2006 album The Avalanche, which was basically an "extras" LP of songs he had recorded while making his acclaimed Illinois album the previous year.  Yet the songs on it are pretty extraordinary in their own right...I'd even say it's the best album of "rejects" ever made.  Pittsfield is a bittersweet reflection of the singer's rough childhood in this Illinois (not Massachusetts) town, an open letter to possibly his own mother as he and his sister struggle to make it through their daily lives.  Very touching, and a very emotional final crescendo...

329 SOUL MAKOSSA...Manu Dibango
Manu Dibango is a Cameroun musical artist...now 86...whose main claim to fame, at least in America, is his 1973 song Soul Makossa, the music written by him and recorded and originally released the previous year.  It is a standout piece, with its funky beat and sharp saxophone (played by Dibango).  As for the song's lyrics, other than the word "soul", they are all in Cameroun's Duala language...reportedly composed by one of that west-central African nation's poets: "makossa" means "dance", which is self-evident if you've ever heard it.  Of course, at the time in 1973 I knew none of this and just thought it was all extremely cool...here is finally a song that I might actually dig performing on karaoke...it's happy and very intense...

328 NO QUARTER...Led Zeppelin
Definitely not a karaoke piece, this soulful exploration into melancholy is the kind of song that I would reach out to in times when my mood would plummet downward...so it's a cathartic, misery-loves-company kind of listening experience.  No Quarter is from the band's 1972 Houses of the Holy album, unusual to me in that I thoroughly liked every single track on it: one of my all-time favorite albums, to be sure.  But it took a while for me to get there...it wasn't until Led Zeppelin's box set was released in 1990 and my local rock radio station played it that I realized all that I had been missing with this great band over the years...

327 BIG TIME...Peter Gabriel
Big Time is one of two songs on today's "list of ten" that I took an initial aversion toward because I so disliked the accompanying video...once I shed it and simply listened to the music I realized what a funny, funky piece of brilliant satire this was.  One of my favorite lines: "The place where I come from is a small town...they think so small they use small words.  But not me, I'm smarter than that, I've worked it out, I've been stretching my mouth to let those big words come right out."...

326 PARANOID ANDROID...Radiohead
I've always been impressed by singers who can hold a single note and strongly belt it out for a protracted time...Radiohead's Thom Yorke gave such a demonstration with this track from their 1997 O.K. Computer album.  I'm not sure exactly what the lyrics are meant to convey, but Yorke's cynical style and the band's tremendous instrumentation made this one of my favorites years later when I first heard it and enjoyed listening to it on my extended training runs in 2010...

325 THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD...the Beatles
When this song was released as a single in the late spring of 1970, it was called the "final Beatles song", for Paul McCartney has just announced his departure from the band.  Like Paul...who later complained about it in his lawsuit against the other three Beatles...I was initially taken aback at co-producer Phil Spector's lush orchestration and female chorus. Later, though, I came to like it and the song became more of a philosophical piece about the different long and winding roads we find ourselves journeying down at various stages of life...

324 THINK I'M IN LOVE...Beck
The Information...from 2006...may well be my favorite Beck album, and Think I'm In Love is one of my favorite tracks from it.  It's a sweet, simple love song with a catchy beat and crisp, sharply delineated instrumental roles.  I could see the Beatles in their heyday dreaming up a pop tune like this, with Paul on lead vocals and George and John harmonizing in the background.  My favorite line: "Probably lay my head on a wooden floor, tell her I was tired from working the store, counting all the cash from an old shoe box, saving up to buy her something she wants"...

323 TIME AFTER TIME...Cyndi Lauper
This is the other song that I first became acquainted with (and disliked) by watching its video...a really forgettable, maudlin viewing experience.  Not that 1984's  Time After Time on its own doesn't prey on the emotions as well...it's just that there's such a thing as overkill and the song works very well without any "help".  Just listening to it amplified the beautiful arrangement, including that background ticking that made this more serious follow-up single to Lauper's Girls Just Want to Have Fun so appropriate.  As it was, Time After Time turned out to be one of my favorite songs of 1984 as I lived through that year...

322 LAYLA...Derek and the Dominos
I'm not referring here to Eric Clapton's later jazzed-up acoustic Layla that only encompassed the vocal first half of this classic he recorded while fronting Derek and the Dominoes...it's the instrumental last half of the earlier version, recorded in 1970 and complete with piano and virtuoso rock guitar, that endeared me to it so much during the summer of 1972 (a very good time in my life) and sold me on it as my favorite song of that year.  Legendary guitarist Duane Allman, who died in 1971 in a motorcycle accident, provided much of the guitar "beauty" for this enchanting work...

321 I WALK THE LINE...Johnny Cash
What can I say about the Man in Black except that whenever I'm dressed in black I invariably think about the late Johnny Cash...what a great, class act!  I remember he once had his own TV variety show in the 1970s...one of the features was "Ride This Train" where he would musically treat an important time in America's popular history...I Walk the Line to many was Cash's first and biggest hit.  I love the way he would change the pitch of his voice with each succeeding stanza...reminds me of the old "limbo" line: how low can you go?

Next week: songs #320-321...