My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #310-301

Here are the next ten songs, in ascending order, on my personal 500 all-time favorite songs list. They range a time span of forty years...unfortunately the latest one come out more than fifteen years ago!  Not that I'm pronouncing judgment against the state of today's popular music, but it just doesn't grab me the way the older stuff did...but I'm sure if I were much younger the songs of today would impact me the same way as the ones I grew up with...

310 REBELLION (LIES)...Arcade Fire
This track is from the Canadian alternative rock band's 2004 debut album Funeral, but I first heard it about six years later when I got around to listening to the entire album.  I became a fan of theirs because of Funeral and the subsequent albums Neon Bible and The Suburbs...but I've generally been disappointed with Arcade Fire's last two LPs.  Still, their best works rank among my favorite songs ever...band leader Win Butler sings with such heart...

309 A CHANGE WOULD DO YOU GOOD...Sheryl Crow
I bought Sheryl Crow's eponymous second album from 1996 largely on the merits of this terrific song with a mesmerizing beat, rhythm guitar and clever lyrics.  It contains one of my all-time favorite lines, a great suggestion for a telephone answering machine: "Hello it's me, I'm not at home.  If you'd like to reach me, leave me alone!".  Crow has a flair for lyrical twists in her songs that at times remind me of Bob Dylan or John Lennon...

308 ABACAB...Genesis
1982 had a lot of good songs...this lengthy track, also the title of its album, turned out to be my Song of the Year back then.  The letters in the title represent the first six musical notes of the song...being a music theory dummy I leave it for you to investigate whether that's so.  Genesis, in my opinion, was terrific from around 1980 through 1984...then their output began to deteriorate.  The trio of Phil Collins on drums and vocals, Mike Rutherford on guitar and Tony Banks on keyboards was a hard combination to beat when they were at their peak...Banks is spectacular on Abacab, especially the long instrumental closing part...

307 YOU BETTER RUN...the Rascals
The Rascals came out with this minor singles hit in 1966 two years before Led Zeppelin exploded onto the musical scene...yet You Better Run, to me, was the proto-hard-rock song, with Jimmy Page-like guitar riffs and soulful singing.  I wondered how Zeppelin's Robert Plant would have sung it had his band decided to cover it, only to just recently discover that he himself had actually done so...back in '66 with another group! The Rascals' songs covered a wide range of musical styles...a few years later Pat Benatar successfully covered this favorite of mine...

306 TWO HEARTS BEAT AS ONE...U2
This is the U2 song that back in 1983 first turned my attention to this Irish rock band...not so much for Bono's wailing singing style but rather for guitarist The Edge's inimitable, trademark rapid-fire playing, which stood out on this brash, passionate song of desperation and faith.  I owe my thanks to MTV for showing the video back then...I never did hear it played on the radio. Two Hearts Beat as One is from their third album, titled War...

305 RUBY TUESDAY...the Rolling Stones
Although Mick Jagger gets a lot of credit for singing this Stones hit from early 1967, it was actually a creative collaboration of the band's talented multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones and Keith Richards, the former largely responsible for the song's melody and the latter composing the lyrics.  Jones played the recorder on it...you know, that flimsy little instrument they gave lessons for in elementary school? Fame and success can provide focus and discipline for some people while destroying others...sadly for Jones he couldn't handle his own "good" fortune...

304 A SUMMER SONG...Chad and Jeremy
On 560 WQAM "Tiger Radio" back in 1964 this song was introduced as being by "Stuart and Clyde"...the surnames of Chad and Jeremy.  I invariably associate this song with sitting outside on my back porch back then as a seven-year old kid, often with my sister Anita.  Sweet memories, old times..songs like this one bring them back although, like A Summer Song, they can be beautiful in their own right...

303 TRY A LITTLE KINDNESS...Glen Campbell
The springtime of 1970, when this song was a radio hit, was anything but a "kind" time in my own life, undergoing a very dog-eat-dog, hostile social environment at school in the 8th grade, and I had always thought that this song's lyrics were for others to follow. But in all honesty, although I never picked on other kids I have to realize that I was also short in the compassion department back then...taking an engaged, active interest in others' lives and opinions is in itself a form of kindness, one that would have served me well had I employed it in those difficult times.  Campbell's message reigns universal and timeless...

302 HEY HEY WHAT CAN I DO...Led Zeppelin
Not on any of Led Zeppelin's traditional albums, this B-side song on the Immigrant Song single should have been on their third album...why they passed up on it in favor of some clearly inferior tracks is beyond me.  It's a slow bluesy rant by Robert Plant about his (fictional) wayward love, one of his best performances for the band.  I came to know of Hey Hey What Can I Do after hearing it off their 1990 box set, which was aired on Gainesville's WRUF/Rock 104...

301 CIVIL WAR...Guns n' Roses
Guns n' Roses is far from being my favorite band, but they put it all together on this 1991 piece from their Use Your Illusion II album about the horrors of war and assassination...from back in our own American Civil War on through the Kennedy shooting and Vietnam War and then to the proxy international civil wars instigated and armed by the superpowers.  Yes, there is a lot of food for thought here as well as fantastic guitar playing by Slash.   This band is one that had a lot of talent and promise, but internal squabbling broke them up in the end...too bad, I would have loved to hear more songs from them with the intensity and sophistication of Civil War...

Next week: my all-time favorite songs #300-291...