My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #200-191

With today I begin to explore the top 200 of my list of all-time favorite songs...you can reference the previous (lower-ranked) entries by skipping back to previous Mondays on this blog.  All of the ten songs I'm discussing today are super-oldies, the most recent one coming out more than 37 years ago...

200 TANGLED UP IN BLUE...Bob Dylan
The notion that some people just stumble through their lives, bouncing off experiences and relationships, is a hidden theme of this narrative by the Bard of Our Time as he relates in epic fashion his on-again, off-again friendship over the years with a woman unnamed.  My favorite line: "All the people we used to know, they're an illusion to me now. Some are mathematicians, some are carpenters' wives...don't know how it all got started, don't know what they're doin' with their lives".  Tangled Up in Blue is from Dylan's Blood on the Tracks LP and was a hit in early 1975...but I didn't get to really liking it until years later: sometimes you just have to grow into a song...

199 P.S. I LOVE YOU...the Beatles
I've loved this very early (and very short) Beatles song since early 1964 when it was played a lot on Miami's 560/WQAM, along with much of the backlog of Beatles hits that had already been released in England the year before.  It's a "Paul" song and is one of the greatest love songs of all time "as he writes this letter"...

198 ROUNDABOUT...Yes
Among other things there are two distinct memories I have from the spring of 1972 as I wound down my sophomore year in high school: it never stopped raining and my favorite song was Roundabout by Yes. I'd sit evenings on the back porch or do homework in the utility room my sister converted to a study area and who let me use it, with the radio going strong.  And this was the one of the best songs back then, in my opinion...but there always seemed to be that background sound of rain pounding down on everything.  Ironically, during the previous spring South Florida was in the throes of a severe drought with a smoky, stinking haze blowing in from Everglades wildfires. Roundabout, from the English progressive rock group's great Fragile album, dazzled me with its insane keyboards...more from Yes to come...

197 THE DAY WE MEET AGAIN...the Moody Blues
I discovered this jewel from the band's 1977 Octave album during the mid-1990s when I was investigating their catalogue of works.  I didn't care for the album as a whole, but those last two tracks were incredible...this one is the finale and the other is higher on this list.  The Day We Meet Again is dominated by the organ, and imparts a sad, dreamy feeling as singer/songwriter Justin Haywood delivers a possibly unintentional prophetic message about his band's future. Octave is a peculiar album, recorded after the Moody Blues had broken up four years earlier and four years before they would resume recording together.  In our times that would seem to be a normal break between albums, but not then: everybody was churning 'em out at a much higher rate in the sixties and seventies...

196 AMERICA...Keith Emerson and the Nice
For some reason the memory keeps coming back to me of sitting in the seventh grade at Nova High (no middle school back in 1968) during morning announcements (which for some reason they called Ad-Com, short for administrative communications) and they played this song over the air...I had already been enjoying it from the radio.  America is an organ/guitar-based instrumental rock adaptation of Leonard Bernstein's same-titled piece from his musical West Side Story...with a tribute to Antonin Dvorak's Ninth "New World" Symphony thrown in for good measure.  Bernstein was reportedly miffed at Emerson's presentation of his work as an antiwar protest song, but I thought then and still do think that it was a masterpiece...my favorite song of 1968 as I lived through it...

195 DESIDERATA...Les Crane
Disc jockey Les Crane turned Max Erhmann's prose poem into a hit single in 1972...he delivers the great wisdom of this piece in a calm, plain voice with a female chorus for the line "You are a child of the universe..." Have you ever read or heard Desiderata?  Pretty much everything in it is useful for framing one's own attitudes about life and others....here's one verse: "If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself"....

194 FLY AWAY...John Denver and Olivia Newton-John
Fly Away was a 1975 hit...I first heard it on TV as Denver and Newton-John performed it.  I thought then that there was a future in these two collaborating on more songs as they both seemed to project the same kind of popular music with country leanings and their voices dovetailed beautifully, but apparently they didn't agree and went their own ways.  This one at least I'm grateful for...

193 IT'S RAINING AGAIN...Supertramp
Supertramp had a good run in the late 1970s, which would end in the early 80s when singer/composer Roger Hodgson regrettably left the group for solo stardom that would elude him.  From late 1982, It's Raining Again is self-evidently a melancholic song with Hodgson's plaintive singing and the band's seamless accompaniment, including piano, synthesizer and saxophone...it ends with an old nursery rhyme.  It's the last song they did together that I liked...

192 PRESSURE...Billy Joel
Back in 2007 when I compiled my all-time favorite songs list on this blog, Pressure, from Joel's 1982 Nylon Curtain album, came in at a lofty #23, but its subsequent drop on my list over the years isn't so much due to me liking it less as it is that I took a better look at all the rest of the songs I liked, including many recent ones.  It has some of the most clever lyrics I've heard, my favorite line being "But here you are with your faith and your Peter Pan advice, you have no scars on your face and you cannot handle pressure"...

191 WORDS OF LOVE...the Beatles
When the Beatles album Beatles VI came out in the summer of 1964 my parents, both hardline Beatles fans back then, duly went out and purchased the album...it quickly became one of my all-time favorites of that group.  I was seven at the time, on summer vacation between the second and third grades at Boulevard Heights Elementary in what was still called West Hollywood...good times, good times.  Words of Love, the closing track on side one, features George deftly displaying his guitar picking skills as he sings this brief cover of an old Buddy Holly song...not that I knew of Holly back then.  Along with Slow Down, this was one of my top favorite Fab Four songs during that season...

Next week: #190-181...