My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #210-201

With today's songs we're now through with the "lower 300" of my 500 all-time favorite songs list...but as I've written before, since I've heard thousands of songs over the years all of these are pretty special to me.  Here are my reactions to the next ten on the list...

210 THE INNER LIGHT...the Beatles
This beautiful George Harrison song was released in 1968 as the flip side on the single Lady Madonna.  It's pretty short but loaded with wonderful indigenous Indian instrumental music performed by native artists.  The lyrics reflect Harrison's fascination at the time with Transcendental Meditation: "Arrive without traveling, see all without looking, do all without doing".  I didn't hear it until decades following the Beatles' breakup, probably the "final" Beatles song of their studio recordings I heard for the first time.  In essence, though, The Inner Light is a George Harrison solo piece...

209 FIELDS OF GOLD...Sting
Sting was asked about Fields of Gold and replied...if my sometimes-flagging memory doesn't fail me...that it was just a love song, nothing more.  And sometimes that's all you need to produce a great, memorable song if you're as talented and creative as the former frontman of The Police.  Fields of Gold came out in 1993 and is one of the best songs at visually evoking scenery:"You'll remember me when the west wind moves upon the fields of barley, you'll forget the sun in his jealous sky as we walk in fields of gold"...

208 KARMA POLICE...Radiohead
From Radiohead's 1997 album OK Computer, this is the song that turned me in that incredible British band's direction when my local alternative rock radio station began playing it early in 1998. The lyrics make little sense and their video even less...the music itself steals the show here.  It's somber and majestic and singer Thom Yorke expresses a mood of cynicism and a hint of despair...an ode of angst...

207 REFLECTIONS...the Supremes
The Supremes, with Diana Ross heading the great 1960s singing trio, came out with one listenable single after another, beginning in 1964 and lasting a couple of years after Ross left them in 1970 to pursue her solo career.  Smack dab in the middle of their hits is Reflections, a 1967 "Summer of Love" song that speaks of the pain of a broken relationship.  At the time I wasn't paying too much attention to it...this is a song that began to stand out retrospectively to me starting in the early 70s...

206 SHATTERED...the Rolling Stones
Funny and relentless are adjectives describing this closing track from the Rolling Stones' remarkable 1978 album Some Girls, one of their best.  Mick Jagger, who I remember saying that he wrote this song's words in a New York City taxi, is hilarious as he employs stream-of-consciousness to lampoon all the aspects of Manhattan that he has grown accustomed to, especially anything seedy or scandalous: a perfect storm combining a mesmerizing beat and outlandish lyrics...

205 ENJOY THE SILENCE...Depeche Mode
I always associate this fascinating song, from the British band's 1989 Violator album, with its video depicting singer David Gahan garbed in king costume...complete with crown...wandering over beautiful, scenic lands carrying with him a folding chair which he proceeds at intervals to open up and sit in.  I've always felt that this would have been a great Beatles song...and Ringo would have been the perfect choice to sing it.  It seems paradoxical that some songs extoll the virtues of silence and I can't get enough of listening to that message...

204 IT'S ALL IN THE GAME...Tommy Edwards
This is one of those classic old popular songs from an enchanted era: the late 1950s and early 60s.  Although Tommy Edwards elegantly sang it into a big hit in 1958. Its backstory was also interesting: the original music was composed by Charles Dawes in 1911, before he would later become vice-president in the 1920s under Calvin Coolidge.  I always liked it and am sad that the energy and optimism of that era during the end of the Eisenhower presidency and that of Kennedy's would so tragically end with the latter's 1963 assassination and the subsequent quagmire in Vietnam...

203 DUMB...Nirvana
A truly chilling song of understatement and despair...one of Kurt Cobain's quieter compositions, an introspective piece from the grunge band's 1993 In Utero album that questions the notion that people need to apply their learning to the world's standards...instead KC states "I'm not like them but I can pretend, the sun is gone but I have a light, the day is done but I'm having fun, I think I'm dumb...or maybe just happy".  The background strings accentuate the eerie, somber mood...

202 HE AIN'T HEAVY, HE'S MY BROTHER...the Hollies
Yet another great song from 1969, a year that for some reason in my life at the time I nearly completely lost touch with what was going on in the music scene.  This one's a tearjerker that expresses the Boys Town theme and a pledge to stand in the gap for others in their times of personal storms.  The Hollies had come out with a string of hit singles during the British Invasion of the mid-sixties but later on in the decade had diminished in popularity in the USA while still going on strong in England...this big hit reversed that trend...

201 DRIVE...R.E.M.
R.E.M.'s 1992 Automatic for the People in my opinion was the Athens, Georgia-based alternative rock band's best album...Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones reportedly produced it.  Drive is the lead track on it, starting with acoustic guitar as singer/lyricist Michael Stipe, one of my favorite voices in rock n' roll, speaks to kids with attitudes...with his own attitude: "Hey kids, where are you? Nobody tells you what to do, baby. Hey kids, shake a leg...maybe you're crazy in the head, baby". The electric guitar abruptly breaks in and eventually you have a Jones-style orchestrated background...beautiful.  If I ever get a handle on playing guitar this is one of the songs I want to perform...

Next week: #200-191...