My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #130-121

Here's another segment of my all-time 500 favorite songs list that spans several decades...most of the songs are pretty well known but a couple are hidden treasures on their respective albums.  I naturally think they're all fantastic and urge you to give them a listen.  And now, the next ten...

130 PRODIGAL SON...the Rolling Stones
Although the album Beggars Banquet, on which this track appeared, came out in 1968, I didn't hear it until the mid-nineties when I examined the Stones' collected works. Prodigal Son was originally composed by blues artist Reverend Richard Wilkins some forty-odd years earlier. It would be a great song to play on Christian radio stations, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen since the singer is, after all, Mick Jagger.  I loved Jagger's subdued, blues-soaked style here...my estimation of this song has only increased over the years...

129 SPACE ODDITY...David Bowie
To me, for most of David Bowie's career Space Oddity was his great, defining song with its cosmic overtones and sense of alienation and isolation...then I realized that I liked another of his early works more.  Although Space Oddity was first released in 1969 and I heard it while straining my ears one night to hear it played on a weak AM station that was fading in and out, for some reason it was rereleased as a single in early 1973 and my local station WQAM/560 played it in their regular rotation.  It's very loosely based, in my opinion, on the celebrated 1967 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey as astronaut David Bowman finds himself on his own special trip out in the cosmos, cut off from humanity...

128 LAZY EYE...Silversun Pickups
I liked this 2006 indie hit back then when it was played on my local Gainesville alternative rock station, but years later...in 2018...for some reason I really picked up on it and would make it my favorite song of that year.  Lead singer Brian Aubert sounds like he's trying to imitate the Smashing Pumpkins' front man Billy Corgan, and that can get to be a little irritating.  But he delivers a great performance here...and the guitar play is outstanding on a number of levels.  It's really quite a brilliant song...

127 SUICIDE BLONDE....INXS
This song by the Australian band came out in 1990 and was a moderate hit...to me this lead song from their X album was superior to any of the hits they had produced from their previous breakthrough album Kick.  This is a great, hard-rocking piece with a piercing riff and singer Michael Hutchence, one of the great voices of his age, more than able to keep up with the torrid guitar pace.  I was also pretty impressed with the video...

126 IMITATION OF LIFE...R.E.M.
From their 2001 surprisingly good Reveal album, Imitation of Life was its initial singles release.  It has a somber, yet whimsical mood to it as the band by this time has clearly moved away from guitar-based alternative rock to a more studio-arranged sound.  Michael Stipe's lyrics are typical of his nonsensical stream-of-consciousness style: "Charades pop skill, water hyacinth, named by a poet imitation of life" yet he sings it as if it were the most important message he could relate.  The verse section's melody is compelling...the chorus, which dominates the song's second half, has a children's sing-song aspect to it that bothered me a little at first, but I came to like it as well...

125 I WILL FOLLOW...U2
This song kicked off the Irish rock band's 1980 debut album Boy and is U2 at its best...sometimes that's the way it is: an act starts out with an artistic rawness to it that over the years gets compromised bit by little bit.  Lead guitarist The Edge dominates I Will Follow with his relentless trademark riff from the very beginning and Bono has maybe his best singing performance in a song full of spiritual overtones.  It didn't become known in America until 1983 when their hit song New Year's Day introduced this iconic band to the country...

124 GOING TO CALIFORNIA...Led Zeppelin
Possibly the greatest album side of all time...Led Zeppelin "IV" Side Two, when there actually used to be album sides...Going to California is Robert Plant's plaintive ballad about looking for a love that he can't find...and then realizes probably never ever existed.  Jimmy Page offers my favorite acoustic guitar accompaniment to a Led Zeppelin song, although Friends from their previous album was pretty awesome as well.  Every song on this album side is on my "top 500" list, two already covered and two more to go...

123 THE TWO OF US...the Beatles
The leadoff track on the Beatles' final studio album Let It Be, which was ironically described on its jacket as "a new phase Beatles album", The Two of Us was one of my favorites during my angst-ridden existence as a thirteen-year-old eighth-grader early in 1970.  A further irony is that this song features Paul and John in one of their greatest performing collaborations while in reality "the two of them" were bitterly feuding with each other over the band's management and musical direction.  I wish they'd come up with a few more like this folksy tune reminiscent of their earlier Rubber Soul period...

122 NIGHTS IN WHITE SATIN...the Moody Blues
This closing track from the revamped Moody Blues' 1967 Days of Future Passed album was unknown to me until album rock radio began playing it in conjunction with the release of their 1972 Seventh Sojourn album...it's a fitting close to an album guiding the listener through the various parts of the day.  The "night" here is gloomy and somber as the singer expresses his inner troubles...the concluding spoken poem, composed and read by drummer Graham Nash, is often cut from radio play but is the best part of the song, in my opinion: "Breathe deep the gathering gloom, watch lights fade from every room.  Bedsitter people look back and lament another day's useless energy spent".  It was a favorite of mine during a period of deep introspection I was going through at the time...

121 JACKSONVILLE...Sufjan Stevens
On his tremendous 2005 Illinois album, Stevens included this slow-moving ode to the Underground Railroad of the mid-1800s that aided blacks from the South escaping slavery to their eventual freedom in Canada...Jacksonville, Illinois was a "way station" in this secret network.  I loved the entire album, but Jacksonville stands out with Stevens' understated singing, banjo picking and strong presence of strings in the background orchestration.  It irks me that a great song like this one doesn't even rate a separate Wikipedia article...I'd like to read how the artist put everything together to come out with such a singular product.  Although it was released in '05 I didn't first hear it until four years later when I discovered Sufjan Stevens while listening to an online alternative music channel...

Next week: #120-111...