My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #80-76

Here are my reactions to five more songs from my 500 all-time favorites list.  As with other segments, there is a diversity of musical styles here...one of them is actually an arrangement of a classical work.  I naturally recommend them all, although one of them I'm reasonably sure you've never heard, two you might have heard, and two were big singles hits in their time...

80 CASIMIR PULASKI DAY...Sufjan Stevens
Have you ever heard of Sufjan Stevens?  Probably not, so in all likelihood you don't know of this very talented and inspired artist's outstanding 2005 album Illinois, ostensibly a tribute to this midwestern state in which he lived for a time but actually a much more introspective and spiritual work. Casimir Pulaski Day exemplifies this: the title refers to an Illinois state holiday at the beginning of March commemorating the Polish military officer who joined the American Revolutionary War efforts against the Brits.  But the song's narrative is really about a teenage girl who is dying of bone cancer, and the struggles with faith that Stevens, overtly Christian in his beliefs and songwriting, undergoes here.  My favorite song of 2009 when I first heard it, this is real Christian music that you'll never hear played on "Christian" radio because, well, as I said before it deals frankly with real struggles that Christians go through regarding their faith...

79 FLY AWAY...Lenny Kravitz
For most of 1998 I thought it was a very good year in music, with many great songs to choose from to crown my "song of the year"...and then Fly Away came along in the fall and blew them all away with its energy and wistfulness.  This song makes me want to yell along with Lenny, pump my fist into the air, and slam into that air guitar of mine...and fly away, too...don't forget that.  "Let's go and see the stars, the Milky Way or even Mars...where it could just be ours"...YEAH!  I think that, along with the other Fly Away on this favorites list of mine (by John Denver and Olivia Newton John) you couldn't come up with two more different-sounding songs with the same title and same general theme, each beautiful in its own way...

78 TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS...the Beatles
When my parents heard this closing track from the Beatles' greatest (in my opinion) album, their 1966 Revolver, I think that was when they began to drift away from being fans of the Fab Four (the Strawberry Fields Forever video on the Ed Sullivan Show didn't help either)...Tomorrow Never Knows is about as spacey as it gets.  I, on the other hand, couldn't get enough of listening to it, funny bird/animal sounds notwithstanding.  And the opening words..."Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream, it is not dying" through "But listen to the color of your dreams, it is not living" reveal some pretty deep, cryptically expressed philosophical stuff...not my parents' "cup of tea" but definitely mine...

77 DEBUSSY'S ARABESQUE NO. 1...Isao Tomita
Back in late 1974 my local Ft. Lauderdale progressive rock station, WSHE/103.5, began regularly playing this track from Isao Tomita's Snowflakes Are Dancing album, comprised of a number of instrumental songs written by French classical composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and arranged and produced completely electronically.  I bought the album and for weeks was entranced by its music...Arabesque No. 1, which in Tomita's version (not the original Debussy score) contains segments of eerie, bizarre "whistling" and "singing", you may recognize as the long-time theme music for the late Jack Horkheimer's weekly five-minute PBS Star Hustler TV show that provided timely skygazing information and brief teachings on astronomy. But listen to Isao's whole album...it's stupendous!

76 SUNSHINE ON MY SHOULDERS...John Denver
This is one of those songs that I associate with a specific personal memory...in this case one morning in February, 1974 I decided to leave the house early and walk the 5½ miles through back roads to my high school.  I had been listening to this then-new release by John Denver and played it in my mind the whole way...ever since then whenever I hear it I recall the very pleasant experience and wish I had walked to and from school more often: the distance wasn't that far and I'd already run much longer distances.  I think this song was Denver's best singing performance...it always amazes me whenever a singer can hold notes as long as he repeatedly did with this hit.  He referred back to Sunshine on My Shoulders in a later song, Back Home Again...

Next week: #75-71...