My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #35-31

Here are five more entries to my list of 500 all-time favorite songs.  They are all a bit on the "down" side, but that's just the way I like it sometimes.  And four of the five are deeply buried in the past as well, the one exception being a twenty-year old song I first heard ten years ago...

35 FUNERAL FOR A FRIEND/LOVE LIES BLEEDING...Elton John
Although this lengthy track from Elton John's 1973 Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album had been out for a while, my local album rock radio station began to seriously play it in early 1975...and it quickly became one of my favorites: I picked it as my "song of the year".  The "funeral" opening section is brooding, stormy, sad, and completely instrumental.  Elton eventually breaks in to singing as the tempo and mood both pick up...I regard this as his supreme masterpiece...

34 MORNING BELL...Radiohead
I'll always associate this sobering song from the British alternative band with long distance training runs in late 2010 and early 2011, and the areas I ran in west of my home neighborhood while listening to a shuffle mix of Radiohead songs on my MP3 player.  From Radiohead's 2000 Kid A album, their greatest in my opinion, its lyrics seem to be about divorce and the heavy toll it takes, especially in those cases involving children.  There's an alternate version of Morning Bell on their next album, Amnesiac...but I prefer the original...

33 LOVE IS LIKE OXYGEN...Sweet
Another "song of the year" on today's list, this one was from 1978 and represents one of those curious examples of a piece of music that stands very apart from the artists' other works.  I've never been much of a Sweet fan but in early '78 the album rock stations began playing this incredible song of theirs that does all sorts of interesting things with melody...and the lyrics resonated with me strongly at the time: "I walk the streets at night, to be hidden by the city lights"...back then I did probably more walking...day and night...then I have ever done before or since...

32 SCENTLESS APPRENTICE...Nirvana
This is a prime example of a song that the listener will either strongly love or strongly hate.  I get the rage embedded within it, the guitar work is phenomenally menacing and heavy metal, and I bet there will never be another artist with the guts to scream his heart out in the demented way that Kurt Cobain does it here.  It's from the Aberdeen, Washington band's 1993 final studio album In Utero, a work that I generally didn't care for all that much.  The lyrics are brilliant and very disturbing with a nihilistic bent...maybe you should skip this one if you're squeamish or prone to nightmares...

31 FOR NO ONE...the Beatles
This is a brief track from what I see as the Beatles' greatest album, Revolver, from 1966.  It's a "Paul" song with McCartney singing solo chiefly to the accompaniment of a piano...that is, until the mid-song break, highlighted by a French horn arrangement improvised and played by Alan Civil,  bringing to mind a similar contribution to the band's Penny Lane by trumpeter David Mason the following year.  For No One is a melancholic, pensive piece that has always matched up well with my general disposition...

Next week: #30-26...