My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #40-36

All of the acts on this segment of my 500 all-time favorite songs list are well-known, established artists with maybe only one song being relatively obscure...they should all be famous since they, after all, are in my personal musical hall of fame...

40 I WON'T BACK DOWN...Tom Petty
Gainesville's late home-grown rock star temporarily broke away from his band the Heartbreakers in 1989 to make his solo album Full Moon Fever...that's why you don't see them credited for this track from it although Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell is strongly present.  I Won't Back Down, with lyrics like "No I'll stand my ground, won't be turned around, and I'll keep this world from draggin' me down", is the ultimate song of defiance and individuality in a culture that outwardly celebrates these expressions but actually tends to stigmatize those who do not conform to the "party line" of whichever group seems to dominate the setting, be it a small circle or a nationwide movement...

39 DARKNESS...the Police
From their brilliant 1981 Ghost in the Machine album, Darkness is a powerful mood piece of despair with a strong, blended instrumental component bathing over its entirety.  It's about the futility of trying to create or get anything done...and wouldn't anonymity be preferable? "Instead of worrying about my clothes, I could be someone that nobody knows"...I didn't get to know this song until about 15 years after it came out, but it quickly became one of my favorites of the Police.  But Ghost in the Machine is so good that there's another song from it that I think is even greater: stay tuned to this channel...

38 EVEN FLOW...Pearl Jam
I always liked this strong guitar rock performance by the Seattle band on their 1992 debut Ten album...but there's a different version out there getting radio play that I don't care for as much.  Lyricist Eddie Vedder sings his typically hard-to-understand words about a homeless man while guitarists Stone Gossard (who wrote the song's music) and Mike McCready deliver an epic performance.  A song sure to get your adrenaline going and one on which I automatically turn the volume up to high...

37 PEACE FROG...the Doors
Off their 1970 Morrison Hotel album, Peace Frog is a funky adventure for the Doors as Jim Morrison repeats the mantra "Blood on the streets" while he reminisces about the band's past experiences and recent history and pays homage to his favorite city, "Phantastic" Los Angeles....the break in the song's middle features a spoken poem he wrote years before about an eerie childhood experience he had while his family was stopped on the highway because of a fatal accident that had just occurred: Jim himself represented the "young child's fragile eggshell mind".  A beautiful...yet admittedly a little creepy...piece of art, this song is...

36 STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER...the Beatles
Speaking of weird, artistic ventures in music, Strawberry Fields Forever was written by John Lennon and first recorded twice, each version at a slightly different speed than the other.  Lennon told producer George Martin to combine the two into one track and when Martin protested about the different speeds Lennon reportedly told him to fix it, or something of the like.  The result was a recording that at times sounds more like Ringo than John...the video shown on the Ed Sullivan Show in late 1966 (I was ten at the time) was my first exposure to this song: I didn't like it, mainly because everyone was suddenly sporting moustaches.  Of course, now I love Strawberry Fields Forever...

Next week: #35-31...