My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #50-46

Now I begin my final top 50 all-time favorite songs from my original list of 500.  Four of the five go way back into the past...and the other reminded me of it.  They're all superb in their own ways...you should give them each a listen...

50 TIME IN A BOTTLE...Jim Croce
In early 1974 this single by Jim Croce, who had died the previous summer in an airplane crash, was popular on the radio...I always liked it a lot and found it a good meditative song.  I also remember at the time...just a seventeen-year old high school senior...feeling that I was old and that so much of life had passed me by.  There's an old song by Bob Dylan with the words "but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now".  He got that right, and Croce I believe had the makings of a long, Dylanesque career himself had his own life not been so tragically cut short...

49 TIMEBOMB...Beck
Timebomb was a 2007 alternative rock singles release by this multiple-Grammy winning Los Angeles artist, not a part of his original Modern Guilt album (which I also recommend) also released that year.  It has a bubble-gum sing-song nature to it that Beck somehow makes work...and it brings a strange association to my mind: back in 1969 during the last half of my seventh grade experience at Nova High in Davie, Florida we had a bomb scare that lasted several hours, with students forced out into the surrounding field for hours without any relief under the hot, beating sun.  I don't think they ever found a bomb, but the experience just standing out there like that with no end in sight was unsettling (and memorable) enough...

48 EAST OF GINGER TREES...Seals and Crofts
A very beautiful, mystical track from the pop duo's famous 1972 Summer Breeze debut album, it evokes some pretty exotic and vivid imagery...and the background instrumentation is fantastic with its oriental overtones.  Because I liked their early '73 single Hummingbird so much I later bought the album, otherwise I might never have heard this wonderful piece that should be near the top of anyone's listening list.  Seals and Crofts made a string of singles hits for the next few years...I think my high school graduating class's theme song was their We May Never Pass This Way Again...

47 UP THE LADDER TO THE ROOF...the Supremes
Although Diana Ross had left the group by early 1970 when this song came out, the lead vocal sounds like her...ironically, although I thought (and still think) that she was/is great, Up the Ladder to the Roof is my favorite Supremes song. It was Jean Terrell, brought on to replace Ross, who sang lead on this optimistic, wistful song that was popular and a source of soothing during a turbulent period in my early teen-age years.  In 1983 I thought that Prince had ripped off the chorus melody to it with his Little Red Corvette...I seem, however, to be the only one who felt that way...

46 EYES OF A CHILD/FLOATING...the Moody Blues
From the Moody Blues' 1969 concept album To Our Children's Children's Children is this three-part piece, the John Lodge-composed and sung Eyes of a Child sandwiching the core song Floating, another Ray Thomas composition.  It's Floating that I like a lot here, but to get the full impact of it all I recommend you listening to it all together.  The first part of Eyes of Child sounds a bit like the band's hit Nights in White Satin while its closing part reminds me of their Just a Singer in a Rock n' Roll Band.  Floating is a tribute a child's vivid, powerful imagination...very sweet yet with a peculiar psychedelic bent to it...

Next week: #45-41...