My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #25-23

Two of the three acts featured below as I continue to approach the top of my list of 500 all-time personal favorite songs are well-known while the last one should be...had the trends of popular music tastes remained at the same relatively high level they were during the latter part of the twentieth century.  But that's just my opinion and you're welcome to your boring top forty MTV superstars of the past few years if you're happy with their output: I'm not...

25 FIND THE RIVER...R.E.M.

The Athens, Georgia-based alternative rock band R.E.M.'s greatest album, in my opinion, was Automatic for the People from 1992...Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones reportedly had a big hand in producing it.  My favorite tracks from it are Drive, Man on the Moon, The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight and the closing song Find the River...my favorite from this outstanding musical act.  Find the River's lyricist and singer Michael Stipe admits that he threw a lot of nonsensical words together in it because they sounded good, but he also gets enough in to direct the mood of the song as it portends great change to come...including the inevitability of death itself, as the accompanying video suggests.  But such things are universal, just as the river flows into the sea...an allegory in this song.  Find the River is sad, thought-provoking, and beautiful...

24 STREET FIGHTING MAN...the Rolling Stones

I pretty much ignored this track from the Stones' pivotal 1968 album Beggars Banquet when it first came out...it wouldn't be until the Nineties when I fell in love with the off-sounding beat and guitar and sitar interactions, along with singer Mick Jagger's ironic lament of London's sleepy town status as opposed to Paris, site of many ongoing street riots and protests. Ironic because Jagger was no radical himself, one of those wealthy folk that the anarchists and revolutionaries liked to rail against...yet in the song he calls himself "a poor boy".  Jagger was and still is a master of projecting an image of himself and his band that contributed to their enduring notoriety and success...even as they accumulated their riches and social status.  Street Fighting Man is one of the greatest air guitar songs I know of...yet this band which is still going on strong...more than two and a half decades following their "One Foot in the Grave" concert tour...has another song that is even higher up on my favorites list...

23 OH DETROIT, LIFT UP YOUR WEARY HEAD...Sufjan Stevens

Sufjan Stevens is one of those musical artists for whom you never know exactly what to expect when you play one of his albums for the first time.  In the decade of the 2000s he released two albums themed after the states of Michigan and Illinois...this song about Detroit is obviously from the former as he bemoans the fall that the Motor City had undergone through the years.  It starts out fast-moving and syncopated and winds down to a slow death at the end, mirroring Stevens' feelings about this great old American city.  Eight minutes long, it has always been among my favorites ever since I first heard it in 2009.  Yet I would be astonished if I found out that any of this blog's readers had ever heard this masterpiece before...to me it should have been a nationwide number one singles hit for weeks instead of being deeply buried on an obscure CD.  Stevens has a new album release, The Ascension, due out at the end of this month and I'm looking forward to hearing it...

Next week: #22-20...