A little while back, somebody on the Hold Steady fan message board put out a request for people’s all-time Top Ten songs. This is a really hard question, but a fun one, so of course I couldn’t resist. And since the overlap between there and here is pretty minimal, I’ll recycle the message I sent for a quick and easy pop-culture blog post to ring out 2014 (links are to YouTube videos). <\/p>\n
————<\/p>\n
Hard to rank-order these, because it’s mostly a list of songs that have been personally significant to me at some point, so this is basically reverse-chronological autobiographical order. Which is also why it’s such an odd mix of stuff.<\/p>\n
1) The Mountain Goats, “This Year.”<\/a> Song number three off John’s Nth CD… Played a lot when I was up for tenure, and when I became department chair, and right at the moment, too…<\/p>\n 2) The Hold Steady, “How a Resurrection Really Feels.”<\/a> I bought the album because I heard “Hoodrat” on the radio, but this is the song that convinced me they were genius.<\/p>\n 3) The Weakerthans, “Reconstruction Site.”<\/a> Fantastic imagery, catchy tune. I can never write about aesthetics without getting “Beauty’s just another word I’m never certain how to spell” stuck in my head.<\/p>\n 4) The Afghan Whigs, “Lost in the Supermarket.”<\/a> Off an album of Clash covers (obviously); got this off Napster when that was a thing. Kate loves it, and I surprised her with it at our wedding (found the CD in a cut-out bin, slipped it to the DJ).<\/p>\n 5) Bob Dylan, “Mississippi.”<\/a> (Live version because that’s all I could find on YouTube…) Album track off “Love and Theft,” which he had previously let Sheryl Crow record. Kate and I were doing the long-distance thing my first year as faculty, while she finished law school. Resonated really well for me.<\/p>\n 6) The Old 97’s, “Big Brown Eyes.”<\/a> I had a beat-up CD boombox in my lab that would only play a handful of discs, and “Too Far to Care” was one. Held up remarkably well.<\/p>\n 7) Sam Cooke, “Bring It on Home to Me.”<\/a> Spent three months living in Japan as a grad student, and listened to this a lot. Not quite sure why I latched onto that specifically, but there you go.<\/p>\n 8) The Rolling Stones, “Beast of Burden.”<\/a> I do a great sing-along version of this after about five hours behind the wheel. Had it on one of my essential driving mix tapes.<\/p>\n 9) Sugar, “Hoover Dam.”<\/a> Copper Blue is one of the most perfect albums ever, this is the best sing-along song off it.<\/p>\n 10) Pink Floyd, “Wish You Were Here.”<\/a> Because reasons.<\/p>\n That’s what I’ve got this morning. Skews a bit more mellow than it might at some other points; I could easily come up with ten much louder tracks that would be equally great. And ten quieter ones, for that matter. Ask me again in a month, and I’d be amazed if the lists overlapped by more than four songs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A little while back, somebody on the Hold Steady fan message board put out a request for people’s all-time Top Ten songs. This is a really hard question, but a fun one, so of course I couldn’t resist. And since the overlap between there and here is pretty minimal, I’ll recycle the message I sent… Continue reading All Time Top Ten<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","category-pop_culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9788\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}