A rant: The Top Twenty Songs that Mean the Most to Me

This rant is a list of the songs that have struck me at various intersections in my life.  Maybe it was the timing, the song itself or the artist.  My music-nerd boner goes up for a broad spectrum of bi-curious ‘ok I’ll try it and let’s see what happens’ musicality, but for the purposes of this list I am limiting myself to one song per artist.  I put them in alphabetical order by artist since trying to rank them on an ark was a level of stupidity I was not willing to embark. So onward to a pointlessness and oversharing!  

1.      Andre Williams – Pussy Stank – This song is off Silky possibly the raunchiest R&B album in existence that I would consider masterful music.  Before hearing Silky my friend Edmund brought me, my future wife and some friends to the Circle Bar in Lee Circle in New Orleans to see Mr. Andre Williams perform in probably 1999 or 2000.  There was older black and white pornography played on a film strip in the upper-right hand wall above the side of the stage before the show.  It wasn’t obnoxious, just a little precursor of the man, the legend, the walking sex, the black Godfather Andre Williams.  Pussy Stank has a jarring guitar riff and the comparison of the smell of marijuana to a vagina in a way that only Andre could pull off.  His combination of dirty and true appreciates the underbelly of what sex is and is not as an adult.  I later in life saw a documentary on Andre staying in Motel 6’s popping a grocery bag full of prescription meds and trying to get off drinking, touring to make due and never getting his money for writing Shake Your Tail Feather from back in his MoTown days.   

2.      The Avett Brothers – Heart Full of Doubt Road Full of Promise – This is the song I chose to end my novel with from their set at Jazz Fest in 2011 after they followed Mumford and Sons.  The reference to people seeing the darkness on another person, on themselves, dreams, doubts, following your own life, freeing yourself, the bad thoughts, and recognizing the depths of the internal.  The idea of an internal morality that sits in each of us.  If I did choose to rank all these in order.  This would be number one.  The context of that live performance and what their album, I and Love and You meant to me for what I was going through in my life in 2009 will always be imbedded in me.  On top of all that, the band is a group of Generation X’ers championing the heart and peering into the raw rather than the superficial.  

3.      Bob Dylan – You Ain’t Going Nowhere – This may be the first Bob Dylan song that I ever heard, not knowing who Bob Dylan was or that this was even his song.  I now have about thirty Dylan albums.  My dearest English teacher in high school Mr. Fuchs played an acoustic set at the Neutral Ground Coffee house in New Orleans.  I remember hearing him play the song rocking back and forth about the easy chair.  I saw a man show the hell of divorce, the beauty of finding love again and death, stark death.  I think of “the day my bride is going to come” and relate what he must have gone through finding his second wife that he seemed so in love with and her untimely death. I think of a skit I did in his creative writing class about divorce and the lack of animosity in my naïve theater.  I think of what I was going through in my life in 2009 and how I could not bring myself to go to his funeral.  I sat in a house alone child-like again in awe.   

4.      Bob Marley – Redemption Song – I remember my first trip to Jamaica with my ex-wife’s family.  I did not have any kids yet and it was my wife and I, her parents and like fifteen of her parent’s friends and siblings and their spouses.  There was this crew of drunken adults and my ex-wife and I were the most responsible.  We were on the ride from the airport in Negril to the tiny hotel we were all staying at in Drumville Cove where a guy would later threaten to stab me while haggling over a wood carving of a turtle.  Our guide was a young woman in her early thirties standing up in the middle of the aisle.  She sung out an a capella version of Redemption Song.  I was looking up at the hills and saw sheets of tin slanted into the Earth to make shelter and a goat tied up on a random stick.  I saw a Jockey T-shirt factory.  I saw some kids playing soccer on dirt with no goals.  I saw the bushy-jungle ranging up to the left and to the right the Caribbean gleaming.  I felt like an asshole.  “This song of freedom is all I ever had.”  I think of the folded down jump seat in that bus and the laughing and the cheers after she finished from the rest of the people.  I think of what that woman probably makes in a year.  

5.      Bruce Springsteen – The Darkness on the Edge of Town – I think of the day my wife walked out to live her other life.  I think of that night and the shock and two hours in of processing.  I think of grabbing my Saints fleece to go out in the light December rain and walking a lap around this spoiled cul de sac neighborhood out of a house that was too-damn-big and every priority in my life was weighing down on me in ways I would too soon come to know.  To single out any particular line in that song is difficult, because the whole thing encompasses something so real to me, but “Tonight I’ll be on that hill ‘cause I can’t stop.  I’ll be on that hill will everything I got.  Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost.  I’ll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost.”  I’m just so glad to know I have “cut it loose.” 

6.      The Clash – Rudie Can’t Fail – Besides utilizing one of my favorite words, “feckless,” this upbeat song off of London Calling has transformed into memories of dancing with my daughter from her at the age of six and older.  I have a playlist on my iPod for her and in that group Rudie Can’t Fail is one of our favorites.  She thought it said, “Daddy Booty Not Fair,” in the chorus.  She would try to fake slap me on the butt and we jump around our living room.  She would write the fake misspelled lyrics in her little notebooks and draw pictures.  The actual part of the song about, “I went to the market to realize what I need, I just don’t have,” rings out the science of wanting, we want things we don’t need and wanting breeds more wanting.  

7.      The Counting Crows – Round Here – This is the first song on their debut album August and Everything After.  I must have listened to this CD five thousand times in high school laying out on the blue carpet in my bedroom writing.  This was teenage loneliness and heart ache in poetic lyrics for me.  When I was married, we had a CD alarm clock, which now sits in my daughter’s room.  This CD was in there and we woke up to it every morning for years. It starts out slow and peaceful.  The guy my ex is now married to has a sticker decal on the back of his pickup truck of a scripted Counting Crows on the left rear window behind the driver’s head.  She knew him in like fifth grade and I remember her telling me stories about these bootleg Counting Crows cassettes and alternate versions of Mr. Jones that the guy had when her and I were still married.  “Ah man I said I’m under the gun, round here, I can’t see nothing, I can’t see nothing round here.” 

8.      Green Day – Jesus of Suburbia – Green Day was one of those bands from high school that was fun.  I was into their stuff on the side mixed into punk, but I was less into the poppy stuff and more into Rancid.  I remember putting Dominated Love Slave off of Kerplunk in the background of a Creative Writing skit once.  That was youthful Green Day.  When I first heard American Idiot when my younger brother brought a copy over, it was pre-Katrina.  I was like, “Holy shit they grew up.”  I am grown up.  I own a house now.  This is a God-damn punk-opera and confronting reality.  This song lays it on the line with Jesus in a way that struck kindred, “In a land of make believe, don’t believe in me.”  I took my younger brother to his first punk show, Green Day at the State Palace Theater in New Orleans after Nimrod came out.  I remember jumping up and down with him in the balcony.  I remember getting the tickets in the balcony rather than the floor to be able to look out for him.  I was probably a freshman in college, so he would have been in junior high around 1997 or so.  Now punk music is such a big part of his life.  So him bringing me the album is part of a full-circle type of memory.  “I don’t care if you don’t care.  Everyone is so full of shit.  Born and raised by hypocrites.”  “I leave behind this hurricane of fucking lies.  I lost my faith to this town that don’t exist.” “I don’t feel shame, I won’t apologize” 

9.      Metallica – Hit the Lights – Kill ‘Em All was the first cassette I ever purchased.  This is the first song on Kill ‘Em All (Metallica’s debut).  I remember walking to a movie rental place that sold music.  I had never heard the album, just of it.  The bloody hammer on the insert front cover.  I put the tape in my Walkman.  I remember sitting in my room with my head phones hearing the fastest loudest thing I had ever heard to that point.  I was in full-on metal phase around seventh grade.  I wore Metallica, Megadeath, and Pantera t-shirts that my mother abhorred.  I had posters and the whole bit.  I liked to wander around my neighborhood by myself sometimes skating or riding my bike, but always alone.  “No life till leather, gonna kick some ass tonight!  Hit the lights!!” 

10.  Nine Inch Nails – Heresey – Out of all the songs on my iTunes that I would probably not want to blare at work this probably wins, especially in my current rural wasteland.  I got into Nine Inch Nails my sophomore year of high school, right after The Downward Spiral was released in 1994.  That album takes on every taboo from war, suicide, God/religion, sex, depression, and human suffering on multiple levels.  “God is dead and no one cares.  If there is a hell I’ll see you there.”  The words were especially striking being in Catholic school my whole life and giving myself permission to question at fifteen.  “Killing suffering in vain, atrocities done in his name.”  As a mature adult I am grateful that other points of view are out there and easier for young people to find them.   

11.  Operation Ivy – Vulnerability – Energy is the number one punk album of all time to me.  What Jesse Michaels and Tim Armstrong created and then left to burn in an inextinguishable flame, rings more true every year, after 911, after the 2008 market collapse, after the global economic consolidation, after noticing Global warming, after the distancing of humanity for machines, and the grand artificial life.  Their only album is like having ten albums.  Certainty the Clash’s London Calling and Sandinista are up there and Rancid’s And Out Come the Wolves is amazing, but this is where it starts for me in my generation, especially for being in high school when I first heard it.  In Vulnerability at the very end, “Our vulnerability is all our insensitivity and it’s going to be the death of us just you wait and see,” rings out as the warning.  It is the reason punk music exists to raise the rebellion and call out the system for correction by sometimes burning it down, by sometimes demanding thoughtful and pragmatic change for the survival of what is really irreplaceable, our humanity.  Twenty-seven songs of genius, even the one cover song.  Freeze Up, Take Warning, Room Without a Window, Healthy Body, Unity, there is so much greatness. 

12.  Professor Longhair – Mardi Gras in New Orleans – This is my daughter and I’s national anthem.  She knows she was born in New Orleans, but knows only glimpses of it after leaving a month after her first birthday after Katrina hit.  When this comes on her iPod shuffle list, we typically stand up salute and get her little bumble bee umbrella from the stand by the door and second line around the living room.  The first piano part is like a roll call of attendance to get up.  She knows this from parades now, she knows where her daddy is from and this tie that we were born in the same place and not in this other place is a binding tie.  The whistling, the fact that this song could actually have no lyrics and would still be as powerful.  This is like a call to arms for New Orleanians, who we are, something intimately native.  After Katrina, after having what you love ripped apart and away at the seams, it means all the more now.  Yeah you right. 

13.  The Ramones –Sheena Is a Punk Rocker – The first real concert I ever went to was to see Pearl Jam on the field my high school played football my sophomore year when they were having their battle with ticket master in 1994.  The show was originally set for July 4^th, but got rained out or postponed for some reason.  Bad Religion was originally supposed to open up for them.  Well come September, The Ramones were the opening act.  That show and The Ramones solidified my shift away from metal and into punk.  The Ramones were the loudest, fastest band I had ever and have ever heard play live.  Their studio albums do not give the ferocity and fun that was justice.  The do have a greatest hits live album put out in 1996 that gives a glimpse.  But going 1,2,3,4 like a machine gun of two-minute songs one after the other in an unrelenting onslaught struck me like nothing else.  I saw them play once more before the deaths started.  “I’m ready to go now, Oh yeah,” A minute forty-five, in an out kick ass rock and roll! 

14.   Rancid – Avenue and Alleyways – …And Out Come the Wolves is a punk document to me.  Rancid is my favorite band, so many good songs.  They are an homage to the Clash and taking on my generation, pulling out what Tim Armstrong brought to Operation Ivy out of the gutter into the streets and showing the world for what it is.  This came out in 1995.  I met my best friend around then in high school.  J is a black kid from the other side of New Orleans with a parallel back ground to my own.  We are similar in so many ways that matter.  This song makes me think about the bullshit of surfaces and how there is nothing I wouldn’t do for the guy, ever, till death, if we ever need each other we would do whatever.  “Actions could erase all the fear we suffer, People segregated no one understands each other, He’s a different color, but we’re the same kid, I treat him like my brother he will treat me like his.”  “I’m a battering ram coming through to you Oi Oi Oi!”  

15.  Ray LaMontagne – Old Before Your Time – This song came out in 2010 when I was feeling old as hell.  My whole life was in reconsideration.  Family, money, the losses, love, and fear.  This song really put fear and love right there on the table for me of seeing the life of choice of being a broken man in the sadness and having life right there every moment.  “Ain’t about time you realized it’s not about keeping score. You win some you lose some you let it go.  What’s the use in stacking on every failure as another stone, until you find your whole life building walls.”  This song makes me think about internal growth, self-examination and finding peace by staring life straight in its maw and not letting yourself get eaten and old.  

16.  My brother's band – Song Censured by the internet – This is a song my brother wrote for one of his bands about me and surviving the custody trial after my divorce after something my daughter told me her mother made up to tell her about me that a four year old doesn’t know what to believe.  Coming from him it shows me he saw me and what it took.  It shows me how much he loves and respects me, which are amazing feelings knowing how much he means to me and what I have tried to teach and show him in my little time on this Earth.  “The girl you thought you knew, she never existed.  She never existed at all.”  There is some catharsis in it and some anger that I do not have the paradigm to express.  He has his own anger about the facets of the whole deal and I respect that.  I have a daughter.  There are things I cannot say, that I cannot completely feel knowing the counterweight.  He is my brother with a level of intimacy of the reality, but a greater freedom that registers. 

17.  Sage Francis – Hoofprints In the Sand – It is hard to point to one Sage song.  I have to thank my older brother for introducing me to Sage.  “Thumbing their noses at those in need of handouts.”  Politics and the hoodwinks of war, religion, parties, money, “from Noah’s Ark to Rosa Parks,” “bring ‘em down and build ‘em back up with what we throw away,” “fashion catalogues with gas masks,” “my higher power doesn’t need to be thanked,” “I am at the fire where are you?”  “I know that you pray when the chips are down and act differently when there are atheists around,”  Sage brings spoken word and hip-hop with a political, emotional and spirituality that I find to be dead on.  The best part of this song is that a man can see the fire burning in the world and he begs to ask, “Where are you?” So many people appear oblivious; I strive to never be counted in that number again. 

18.  Sam Cooke – Another Saturday Night – Cooke is love and kindness, fun and a bit of sex even with the gospel background.  This song makes me think of Halloween around 2011 dancing in a bar with a woman who I cared deeply for.  I think about letting go and all the other Saturday nights in my life where there was no dancing, no drinks.  I think of putting on Sam Cooke’s Portrait of a Legend in my house and just letting it play over and over again, such classic American music.  

19.  Wilco – Misunderstood – This is the first song on disc one of Being There, which came out in 1996, my senior year of high school.  Wilco went from alt-country on A.M. to unleashing the crusader of lonely pathos in Jeff Tweedy.  I remember later standing alone at the House of Blues in New Orleans after their next album Summerteeth came out in 1999.  I wanted to have love, any kind of relationship to share this pool of writing inside me. The flood of words and thoughts in my head has never stopped.  I had my notebooks and Wilco and bands like the Counting Crows to write certain types of poems when the mood struck.  I played Being There repeatedly.   The idea of being misunderstood is the universal definition of high school to me for everybody.  “Fortune inside your head, all you touch turns to lead, Think I might just crawl back in bed.  Fortune inside your head.”  “So misunderstood.  You’re so misunderstood.  I’d like to thank you all for nothing.  I’d like to thank you all for nothing at all.”  That last line about the thank you, to me I say it to my thoughts.  So many days I wish I was built differently, that my head would just stop the requirement to express, to write, the contemplation, I so often wish I could be oblivious. 

20.  Woody Guthrie – I Ain’t Got Nobody – Trying to pin down a single Woody Guthrie song is I imagine like trying to select a most influential Bible verse to a Christian.  There are so many standard bearers that would start the train from Bob Dylan, to Johnny Cash, to Bruce Springsteen, to Jeff Tweedy, and so many more.  I typically picture Woody sitting in a boxcar with a guitar, no audience and the landscape passing.  His audience was the world, possessions were all under reconsideration.  Guthrie to me is the original American punk-rocker singing about topics that probably went over people’s heads, but stuck in their spirit.  “I ain’t got nobody, and ain’t nobody’s got me.” That’s it, plain a single chorus and guitar in about two minutes.  What is more punk than that?  Guthrie sang about fascists, Jesus, the financial perils of the dustbowl, hard work, and battles of war.  He sang fables of poverty and the other side.  Woody Guthrie is part of my version of church.  Ida Reed raising the flag, railroad yards, food in an empty belly, the strength of private unions, farms, revolution, ruins, the false and true, and slip knots of men hung in trees.  My wife laid down and died on this cabin floor and I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.  The gambling man is rich and the working man is poor and I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.  Guthrie was a history teacher bringing an accountancy against those who tend to pick and choose what to leave out of books.  Woody! 

So that’s my list.  If you have not heard these songs, well you probably have no idea what the hell I have been writing about, but all the more reason to go find them right now.  We have the internet for a reason other than porn.  I hope you enjoyed and if you have a similar list feel free to post your own in the comments.  Peace.