Fave track is not fave album.
My fave albums don’t change much. It’s been Are You Experienced?, Elvis Is Back, Revolver and Get Happy!! at the top for decades (and faves isn’t greatest, Sgt. Peppers maybe the greatest but it wouldn’t be in my top thousand and survives soley upon “Good Morning, Good Morning” and “A Day In The Life”). If you add Ready To Die, In Utero, and I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, that leaves three albums in a state of flux.
But tracks…? Ten tracks isn’t even a footnote and much depends upon my mood at any given time. Dave Marsh called “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” and I can see why but I can also see why not. The racial undertones so important in Marsh’s opinion are too heavy for a great pop single ever.
Any anyway, if we’re talking Marvin Gaye, why not “What’s Going On” or “Let’s Get It On” or “How Sweet It Is” or, hell, “Can I get A Witness”. In the late 80s I wrote a novel about my alma mata Brummana High School -shut down mid-term 1975 due to the civil wat. It was about a teacher whose six year old daughter was run over by a car and died (that actually happened but I didn’t base the story on the teacher’s real experience). Any way, one of the characters spends the novel trying to play “Stubborn Kinda Fella” on the piano.
My point is don’t hold me to anything here…
1. I Got A Reason # 2 – Conor Oberst – This is the live boot version released six months before the album, and better in just about every way (including the # 2) . But particularly, the last time round on the chorus, Conor is devastating, the keyboards are much stronger, and the long list of eleigible and handsome men who want to lay with her “Upon the table of the elements” is so much more than a luddites complaint.
2. As I Went Out One Morning – John Wesley Harding – The problem with Dylan is you get caught up in meaning: is it a speech? a disgruntled rejection of fame? Or is it just a straighforward happenstance. I’ll take it at face value and revel in the way the girl pleads from the corner of her mouth.
3. Sparkle – Aretha Franklin – Curtis Mayfield, Aretha Franklin is singing it, and why thisn’t accepted as a hallmark in the R&B canon I don’t know. I’m guessing people don’t know it. The orchestration is a little overwrought, and I could do without the back up singers but that is a question of interpretation not song. Hearing Aretha sing it at Radio City last year sent me back to the song and all I can say is if you submit to “Sparkle” it will move your soul.
4. You’ll Need Those Fingers For Crossing – Los Campesinos – When I show disappointment in a fave band like Los Camp I really hear it from the fans but really, if Garth can write a song as this a theistic creed, why wouldn’t he? The last verse, the one about God, is the sound of a generation.
5. Colorado – For Science – This song rests on a hook so great Lennon and McCartney coulda written it in 1964. “I wanna move to Colorado-o-o-” John Slover sings, “I’m so in love with her and I don’t think she knows…o-o-o-” It’s one minute and seven seconds and I can’t listen to it once, I hit it five times in a row minimum. Plus, plus, plus: I wanna this written on my tompstone: “It’s just a matter of time before she finds another guy”.