1. Range Life – Pavement – The best song off their best album is a road song as indelible and correct as Old 97’s “Longer Than You’ve Been Alive”, although from a younger , wider perspective. Malkmus sings slightly out of tune and the song winds and wheels along, from one traffic light to the open road and he wonders about a future but it feels stream of conscious, his mind whether skateboarding or travelling, or wondering about paying his dues, and the song ravels like the road behind ever forward to a dream dream dream, which, today, is just completely over.
2. Tulane – Chuck Berry – A later song, we’re into the 1960s by now, but this is an ultimate flying car song, you can exactly see why Joan Jett chose to cover it: drugs, cops, lawyers and tricks of politics and Berry’s exultations to Tulane: “go Tulane, he ain’t man enough for you”. The song is a tearaway slice of urban life and 100mph.
3. Magic Bus – The Who – This is a little neither nor, it starts as Britpop circa 1965 and ends as a psychedelic jam , and it equates taking the bus to visit your gal with an acid trip: it is spooked out colors and whining bridges . Imagine the Kinks covering Traffic, only with the Who performing.
4. You Make Me Feel So Young – Frank Sinatra – recorded by Frank for Songs For Swinging Lovers, ten years after Mack Gordon and Josef Myrow wrote it, and really not a major song in theory, despite the way Sinatra clips off “I’m such a happy in-di-vi-dual” . But time has changed this one and it has become a part of the Sinatra canon. You can think of a dozen people who’ve recorded, SAY, “Nice N easy” but “You Make Me Feel So Young” feels specific to Sinatra. The feel good swing of the song, the looping vocal and ease: this isn’t highbrow Sinatra, it isn’t “Summer Wind”, the mood is exuberant cool and the song lives on as a classic of Sinatra cool yet joyfulness. It’s another of those songs, it is an “The Best Is Yet To Come”.
