1. The Heart That Time Forgot – Kelly Willis – MCA Nashville made her a star but not on the Bang Bang album, her sophomore effort and still a masterful 80s country album with strong countrypop songs including this one by Nashville pro Kostas Lazarides. Willis aches through the melody and the guitar break is simple and understated.
2. Shoop – Salt N Pepa – An original female rap duo sing sex and really sex, “what’s my weakness?” Pepa asks. “Men” comes the answer and while she’s not in love, she is in love with his super sperm, a coming of age for mainstream rap.
3. The Love I Saw In You Was Just A Mirage – Smokey Robinson And The Miracles – Dave Marsh once wrote how when it was first released, everything surrounding it on the charts sounded a little obscene. This is as elegant and heart throbbing a song, a very beautiful perfectly maintained simili for betrayed hearts.
4. we’re Going To Be Friends – The white stripes – Through some act of shamanism, white finds his inner child and captures the timeless time passing young new friendship. Too early for romance Suzy Lee and White build the deepest of bonds together in a timeless Fall of school and life, floating in a place where everything is fresh and surplussing yet safe and warm, “We don’t notice any time pass, we don’t notice anything
we sit side by side in every class”. Time has stopped for childhood where a day is a week is a year is a lifetime. He would never attempt this again.
5. You Only Live Once – The Strokes – Their greatest moments is also Julian Casablancas, a man who is living a life none of us can even vaguely imagine, delves deep into his personal philosophy before YOLO even existed. What he decides is “some people think they’re always right, others are quiet and uptight” but it is just the way of the world, while Albert Hammond jr plays one of the great licks of all time. The stuff of legend.
6. Troubadour – George Strait – Six years before he became an old troubadour now he’s gone, Strait projected forward in a self-portrait about life and the road and looking in a mirror and what the reflection shows you. A yearning sense of the passing nd also the stubbornness of a country star mentality. In its way, as important a road song as Old 97’s “Longer Than You’ve Been Alive”
7. Did She Jump Or Was She Pushed – Richard And Linda Thompson – One of the greatest divorce songs ever, Richard positions his break with a metaphor: the end of the affair as a suice or murder. Linda sings it.
8. Titus Andronicus – Titus Andronicus – This might not be Patrick Stickle’s best song but it is his most important so far, quitting college, dumping becoming a teacher, seeped in New Jersey and intellectualism, he threw his guitar on the floor and refused to write his masterpiece. Frustrated and angry who joins his audience, an audience still in the nascent state, simply to warn us that our life will be over before we know it, and writes his masterpiece any way.
