Marc Fagel's Blog: Jittery White Guy Music: The Blog, page 108

My Top 1000 Songs #131: Soon

Here's one of those songs that has personal significance not so much as a singular piece of music, but rather for perfectly encapsulating a particular phase of my life.

Don't get me wrong; it's a great song. But I can't say I sit down and listen to 7 minutes of "Soon" all that often; yet when I do, it's invariably an emotionally fraught experience.

My Bloody Valentine neatly book-ended my immediate post-college years. 1988's Isn't Anything came out just as I was starting law school; 1991's Loveles...

My Top 1000 Songs #130: Won't Get Fooled Again

As the bookends for 1971's Who's Next , "Baba O'Riley" and "Won't Get Fooled Again" were the twin powerhouses that pretty much ended my childhood love affair with the Top 40 radio that had first hooked me on music; the album, and these two songs in particular, showed me that rock & roll was much bigger, more powerful, and more musically interesting than I'd surmised from my childhood fixation with pop music.

Here's what I had to say about it in my book:
 

Live in the studio, 1978 (Keith's last stand...

2022: The Year In Review (cont.)

Yep, still working on my annual best-of mix. I shared 11 top tracks from 2022 a few weeks ago. Ready for a few more?

Dentist, "Don't Let Me Catch You"

Dentist's Making A Scene is pure pop-punk, perky and smile-inducing in ways that call to mind Charly Bliss and the Beths. Fun video for this stand-out track to boot!

Say Sue Me, "No Real Place"

Not unlike Alvvays (from the prior list), South Korea's Say Sue Me take elements of shoegaze and dream pop and craft fizzy bubblegum grooves out of the stew.

Dr...

My Top 1000 Songs #129: Stay Free

The Clash's 1978 Give 'Em Enough Rope isn't their most consistent album, and has a mixed critical legacy, but it gave us a couple of their finest moments. Mick Jones takes lead on the poignant, personal "Stay Free," which may be autobiographical or just some fine Ray Davies-quality storytelling. It's a tale of two childhood buddies and trouble-makers ("We met when we were in school. Never took no shit from no one; we weren't fools"). One ends up a rock star; one ends up in prison. And when he's ...

My Top 1000 Songs #128: Stone Cold Yesterday

I first got into the Connells way back in college, when they were at the forefront of the jangly guitar bands (often but not invariably with southern roots) to rise in the wake of R.E.M.'s college radio success. And while I love the North Carolina-based band's mellow, mid-tempo jangle (right up through last year's terrific reunion album), my favorite song of theirs, off 1990's One Simple Word, is an uncharacteristically rousing rocker, pure power pop with a rollicking tempo and chiming guitar ho...

My Top 1000 Songs #127: Badlands

Among the traits shared by Springsteen's two finest albums is kicking off with a definitive opening track. "Thunder Road" set the pace for 1975's Born To Run with a grandiose road song, sweeping and epic like much of the album; while "Badlands" made it clear from the opening drums that 1978's Darkness On The Edge Of Town would offer some more direct, concise rock & roll. "Badlands" is certainly one of his most immediate tunes, with an atypically basic three-chord progression out of the Kinks son...

My Top 1000 Songs #126: Disturbance At The Heron House

R.E.M.'s Document brought their initial indie days on the IRS label to a close in 1987. They had been THE life-changing band for me throughout my college years, and this was sort of a bittersweet capstone. (Which isn't to say I didn't love and treasure R.E.M. right up through the bitter end, but by that point they were no longer "my" little band from the college radio station.) Document continued their move away from the gentle, jangly guitars of their first few records into a more muscular guit...

My Top 1000 Songs #125: Generals & Majors

"Generals And Majors," off XTC's 1980 LP Black Sea , is another one of those tracks I first heard as a young teenager that gave me a whiff of a whole world of great music that I was missing out on, that wasn't get much play on MTV or the midwestern FM radio stations. I don't remember where I first heard it--maybe on that rare hour on the classic rock station when they played more interesting new wave and punk stuff that got left off the daytime playlists, maybe on one of those late-night cable sh...

My Top 1000 Songs #124: Birds

I have a deeply personal bond with Neil Young's 1970 masterpiece After The Gold Rush, in a way I don't like to share (in contrast to most records, where over-sharing is my modus operandi). And on an album with as transcendent a song as the title track, it's kinda crazy to have another tune at least as gorgeous, if not more so. But "Birds" has always deeply moved me. Like that title track, it's mostly just Neil and his piano. Maybe it's the bittersweet lyrics, a break-up song that feels both trag...

My Top 1000 Songs #123: Jesus Christ

Ah, yes, it's that time of year again. The inescapable Christmas music everywhere you go (went out for lunch earlier this week, and Tom Petty's "Christmas All Over Again" was being cranked over the loudspeakers at ungodly levels, which at least is better than, say, "Winter Wonderland"). The endless debates over whether Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime" is truly terrible or a guilty pleasure. (Sorry, truly terrible.) And it's particularly tough when you aren't someone who celebrates Chri...