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  1. 10. Nikes – Frank Ocean

    “We’ll let you guys prophesy/we gon’ see the future first”.

    What will music sound like a century from now? Will it be as strange to the ear as, say, Dubstep might have sounded to the average listener a hundred years ago? Will it incorporate technologies as yet unimagined? Will people still feel and dream and love and scream as they do today?

    The future of music is a tantalising phantasm, perennially lurking just over the next horizon, perennially beyond our reach. And then occasionally – just occasionally – an artist will come along who seems to give us a taste of what’s ahead, as if they were an emissary for all that is to come. A Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a Miles Davis, an Iggy Pop. It’s in those moments, that electric crackle across the synapses, where the doors are flung open and you get to catch a glimpse, and it’s usually only a glimpse, of what will be. Or at least what might be.

    So it was with Frank Ocean, who returned in 2016 with Blonde, exceeding the lofty expectations for his follow up to Channel Orange, and signposting a future Soul music that could seemingly morph across genres, a shapeshifter that carried within it the same genome that had powered so much of the music I had grown up loving. I was in my mid 30s when Blonde arrived; around that age where new music is meant to become a little more troublesome, a little harder to understand. But no such friction occurred here: Blonde was the album I’d been waiting for all my life; the record I was positive Sam Cooke would have made he been gifted youth and access to a recording studio in the second decade of the 21st century.

    Blonde is an experimental record, full of seemingly half-finished ideas, pocked with spaces seemingly still in need of filling it. But in those spaces it’s impossible not to hear familiar echoes; the spareness of Just For You, its dependence for animus on the human voice. The scatting on (What A) Wonderful World, where Cooke’s “ra ta ta ta”s seem to express so much more than a conventional lyric ever could have. That bravery to go beyond words. And above all, the warm connection of that imperious voice. Blonde seemed to pick up these elements and run with them; listening to it made me glad to be alive, and excited for what might come next.

    Of course, first contact with Blonde was Nikes, the album’s lead-off single and opening track. A song so curious and offbeat that it set the tone perfectly; woozy, crystalline, inventive. Disobedient of genre and any other petty barrier with which it came into contact. A song so potently full of ideas that I’m still listening to it nearly ten years later and recognising new details. Nikes was Blonde’s calling card, its signal that all bets were off.

    Simply put, nothing sounded like Nikes in 2016. The woozy stagger with which it opens, head gone in the club, bright lights in the eyes. The pitched up chipmunk vocals. The stuttering drumbeat that kicks in from time to time, the sense of fracture. The lyric, all opacity and metaphor.

    Nikes is delivered in three sections. The first is young Frank (hence the shifted pitch of the voice), simultaneously enticed and repulsed by the materialism all around him. We get the memorable opening couplet: “These bitches want Nikes/they lookin for a check, tell ‘em it ain’t likely”, and the track’s first lyrical double meaning (the check is both the Nike swoosh and the fiscal variety). We get the literary reference (“Must be on that white like Othello”). We get that plaintive “All you want is Nikes/but the real ones/just like you/just like me”. A contemplation of what is authentic and what is counterfeit – or more pertinently of who is counterfeit – that “just like you/just like me” is as melancholy a line as any in the history of Soul music, a eulogy for authenticity in a world gone plastic, a recognition of communal complicity.

    This section of the song is meant to denote a half drunk stream of consciousness, so we get the crass but memorable “If you need dick I got you/And I yam from the line”, and then we’re off to a list of eulogies, headed up by the recently departed A$AP Yam and tailed by Trayvon Martin. There have been a lot of lyrics about social justice written in the last ten years, but very few as direct and penetratingly guileless as “RIP Trayvon, that n***a looked just like me”. There’s no anger, just a numb sense of proximity and removal. And then seconds later that cry of “Woooo – fuckin buzzin” that brings this section to a close – thoughts jumping on apace.

    Nikes is already extraordinary by this point. Extraordinary in its production – what genre are we even operating in here? Extraordinary in its honesty, in its open invocation of an authentic inner monologue that jumps from horniness to matters of justice to holy shit I’m buzzed. That ADHD brain being swept along, the head relentless, no matter how hard you try to get out of it. Extraordinary in that Ocean, who can sing about as well as anyone of his entire generation, chooses to bury his voice like this on his album opener: pure chutzpah. Just listen to the untreated audio of his actual vocal and imagine the guts that decision must have taken. To be able to sing like that and then obscure it.

    The second section sees our narrator jump bodies; suddenly he’s his own cousin, a drug dealer. And then his cousin’s girlfriend, who is either deeply cynical or deeply deluded (or perhaps both). The auto tune gives Frank license to jump around, to play these parts, and we get an insight into these wasted lives. The poignancy of these lyrics: “You been holdin’ your breath/weighted down” and “he don’t care for me/but he cares for me/and that’s good enough/we don’t talk much or nuthin’, but when we talk about somethin’/ we have good discussions”. Contradictory half-thoughts, the little lies we all tell ourselves. A whole other song, a whole other lyric that flickers into life for a moment before vanishing off again.

    It’s in the third section where the true magic occurs. The beat drops out, guitars swirl, the track rearranges itself on a dime and Frank’s voice drops in, untreated now, with a lyric that just cuts through everything: “Let these guys prophesy/we gon’ see the future first”. Out of all that drunken delusion and scattered thought, a moment of searing clarity. And as I sat and listened for the first time, all the way back in 2016, difficult to disagree: if anyone had a claim that they would be seeing the future first, it was Frank Ocean, because here he was right now: bringing the future to you. Music that morphed and twisted even as you listened to it, lyrics full of ambiguity and double meaning, genders and personas shifting, performed as much as sung. A new music that didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard before.

    Having performed the first two sections in character, Ocean delivers the third as himself in the here and now. Rapped, more than sung, flow imperious, it’s a freewheeling demonstration of the depth of his talent, both in terms of delivery and content. Great lines come and go (“Living so that last night/feels like a past life”) as he shifts up and down the gears, varying the pace of his delivery. “Acid on me like the rain/weed crumbles into glitter/rain/glitter/we laid out on this wet floor/away turf no astro/mesmerized how the strobes glow/look at all the people feet dance”. Writing as vivid as the opening is hazy, an incredible sense of time and place, an absolute joy in words and their delivery.

    Ocean drops the word “feeling” as if it were punctuation, and then we’re into the denouement:
    “I may be younger, but I’ll look after you
    We’re not in love, but I’ll make love to you
    When you’re not here, I’ll save some for you
    I’m not him, but I’ll mean something to you
    I’ll mean something to you
    I’ll mean something to you”

    It’s a lyric that pulls back the façade of the traditional R&B tune, revealing the weakness and deception beneath. It makes you feel intensely sad for both parties – that final, repeated declaration of “I’ll mean something to you” a hope against hope that both know to be entirely untrue. There’s a lovely economy of language here that tells us all we need to know about the nihilism of the transaction that’s going down, as Nikes simultaneously celebrates and reviles the impending tryst.

    I hadn’t heard a song like Nikes in 2016, and it was such a great and unexpected joy to be so thoroughly excited and moved by music so late in the game. My assumption was that more would follow, that having opened up this new space where sounds and textures and words could flow in such unexpected directions, Ocean would continue to push out into that frontier. But it wasn’t to be: Frank Ocean largely backed off after Blonde, and Nikes remains his high water mark.

    Looking back now, maybe it’s better that way. Sometimes it’s nice to see not “the” future, but “a” future first, and that’s precisely what happened here: Ocean carving out a path he would not follow or elaborate on further.

    Nikes remains an almost perfect song: a truly great artist pushing at the boundaries with his sonics, his vocals and his lyrics, all at once. It’s also a fabulous rebuke to materialism, perhaps as potent even as Fugazi’s Merchandise: in a world where everyone is chasing product, what happens when we become product ourselves? What is the price when we sell ourselves off too cheaply, trade out our hearts and souls for pennies on the dollar?

    Nikes is a song I go back to all the time, trying to work out how it juggles its elements so cleanly. How it somehow sounds organic and industrial all at once. How he jumps character so freely, takes such risks with his voice. Nikes was the song that showed me that music would never get old, even if I would. That I would continue to hear new things, exciting things, things that changed how I thought and felt, until the day I die. For that reason, it will always hold a special place in my heart, even as its author recedes ever further from view. It is a song that makes me love music, now and in the future, regardless of whether that future elects ever to arrive.

  2. What a great, desolate track it is. I am…. somewhat older than you, and when i heard it I got the same feeling that new possibilities in music were still available. On on on.

    • Desolate is the word. I’ve forced myself to come round to the idea that it works better as a punctuation mark than a conjunction, but man what a shame he couldn’t follow through on some of those ideas.

  3. 9. Chanel/A New Order/Sabrina – Fred Again/Frank Ocean/Moderat

    “Music is the shorthand of emotion” – Leo Tolstoy.

    It was early January 2020 when my best friend and I decided to go to a festival together.

    We’d been looking for a while for some adventure to go on, some opportunity to take a moment out of life, spend a bit of time in one another’s company, and see something memorable. From the side of a St Lucian swimming pool I texted him the line up of the forthcoming Coachella and offered a “how about this”. Within a minute I had his reply: “I’ve never heard of half those bands, and I’ve no real interest in the other half. I’m 100% in”. The reply did not surprise me; said friend was not a big music listener, but has always been of the flavour that if you asked him to meet you in the woods at 2am and source a shovel his sole response would be enquire whether to bring one pair of gloves or two. Tickets were booked by day’s end.

    The line up for Coachella’s 2020 edition was particularly strong, hence the interest. But there was one performer, above all others, who I was excited to see. Frank Ocean, who was even then becoming an increasingly rare public performer, closing proceedings on the Sunday night. My favourite contemporary artist, in what was sure to be a memorable setting, with my best mate. It doesn’t get much better than that.

    Well, it’s as they say: man plans, god laughs. I sat booking those festival tickets with a newspaper in front of me warning of the ongoing spread of a mysterious virus in Asia. Before my tan had even had a chance to fade, that same virus was at our doorsteps; the office closed, the world locked down and life ground to a halt. The era of adventure was, seemingly, over.

    I know that many people enjoyed their lockdown. Found the peace and quiet therapeutic, the slowing of life a welcome change. I was not one of those people. Any pretensions I had to introversion vanished during the course of 2020. I missed my friends. I missed my family. I missed the simple act of standing in a large crowd, feeling its oscillations, listening for the rise and fall of its distinct hum. We kept our Coachella tickets, even as the festival was postponed again and again; it felt a small act of self-preservation to tell ourselves that one day this thing would happen and we would be there to see it, as originally planned. Fuck Covid.

    There were many moments when such things felt a forlorn dream, as if the pandemic would stretch on forever. I remember standing in my back garden, looking up at the night sky and wondering if somewhere up there was another Earth, a planet identical to our own, where all things were the same but for this one. Where you didn’t have to worry about your parents dying because they’d mishandled the groceries, or wonder whether that jogger had passed within two metres of your elbow. A place where normal life was still in effect.

    Back on this planet, it was April 2022 by the time we eventually made it to Coachella. Much had changed both internally and externally; Frank Ocean was off the line up, my buddy’s marriage was badly on the rocks, and we both now knew the proper method by which to wash our own hands. A different world to the one in which we’d ordered the tickets; a world in which there was really no telling what it would feel like to attend a music festival, to be in amongst large crowds once again. To experience something with people outside your own home.

    Of course, we need not have worried. We had a magnificent time, stood in the sunshine, watching fantastic music and enjoying the liberties of which we had so long been deprived. And in between we talked: my friend was at one of those pivotal life moments, and we spent that trip chatting it through, working out the emotions, figuring out what was next. A new chapter, another life, a chance to rebuild and go again. The same for him as all the rest of us.

    On the final day of the festival I went to watch Fred Again, an artist who would go on to be the breakout star of that year, who would go from playing to a few thousand people in 2022 to tens or even hundreds of thousands within a few months. Fred broke out because, as much as any artist I can think of, he put his finger right on the moment. His music, comprised of an even mix of party bangers and low key, ambient soundscapes with sampled dialogue over the top, captured a dawning era of collective unity and discomfort, as the pandemic began to recede and the cost was counted. People wanted to dance and they wanted to cry. That’s an unusual combination of demands for an audience to make, and Fred was perfectly placed to deliver.

    It’s an odd thing to sit here and admit, but Fred Again’s music – uncharitably but somewhat accurately referred to as “Emo House Coldplay” – moved me that day about as much as music has ever moved me.
    Stood right at the front of that great crowd, which flowed clean out of the tent and beyond, I wasn’t prepared for the idea that this might be an emotional experience, and consequently it caught me off guard. There were moments of absolute euphoria; of being unable to believe that the crisis had passed, that I was actually here at this event, stood amongst all these people, listening to live music after a break of nearly two years. At the familiar energy of an exciting artist finding his sound and his audience.

    But something new was stirring too; during lockdown I had missed crowds of any description, and at Coachella I discovered that suddenly the very experience of live music had changed for me: all of a sudden I was at least as interested in the audience as the performer, in the energies coming off them, in their enthusiasm and passion. The absolute luxury of being stood amongst them, of going through something together. The experience of being stuck at home had changed the way I listened, changed the way I felt. I wanted so badly to be around people again.

    Fred played one banger after another that day, and as he did so you could feel this great wave of emotion coming off the crowd. People who had been waiting a long time for a party, people who had struggled, people who had lost. As he played his music, he chatted and prompted and nudged. I’ve seen a lot of electronic music performed live, but I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone bring so much personality, so much basic human openness, to proceedings. And that same openness seemed to give the crowd extra license to let go. Catharsis hung heavy in the air, and I was moved by that sense of people coming together to let something out that had been locked up for a while. And then he played Chanel/A New Order/Sabrina, and I really wasn’t ready for that at all.

    The track is a mash up of three components: a vocal taken from Frank Ocean’s Chanel, the beat from A New Order, pinched from German electronic supergroup Moderat, and then a segue into Fred Again’s own Sabrina, which deploys a lengthy sample of the poet Sabrina Benaim performing her work “Explaining My Depression To My Mother”. There have been a couple of moments in my life where a song has caught me at precisely the right moment, from precisely the right angle, and landed so profoundly as to draw a distinct line between before and after. This was one such moment.

    I was already on my heels when the track began, but the sight of Frank Ocean appearing on the big screen, repeating the mantra “I see both sides like Chanel”, sent me further off balance. After all this time, all this waiting we were actually here. It was actually over. The sight of Frank sent me right back to the start, sent me introspective: I thought of everything that had happened since I’d sent that text by that swimming pool. Of standing in a supermarket stripped of food, of wondering whether my parents were going to make it, of trying to figure out how to shield the kids from what was happening. Of the people we knew who’d passed away or who were grieving, or whose lives had been upended. Of all that chaos and loss. And in that moment, I broke a little – allowed myself to finally experience some of the feelings I’d kept at bay since the pandemic began. A heady mix of relief, gratitude, pain and anxiety.

    And then the beat of A New Order dropped, that stalking, rising beat with its mounting sense of urgency, and it just blew something right open inside me. Some door that I’d been keeping closed forever. And suddenly I realised that I had tears in my eyes, stood in the middle of a field listening to German Techno. It made no sense at all. And I wasn’t the only one – all around me I could see that people were lost in their own reveries, that this music was rising to meet the moment, that a collective trauma was being parsed. As the song rolled across the top of the audience in waves you could feel it roiling all those present. A stranger hugged me, which made it simultaneously better and worse, and then the sample of Sabrina began.

    I cannot speak to the virtues of Sabrina, taken as poetry. It’s certainly very millennial, with its parading of mental health, the titular possessive against “depression”, and its reading is certainly emphatic. I can maybe vouch that it has a peculiar effect on crowds, who seem to respond to its candour and overlook the clunkiness of some of its language. But what I do know is that, paired with A New Order, it was the final nail, and that I had never seen anything like it. Ten thousand people in a tent, all of whom were dancing just four minutes ago, now stood listening to Benaim recount the moment she realised that everyone she ever knew would one day die. Collectively recognising that each of us had been confronted with that same mortality over the previous two years, completely impossible to avoid the connotation. The party after the end of the world.

    And then the track hit its chorus: “I am a party/only I am a party I don’t want to be at”, and the beat dropped, the dancing began again, and the ground fell away from under me.

    It’s funny to watch videos of this track on YouTube, because at this moment you can often hear the crowd cheering, or even shouting along to those lines, like they were the chorus to a Pop song. But in the moment, they wounded me, because they revealed to me a simple truth: that I was struggling. That somewhere in the midst of Covid, in the midst of all that stress and pandemonium, a bunch of old feelings had reemerged that I’d spent decades keeping under control. That somewhere along the way I’d reached the limits of my own stoicism, limits which until that point I had not thought existed, that moving fast and enjoying the moment wasn’t cutting it any more. Suddenly, I too was a party, only a party I didn’t want to be at.

    All of which probably sounds fairly dramatic, and – really – it wasn’t. The show moved on, I danced some more and then stumbled out of the tent to find the sun setting and the entire site bathed in that cleansing golden hour glow. Felt a little like something had shifted permanently. I met up with my buddy and told him all about it. We talked. I came home and spent about 18 months taking all the toys out of the box, examining why I was feeling what I was feeling, and then putting them away again once it had all settled down. Once I felt like I understood it all, once the events of the past had been appropriately sifted and ordered into some sort of greater sense.

    There has been no eureka moment, no great healing, just an acceptance. I went back and looked at some painful events in my past, and asked of them the troubling question: why. And in response, after some months of enquiry, came back the inevitable answer: because. An answer that’s really just a fading echo of the question itself, but an answer nonetheless. Feelings, some of which I’d been avoiding forever, passed through me, and I popped out the other side with a little more perspective, perhaps understanding myself a little more fulsomely. I came to recognise that the “why” doesn’t really matter, that the art is in the acceptance and the expression.

    As I’ve been writing this list, it’s become clear to me that you can probably draw a straight line from that moment, from Chanel/A New Order/Sabrina at Coachella, to this entire exercise. While it wasn’t the intention at the outset, somewhere in my subconscious this project must have combined an opportunity to do something I’ve always enjoyed – writing about music I love – with something I probably needed; cataloguing some of the conclusions I’d reached, filing them away so that I wouldn’t need to think about them again for a while. Holding on to some things, but letting go of others. And I can own that – you can’t write properly about your favourite music without writing about yourself, and maybe that was part of the appeal.

    When I first started writing about my favourite songs at the start of the year, my main goal was to be honest. I wanted to try to find something interesting and distinct to say about these hundred tracks (not always easy on a Monday morning), because it appealed to the word nerd in me. But I also wanted to be honest about why I loved them, even where doing so might be difficult, partly because I thought it might be illuminating to really try to investigate why certain tracks appeal, and partly because – really – what’s the point in doing these things if you’re not going to do them properly?

    So: Chanel/A New Order/Sabrina, one of my ten favourite tracks of all time, because as I stood there listening to it the first time it had the most profound impact upon me, and because it’s a song that ultimately prompted a bit of healing, which is never a bad thing. But it’s also a song that always provokes a slightly painful Proustian rush when I listen to it; invoking the unexpected commingling of pain and euphoria peculiar to that show at that time, and reminding me of a moment that felt like the first exhalation after an extended period of holding one’s breath.

    So much of music is about contrasts; the bittersweet lyric, the loud/quiet dichotomy. This track enjoyed the fair wind of confounded expectations. I went to Fred Again that day expecting a big old dance party. For whatever reason, it had never even occurred to me that I might feel something other than joy, that House music could really make you feel anything particularly profound at all. It never occurred to me that this music could communalise emotional catharsis the same way it communalised ecstasy. In a sense, that show felt like going to live music for the very first time, because something fundamental had changed both in the way I listen, and in the sound itself. Music as a shorthand for emotion.

    Of all the songs on this list, this is the one I have found it hardest to write about. Not because doing so has required honesty – strangely, that bit has come easy – but because it’s so difficult to put into words the effect it has on me when I listen to it even now; that bizarre cocktail of rising panic and soaring elation. Because as much as I can put its impact down to circumstance and context, to being in that large, emotional crowd at that particular moment, that same impact doesn’t seem to dim with time and distance. Because it’s so intimately tied to my love for my best mate, and to wanting good things for him. Because it’s a song that showed me that new music could still hit like a truck, even in my 40s. Because it’s a song that fundamentally changed my own path. And because to listen to it, you would never guess that any of those things could be the case.

  4. I have what must be an edit extracted from some mixtape or other of this – it fades sharply after Fred says “shout out Moderat” so I guess the Sabrina part must come after. Doesn’t really matter because what a great mix it is in its truncated form (so different to the Frank Ocean original).

    It’s a song that I play, turned up to 10, when I need to elevate, get fists pumping, the sort I used to play before leaving the house for 5 a side game or a big night out. Off the top of my head REM’s “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth” or Prodigy’s “Breathe” inhabit the same space. That sort of epic, mood-lifting tune you can bounce around the house to.

    • The Sabrina part is often left off the Soundcloud versions, which is a shame.

      I should have added that he manages to mix the three disparate parts and make them fit together as if they were always meant to be. The vocal from Chanel, in particular, fits so beautifully with A New Order that it’s hard to believe they weren’t intended to be paired.

  5. Really good, not heard that before. Unfortunately my brain kept mixing Trump’s ‘they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats’ into the spoken parts grrr

  6. 8. Love Minus Zero – Bob Dylan

    I have this vivid memory of the moment the door first opened for me. Slumped in the passenger seat of my mother’s blue Ford Escort, somewhere between Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells, disgruntled and anomic. A newly minted teenager, unimpressed and unimpressible.

    A cassette copy of Bringing It All Back Home is playing, and the foundations of my Dylan-phobia are being challenged. We’ve just rattled through Subterranean Homesick Blues – all two minutes and change of it – and it sounds surprisingly contemporary, the curled lip of “thinkin’ bout the government” utterly at home in the early 90s, the song’s careening, rattling energy still potent even at a distance of nearly thirty years. It’s not enough to convert me, but it’s enough to get my attention.

    Consequently, I’m properly listening as the next song begins, and it takes the next song precisely 25 seconds to win me over me fully. “She can take the dark out of the night time, and paint the day time black”. I’ve already written enough bad poetry to recognise a great line when I hear one, a line I could only dream of having written myself. Was this praise? Condemnation? A recommendation or a warning? For the first time with Dylan, I move beyond the delivery and I hear the words, and the words are beautiful. My heart is lost, and something begins that has continued to this day.

    Bringing It All Back Home is a curious album, catching Dylan at a tipping point. It’s split between the electric first half and the acoustic second, so it signposts the future, yet it’s a future that’s still ever so slightly on the tip of his tongue, because the acoustic tracks (Mr Tambourine Man, Gates Of Eden, It’s Alright Ma I’m Only Bleeding, It’s All Over Now Baby Blue) are so strong that it’s impossible to digest them as something he’s about to move beyond, something that could ever be exceeded. Bob Dylan still self evidently “of” Folk Music, even as he stretches to transcend its boundaries.

    But if the album is fundamentally about a tension between past and future, between two competing visions of what Bob Dylan might be, there’s also a third force in action: the love songs. She Belongs To Me and Love Minus Zero, the absolute ground zero of my Dylan affections. Because for all that he could wow you with his “thin, wild mercury sound”, could blow you away with the literary allusions and the acid tongue, there was something about Dylan’s simple love songs that felt immediately and profoundly moving.

    Perhaps it was the contrast in hearing someone so characteristically enigmatic and ambiguous drop the front and speak his heart. Perhaps it was just the devotional quality of those lyrics – that ability to make his lovers sound like Joan Of Arc, Helen Of Troy and the Scarlet Pimpernel all rolled into one. Perhaps it was simply that the love songs were easily accessible, as love songs tend to be. Regardless, these two tracks fascinated me immediately and endlessly, not least in their comparative passivity: the tendency of the narrator to start out standing and wind up on his knees. What kind of women was Bob Dylan dating?

    She Belongs To Me and Love Minus Zero stand right at the heart of Bringing It All Back Home, a keystone amidst the whirl of politics and surrealism, art and agitation. They humanise the record, just as surely as the corpsing at the start of Bob Dylan’s 115th dream, they lend it an intimacy it might not otherwise possess. They have the properties of clues in a murder mystery, and in a very real sense that’s what they are: Robert Allen Zimmerman ceases to exist and everything that follows is a fabrication of one sort or another. Bob Dylan is the work of art, and his songs provide us with hints and signals as to how that work should be interpreted, particularly where they directly concern his personal life. The glory of Dylan is that it’s six decades and counting and he’s still never pulled back the curtain, still never let us see the workings of the great and powerful Oz. So, the love songs remain the single best point of evidence as to what might be going on back there.

    Love Minus Zero is hands down my favourite Bob Dylan song. The first Dylan track to include the word “love” in its title, it was originally christened “Dime Store”, presumably as a very Dylanish effort to add a little extra note of disorienting sarcasm, before he thought better of it. There’s very little sarcasm here in the final product: instead, it’s a move away from what Dylan called his “finger pointing songs”, a serenade presumably written for Sara Lownds, but touching on love in its most idealised, abstracted form. So many of Dylan’s great songs are about restless dissatisfaction, about agitation, but this one is almost zenlike in its warmth and acceptance.

    It’s the first verse of Love Minus Zero that I’d like to focus on, because that’s where so much of the song’s magic is to be found. It’s also unusual, because it’s incredibly direct. Dylan was still in protest mode, he knew how to say what he meant and mean what he say, but at a time when his lyrics were becoming increasingly opaque, it’s striking to read through the below and recognise how simple it all is. What does he mean? It’s all there on the page.

    “My love she speaks like silence,
    Without ideals or violence,
    She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful,
    Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire.
    People carry roses,
    Make promises by the hours,
    My love she laughs like the flowers,
    Valentines can’t buy her.”

    You listen to She Belongs To Me, which makes love sound like a kind of war, a war in which you were defeated before you even began, and you wonder if Dylan could ever stoop to write a simple love song in which the participants are equals. And then it arrives, two tracks later.

    Love Minus Zero is unusual amongst Dylan’s love songs of this era in that there’s no real sting in the tail. You get that gnomic final line, with its self-conscious nod to Edgar Allan Poe: “my love she’s like some raven/at my window with a broken wing”, but there isn’t the sense of lament from Girl From The North Country, the patina of disgust in To Ramona. This is a song about finding some other person who is perfect for you, and its appeal is in hearing all Dylan’s wordplay, all his immense facility with language, turned to the singular purpose of praising that other.

    But there’s also something interesting happening here with regards to power. Most love songs, and particularly love songs of this era, reduce their subject to the status of object: a prize to be won, a challenge to be met. Dylan does something unusual here, in bestowing upon his love virtue after virtue: silent strength, loyalty, incorruptibility. These are classically regarded as masculine traits in romantic works, and it’s striking that where Love Minus Zero is performed by a woman and the genders reversed (see, for example: Eliza Gilkyson’s perfectly lovely rendition), there is no tension at all, no sense of things being turned on their head. It’s an unusual song that positions man and woman as equal, and equally capable of virtue. I loved Love Minus Zero for that, because that’s what I wanted.

    Inevitably, as must be the case with all the higher entries on this list, there’s a personal angle here too. I would have been about 13 years old when I first heard Love Minus Zero, and I can recall sitting in that car imagining what it must be like to have this sort of depth of feeling for another human being; wondering whether this was something that was going to be handed out to everyone, or reserved for a lucky few.

    Over a decade later, I met my wife at work. She was like no one I had ever encountered: guileless yet impossible to impress, steadfast but weightless. As we dated, I kept waiting for her to show another side, a darker, more complex self, and it never arrived.

    Twenty years later, it’s still never arrived, she’s still like no one else. I listen to that beautiful first verse now, and it is my wife. She embodies those words so completely they could have been written for her, that it’s almost difficult to accept that I didn’t go and write them myself. And not just some of them either; all of it, every golden line. I have never met anyone less political but with a stronger moral compass. Anyone less interested in being right, or in serving their own ego. Anyone more rooted in the present moment, less inclined to explore the past or dream of the future. Anyone less interested in art, but more open hearted. Anyone more true.

    I hadn’t gone looking for love. In fact, I’d long since concluded that I was one of those people who could happily live their life alone, spared the messiness and sleepless nights that are invariably amongst love’s vast entourage. But then I met someone who challenged all those assumptions, and about whom I felt certain. More certain than I’ve ever been about anything in my life – a high bar indeed for someone with a tendency to dole out opinions cheaply and argue them at great expense. I took her to meet my parents with the preambulatory instruction “this is the girl I’m going to marry”. Frankly, I’d have married her after the first date if I could have, because although I’m not a wise man even I can recognise good fortune when it’s placed directly in front of me.

    On our wedding day, we had Love Minus Zero as one of the readings: the only song lyric chosen, because for all we refer to song lyrics as the equal of poetry, they very rarely are. One of my wife’s friends stood up in a giant hat and butchered those glorious words; clearly never having heard the song she elected to read each line with maximum mystique, which is precisely the inverse to what was required. It was perfect anyway. By that stage I knew too much to argue or to judge.

    Dylan has provided the great cartography of my life, as he has done for so many others. Listening to my Mother’s favourite album with her. Finding common ground with my Father. Dylan’s music seeming to pre-empt my entire marriage, like a consoling arm around my teenage shoulder. He’s been there for me with wisdom at every stage; all these songs that seem to be about nothing much at all, which say so much without really telling you anything, but which are ultimately all about the passage of life. About what it feels like to be a human being, born in the 20th century, meandering your way along these same lanes, making the same mistakes and finding comfort in the space spaces. He has written literally dozens of songs I could have included here – dozens of songs that are funny, clever or incisive, dozens of songs that have enriched my life – and for that I owe so much gratitude.

    Love Minus Zero links past to present. It spins me back to being that 13 year old, profoundly lost in my Mother’s car. It stops off along the way in my 20s, to those long evenings when it began to become clear to me that I was to be amongst the aforementioned lucky few. To our wedding day, and to a hundred other warm days since. And I know deep down that some of this is projection, a fortune teller’s trick: that it’s just a song I heard as a kid that I’ve connected to my wife, and to love, and to so many of the good things in my life. But that knowledge is dwarfed by the enormity of what this song gives me. By the hope and gratitude and joy that it prompts. By the love it invokes.

  7. Around this time of season, I usually do a post on my favourite tracks of the year.

    Frankly, I’ve already written more than enough about songs in 2024, so I’m going to spare us all that indignity this time around.

    Instead, I’m including below a Spotify link and a list of my favourite tracks in case anyone wants to have a poke through. The music will need to just speak for itself.

    Merry Christmas, folks.

    1. Hashtag – David Rawlings, Gillian Welch
    2. Alone – The Cure
    3. Lithonia – Childish Gambino
    4. Von Dutch – Charli xcx
    5. Don’t Rely On Other Men – JPEGMAFIA
    6. Enemy – The Blaze
    7. Outspoken – SBTRKT
    8. flight fm – Joy Orbison
    9. Challengers – Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross
    10. Blinding Faith – Knocked Loose
    11. Starburster – Fontaines D.C.
    12. Hell Of A Ride – Nourished By Time
    13. Lego Ring – Faye Webster, Lil Yachty
    14. Coloured Concrete – Nemahsis
    15. Permanently Lonely – Orville Peck
    16. I Came Here To Leave You – Charlotte Cardin
    17. The Last Year – Jessica Pratt
    18. Wonder Now – Camp Saint Helene
    19. One Last Dance – BADBADNOTGOOD
    20. Summer’s Gone – Father John Misty
    21. Madres – Sofia Kourtesis
    22. Phoneglow – Burial

      • I thought the same thing as I was putting it together. Probably a bit less new music listening this year on account of all the old music listening for these threads. I also don’t think it’s been a particularly interesting year for Hip Hop, which has had an impact.

        But perhaps some Afterword-friend artists just made great records in 2024. That Cure album is pretty incredible, and Hashtag is probably the single best song of the year – it’s so beautiful.

        Or maybe, through sheer dint of effort, I have finally succeeded in turning JPEGMAFIA and Knocked Loose into Afterword artists. For balance, here are a few that were near misses…

        Fisherrr – Cash Cobain

        Saturday Mornings – Cordae, Lil Wayne

        One Sixty – MPH

        Active – Asake

  8. 7. You’re So Cool – Hans Zimmer

    There was a time when I had heard virtually no music, seen virtually no movies. I think back now to those days, when I was still just a kid, and wonder at the vast expanse of unbroken snow that lay before me – how many fields and byways I had still to wander. The great joy in the knowledge that there was so much ahead, so much still to be seen and heard. All that great content just waiting out there to be discovered – sometimes you’d go looking for it, others you would simply trip over it.

    I did a lot of my tripping over at the movies. There was and remains an umbilical connection between film and music; my first encounter with David Bowie was in Labyrinth, I watched Apocalypse Now because it contained a Doors track. The Blues Brothers helped me fall in love with Soul music. I have left a hundred movies with a new song rattling around my head, and gone away to look up the artist. All part of the same endless chain of discovery; one things leads to another, and on to another still, until you can’t even really remember where you got started.

    Looking back on it, so many of those great discoveries occurred via the same source: late night television. That magic moment that used to occur when you’d decide to turn on the TV for half an hour before bed on a Sunday night, discover a movie starting, settle in to just watch a little bit and then end up riding the whole thing out to the wee small hours at the cost of your usefulness the following day. One of life’s great luxuries, that: the decision that you were having so much fun that there would be no sleep until this thing was over.

    I remember vividly the night during the 90s where some genius at Channel 4 decided to screen The Warriors and La Haine, back to back on a week night. Two wonderful and perfectly complimentary movies, two glorious soundtracks. Cut Killer mixing KRS One and Edith Piaf as a crane shot drifts over a Parisian slum. New York gang lords delivering some of the most sampled dialogue in Hip Hop history. Stumbling to school the following day, head buzzing, soul shaken and a new list of cultural leads to run down burned into my brain.

    I remember too the night they showed True Romance, Tony Scott’s 1993 opus. Remember being sat in front of the old TV in my bedroom, about as happy and content as it’s possible to be on your own, watching that wonderful movie unfold, great scene after great scene. Taking it all in for the first time. I couldn’t have turned it off and gone to bed if you’d paid me – tomorrow would have to wait its turn.

    True Romance is an enduring favourite movie of mine. That’s partly because it’s a great film – a stellar cast, one of Tarantino’s finest scripts and so many of the foundational tropes of 90s Hollywood being invented on the spot. But it’s also because it’s a movie I associate with that great joy of content discovery: sometimes, every now and then on a Sunday night I remind myself that somewhere out there is a kid right this minute staying up late to watch True Romance for the first time. Or perhaps their own equivalent of True Romance. There’s something quite beautiful about that knowledge.

    There’s another reason too that I love True Romance, and that reason is You’re So Cool, the film’s theme song. Almost impossible to listen to without mentally superimposing Patricia Arquette’s iconic opening monologue (“I had to come all the way from the highways and byways of Tallahassee, Florida to Motor City, Detroit to find my true love. If you gave me a million years to ponder, I would never have guessed that true romance and Detroit would ever go together“), the track not only perfectly embodies the movie’s ethos, but also links it spiritually to Terence Malick’s Badlands, my second favourite movie of all time.

    Badlands opens, of course, with Carl Orff’s Gassenhauer, a piece written by the great German composer to be performed by children, in the belief that if kids could be introduced to beauty early on it would awaken in them an abiding love for music. Gassenhauer was based on a much older piece written for the lute, dating back to the 16th century, and it fit Badlands like a glove, its gamboling rhythm perfect for that film’s pair of childlike naifs as they rampage across the screen.

    I had seen Badlands before I ever made it to True Romance, had marvelled at its incredible sense of time and place, at Malick’s ability to find the beauty in anything and everything. At its offbeat sense of humour, its tender amorality. I had watched Badlands a dozen times trying to understand what made it tick, and consequently I knew Gassenhauer like the back of my hand. So when You’re So Cool started up that night, when the sound of those marimbas kicked in, a near identical twin sibling to Orff’s work, it was immediately like coming home, and I understood exactly why I was listening to what I was listening to.

    You’re So Cool is a song that consciously evokes the inner child, evokes the innocence in all of us, even as we live our adult lives and make our adult mistakes. It positions Clarence and Alabama, True Romance’s unlikely pairing of leads, as fundamentally virtuous, even as they rob and murder and drug deal their way across the US. Because – much as in Badlands – really, aren’t these just two young people in love, and following love’s precarious path? Didn’t they start out as kids before the world took its toll, before one became a call girl and the other a psychotic comic store clerk with an Elvis fixation? To listen to You’re So Cool is to feel that there is good in this life, good in all of us, and that it’s the good we start out with.

    All of this was and is catnip to me, because it chimes so perfectly with my own personal philosophy. I remember being a kid, looking out across the world and at the adults, and noticing how many of them seemed to have lost something of themselves along the way. That magic spark, that glint in the eye, that oneness with the universe around them. I promised myself that, no matter what, I wouldn’t end up that way; that I would protect the flame inside me at whatever cost. When I heard You’re So Cool for the first time I understood it immediately, because this is a song about protecting that same flame. About that pact I’d made with myself, and that I believed would keep me happy and safe.

    As I got older, there were times when that promise was tested, and times when it pulled me through. Because really what protecting that flame amounts to is remembering always to love yourself. To knowing that you have your flaws and faults, but recognising that goddammit you’re at least trying to be a half decent person and that there is merit in you. Not earned merit, merit at the atomic level of the self. Adults forget this all the time: they go chasing off after some goal, get bruised by some mishap, and lose track of themselves, of their intrinsic worth. Working day blurs into working day, life spins by in an instant. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. You could miss yourself.

    I love You’re So Cool because whenever I listen to it I’m reminded that I’m still the same person. Still the same as that kid who used to build traffic jams of toy cars down the stairs of his home, still the same as that young boy who stayed up far too late watching True Romance. The flame remains lit, the blade is not yet dulled, the promise is, thus far, fulfilled. And I love it too because it reminds me that the era of content discovery is not yet over for me. That there are still great movies I’ve not seen, even if the list is much shorter than once it was, still great records yet to come. That there is life in me and life in the world.

    You’re So Cool is the song my wife came down the aisle to. And I remember being stood there, watching her descend that staircase, a beatific smile, all that impossible glamour, and trying not to trip over the dress, and thinking that she must have had her own version of that same promise, because I had never met anyone else so in touch with the kid that once they were. That she hadn’t forgotten either. I remember the warm wave of happiness in that thought as she moved towards me. As that beautiful music played out.

    Years later, I turned 40 and held a fancy dress birthday party. We attended dressed as Clarence and Alabama, partly as a nod to the ongoing unlikeliness of our pairing, partly because it’s a movie we both love and have seen together many times. I wore the Hawaiian shirt and the gold aviators, had a little plastic model of Elvis in my top pocket. It felt like life had come full circle once again.

    There’s a moment in True Romance from which this song takes its name. Clarence is orchestrating his drug deal and Alabama, badly beaten, face obscured by sunglasses and a hoody, slides him a napkin on which she’s written the legend “You’re So Cool”. The night before my 40th birthday party we stayed up late taking all the napkins that were to be used at the party and writing on the corner of each that same honorarium: “You’re So Cool”. And as I sat and wrote, I realised that this was that the song meant to me: a paean to innocence, yes, but also a paean to self affirmation. To taking a moment, in the darkest hour, to remind yourself: “You got this, you’re doing OK, you’re so cool”.

    You’re So Cool is a track that stirs within me deep emotions. It’s a truly beautiful piece of music, perhaps Zimmer’s best work – and that’s some going. It reminds me of being young, and of the youth I still feel within me. It reminds me of the relationship I built with myself as a teenager, of finding a way to love myself even in the face of some pretty strong suggestion to the contrary. It reminds me of my wife, and of being a pair of kids together. It reminds me of Clarence and Alabama, and of adventure, both the kind you find on screen and that kind you find out in the real world.

    There’s a moment in this song just before the two and a half minute mark where it goes quiet and then gently restarts again, this time slightly more subdued. Gentler and more nurturing, less rambunctious. And then in the last 30 seconds this sweeping, mournful tone creeps in, giving us a new depth that wasn’t there before.

    I think about that tone all the time, about the way it sounds and what it means, why Zimmer included it. Because while the rest of the song sounds like innocence, that tone sounds like experience. Like a life grown a little more complex at the very tail end. I hear that tone and I wonder if exuberance will prove to be enough to get me to wherever it is I’m going, and how many more years I can keep that flame lit. And then, if I’m starting to feel a little doubt, a little concern, I remind myself that – really – I don’t protect that flame, that flame protects me. I remind myself: you’re so cool.

  9. 6. Buddy – De La Soul

    Hallo.

    Back to where it all began. Stood in Richmond Our Price with a ten pound note in my hand; eleven years old and no idea where to even begin. Driven by a sudden compulsion to own some music, any music. It was the last year of Primary School and it was time for me to grow up, to take the next step forward in my cultural life. To begin a record collection.

    Adults owned music, loved music, that much I knew. My parents had their favoured artists, the songs that were clearly dear to them, that encapsulated some fragment of life long since gone by. I’d heard enough already to know that music did something electric to me, that it plugged me into the mains and made greater sense of my own childish labours. But until now, the music had come to me – either via my parents, or the radio, or fortuitous placement in some movie or TV show. This was the first time I’d gone hunting for music myself, and I had no conception of where to start.

    I remember looking out across the endless racks of cassette tapes, attempting to glean from their covers valuable clues as to what might lie within. There was no music press to explain it all for me, not yet. No subtle understanding of genre, of the cultural resonance of this artist or that. No snooty hand of guidance from an older sibling. All I had was that ten pound note and a child’s eye, a child’s instinct, and so that’s what I followed. That’s what drew me first to the cover of Three Feet High & Rising, with its riot of neon yellow, cartoon flowers and bubble font.

    Three Feet High & Rising didn’t look like any other album in the shop. It looked fundamentally unserious amidst a sea of carefully cultivated earnest gravitas, and it posed an immediate and pressing question: why did this Hip Hop act have a Spanish name? Were they, like me, secretly Latin? Could you even be secretly Latin and make Hip Hop records? On such thorny grounds are deep and profound love affairs occasionally seeded. I took Three Feet High & Rising that afternoon and loved it the way you love an album when it’s the first one you’ve ever chosen and the only one that’s in your collection.

    By pure, dumb luck, in Three Feet High I stumbled on one of those records that meets you at just the right moment on your journey. Exploding with energy, exploding with ideas. Delighted in the flexing of its own capacities, full of mischief and magic. It was the first Hip Hop album I ever sat down and listened to end to end; it epitomised the sampling free for all amidst which it was released, and seemed to embody the future potential of the genre. I listened to it a thousand times, learning every skit, every beat, every crass gag and glorious chorus. Rewinding on my humble cassette player to listen to it again and again, unpicking it one stitch at a time, turning it around over and over in my hands to try to see how it worked. What made the magic so.

    I loved the idea that De La Soul could steal music from anywhere; that samples of Johnny Cash, Hall & Oates and Steely Dan could fit seamlessly alongside samples of Bo Diddley and the Commodores. I loved the wordplay: the sensation of being let in on an entirely organic new lexicon, cultivated between friends on the fly. Loved wondering what a “luden” was, what a “peek frean” was, who “Ethel Mertz” and “Miss Crabtree” were. Loved the utter goofines: the enunciation of “she kissed me and I hollered” on Jenifa Taught Me, the “Derwin” interlude on the same track.

    Trugoy, Pos and Maseo were willing to laugh at themselves, and at one another. They had no interest in peddling power or menace, because they seemed to be in possession of the quality that makes such things redundant: boundless self assurance. They were adults with heads full of comic books, old Soul, records and old TV shows, and hearts full of dynamite, and I responded to them because that’s what I wanted for myself. I wanted to be dayglo and limitless, to never forget how invincible I felt in that moment, wanted to take that “I can do anything” from the end of De La Cratic and blow it out into the real world. I wanted a universe of my own, and to fill it with the things that entertained and excited me. Before the Wu Tang ever world-built their way around Staten Island, De La Soul laid out the blueprint for your own hermetically sealed galaxy; only some self assembly required, and you need to pick the parts carefully.

    There are a number of great tracks on Three Feet, but Buddy was the one that jumped out at me above all others. I would go on to become a lover of Hip Hop posse cuts, and this was the first such track I ever heard: members of a Tribe Called Quest, the Jungle Brothers and Monie Love wandering in to the studio and adding their own energies to the simmering gumbo, the whole proving even greater than the sum of its parts.

    Buddy is possessed of the single most exciting opening sixty seconds of a record I can ever remember hearing: that preposterous “hallo”, a series of meany-meany-meanies, those bongos and “say WHAT”s. The low-slung flow, the sense of a studio percolating with talent, restlessly waiting their turn to hop on the mic. The run of everything up to and including that immortal: “De La Soul/From the soul/Black medallions/no gold/hanging on with Pos/hanging out with Mase/buddy buddy buddy all in my face”; one super memorable line after another, production and flow in perfect harmony. Words you wanted to chant along because they felt good as they rolled off the tongue.

    Buddy is Three Feet’s biting point, the track on which Prince Paul’s seemingly endless creativity meets MCs operating somewhere near the top of their game and at the peak of their energies to produce work that still stands up all these years later. It electrified me as an eleven year old, and sold me forever on Hip Hop, sending me off to chase the dragon of the opening section. The cartoon cry of “hold up, wait a minute”, stolen from Bang Zoom (Let’s Go Go) by The Real Roxanne, the sheer savoir-faire of “make sure all the levels are straight out the jungle, the jungle, the brothers, the brothers”. Ideas being offered up and burned away even before you had a chance to digest them. Musical genius by way of untreated ADHD.

    Buddy is buried fully 18 tracks into Three Feet, tucked away behind the album’s single most skippable track, the slightly embarrassing then and even more embarrassing now De La Orgee. But it’s the spiritual epicentre of the record, and the authentic ground zero for so much of the music I have loved since. Perhaps even for the template by which I have judged so much music since: bring me the intrepid energy and assurance of Buddy, or perhaps don’t bother at all. Keep a straight face and rhyme your track title with “Lucille MacGillicuddy”, or don’t call me, I’ll call you. Love language enough to play around with it, or don’t even bother opening your mouth. Care enough to be this sloppy, stay nonchalant enough to be this tight.

    It’s over 30 years since I pulled that album off the shelf and took it home. Thirty years in which I’ve listened to Buddy a million times, noticed some new detail here or there, or compared and contrasted to its almost equally brilliant “Native Tongue Decision” remix. Thirty years in which I’ve wanted to hear new things, new ideas, new concepts; because that’s what Three Feet and Buddy trained me from day dot that music should be; trained me that I didn’t need to understand what I was listening to because there would be time to figure it all out later on. To accept the new, even if I couldn’t yet comprehend it. Thirty years in which I’ve stayed excited, because I know that every now and then someone, somewhere will serve up to me another moment as glorious as Q-Tip trading back and forth with Monie Love: “my Jimmy wants nothing but the best/the best?/the best/ooh-wee”.

    But if Buddy set my trajectory, it’s also my route home, my route back to the point of origin. I put this track on and I remember what it was to be the me of eleven years old. To feel that powerful certainty about the world, that sense that everywhere I looked was fresh magic waiting to be tapped – that I could simply pull an album off the shelf because I liked the cover and have my mind blown. Opportunity around every corner, no time for doubt because I wanted to experience it all. Growing up and having the road rise to meet me. That last flush of proper childhood when you’re the king of the playground, and consequently perceive the world beyond as nothing more than further playground still.

    Funnily enough, Three Feet High & Rising isn’t an album I go back to all that often now. That’s partly a function of the De La catalogue having been unavailable on streaming services for such a long time, but it’s also because it’s a record that proved to be of its moment. It remains a Hip Hop touchstone, a glorious snapshot of a specific period in time, but it’s also a bit of a dead end: the golden age of lawless sampling was more or less over by 1992, and the Daisy Age was supplanted, for better or worse, by Gangsta Rap. De La Soul themselves arguably went on to make other albums that were more focused, more disciplined, albeit never so much outright fun, and were soon eclipsed by A Tribe Called Quest. Is this an alternative vision of what Hip Hop might have been/might still be? Probably not, but it remains an inspiration in terms of the energy and innovation of which the genre is capable: that capacity to take the atoms of the past and super collide them to create the future.

    I can still put Three Feet on, skip past the opening skit and get a tingle from that raw crackle that precedes The Magic Number. But it’s Buddy I end up jumping to every time. Past even Eye Know and Say No Go and Potholes On My Lawn. Because Buddy is the party that never ended – the electric spark that began in my brain some time in 1989 and that has never quite let up, the idea that took hold and won’t let go.

    Listen to those drums, listen to that wordplay, listen to how much outright fun they’re all having and ask yourself: why can’t all records bring this sort of high key animus, this same sense that life is for living and that good music smooths the process? Why can’t every record blow you away the same way that first one does when you eventually get it home and with unsteady hands apply cassette to tape deck? Why can’t we hear everything as if we’re hearing it for the very first time, as if the magic is still intact? Why can’t our ears stay young forever? Why indeed.

    • Wonderful record. Still is. History and the law have not been kind to Three Feet. I revisit frequently and am awestruck every time. Nothing else seems so care free. I skip most of the skits, though.

      • There are about five good skits in the history of Hip Hop, and none of them are on Three Feet.

        I very rarely listen to the album these days. I span it so many times as a kid that I can pretty much hear the whole thing in my head if needed, and – per the above – there isn’t a great deal of new music that sounds like it and makes me want to head back for reference.

        It’s a bit of a curiosity really; a truly great record that you could probably remove from history without changing too much of what followed.

  10. 5. The Obvious Child – Paul Simon

    I was in my late 20s when I first heard Black Wave/Bad Vibrations by The Arcade Fire. Running laps around the Emirates Stadium in Highbury one night after work, the song crept up on me over headphones, put its hand on my shoulder and turned me around.

    “Nothing lasts forever, that’s the way it’s gotta be/There’s a great black wave in the middle of the sea, for me”. So ran the mantra at the track’s core, repeated over and over. By the third repetition, I’d stopped running and was stood looking out over the winter lights of North London, breath fogging the air as a tide of pure dread overtook me. The same dread I’d quietly carried for years, the same certainty that I was living a life waiting for the other shoe to drop. For the black wave to break and engulf me.

    I stood and listened to Black Wave that night, and somewhere in all that brooding, gothic horror I felt I could momentarily discern the familiar weft of another song, of Paul Simon’s The Obvious Child, the first track that had ever made me contemplate a future beyond my control. The first song that had ever truly unnerved me as a kid.

    Like every good metropolitan liberal household of the 80s, we’d owned and loved a copy of Paul Simon’s Graceland. Had played its tracks endlessly on long car journeys, wondered at the unfamiliar South African rhythms and vocals. As the 90s turned, Simon repeated the trick in Latin America, travelling to Brazil to record with local artists, outputting what is still my favourite of his albums, The Rhythm Of The Saints.

    Rhythm Of The Saints was a big deal in my house. Finally, representation for the mother continent that was not comprised of drugs or kidnappings, and full of dreamy, gracefully essayed tracks of the type most artists can only dream of but which Paul Simon probably exhales. Perhaps it lacked the outright bangers of Graceland, and its elliptical lyrics and understated nature puzzled the listening public, but it compensated for those demerits with an excess of beauty. For a while we played it endlessly, and in particular we played the lead off single, The Obvious Child.

    The Obvious Child famously showcased the drumming of Brazilian collective Olodum, and was recorded live in the streets of Pelourinho Squade in Salvador, the sound of the drums captured via microphones hung from windows or on telephone poles. Perhaps as a consequence of that setting, it crackles with a rare energy, has the organic property of an event simply occurring, rather than pre-fabricated.

    The drums of The Obvious Child make the track an immediate outlier from the rest of its parent album. While most of the songs on Rhythm Of The Saints are ethereal, and bury their bongos and congas deep in the mix, Obvious Child pushes the drum sound right to the fore, and what a sound it is. I know of no song with more outright joy in its percussion than this, no song from a traditional Rock artist so willing to give space to the drum, to let it power everything so comprehensively. Probably no track, in any genre, with a drum breakdown as magnificent as the one that occurs here just after the three minute mark.

    The Obvious Child is a favourite song of mine, because I remember how happy it made my mother. I remember her playing it over and over again in the car, proud as if she’d written the thing herself, shouting along to the instrumental “bom bom”s. And even as a humble 12 year old, I could recognise how thoroughly alive the thing felt. How vibrant and full of possibility, just like me.

    But the funny thing about this track, the twist that complicates the relationship, is that while its sound is full of energy, full of light, its lyrics are pulling in a different direction entirely. And it’s that tension that makes the song truly unforgettable, and that bonded me to it indelibly.

    Simon’s lyric here is about the span of life. He was knocking on the door of 50 when he wrote these words, and he sings them in that familiar voice that never seemed to lose its youth, but it’s very clearly a middle age lament. “I’m accustomed to a smooth life/maybe I’m a dog that’s lost its bite”. Full of nostalgia and self doubt, full of uncomfortable half thoughts. It speaks volumes that it spooked me so profoundly as a kid but it makes nothing but sense to me now.

    The storytelling here is masterful. The introductory set up of the first verse, the way Simon drags us back in time with that long, extended enunciation of “I am remembering a girl when I was yooooouuuung”, a wipe cut to a flashback sequence in vocal form. The way he encapsulates youth so profoundly with the cry of “these songs are true/these days are ours/these tears are free”. The way he encapsulates age with “I’ve been following the light across my room/I watch the night receive the room of my day”. The economy of language is staggering, a life rendered fully in just four minutes. All that light and shade.

    Of course, it was the light and shade that set me off, and one passage in particular sent me into a tailspin:

    “Sonny sits by his window and thinks to himself
    How it’s strange that some rooms are like cages
    Sonny’s yearbook from high school
    Is down from the shelf
    And he idly thumbs through the pages
    Some have died
    Some have fled from themselves
    Or struggled from here to get there
    Sonny wanders beyond his interior walls
    Runs his hand through his thinning brown hair”

    Most of the music I had heard to this point told me that life was either happening around you, or was imminently about to happen. This was one of the first songs I ever took to heart that positioned life as a race that might already be partly, if not entirely, run, and the idea scared and thrilled me enough that I rolled it round my head interminably This insight into the spectacle at the finish line. One of the first moments in my young life in which it became clear to me that I, too, might be at risk of one day being old. That I too might become the inheritor of a wistful restlessness, idly thumbing the pages of my own history – just as I’m doing here.

    Now, all this time later, I’m probably about the same age as Sonny in that lyric (albeit my hair remains lustrous), and it all makes total sense. It isn’t scary or alien, it’s just true and maybe a little sad. That idea that some really do end up fleeing from themselves. That fear that there’s still time for you to end up one of them. Perhaps no phrase in all of music and literature better describes the casualties of mid-life: “struggled from here to get there”.

    The Obvious Child was a lyric I couldn’t process, couldn’t parse. I couldn’t tell at the time whether it was a warning shot or a comfort, and because children are lead first and foremost by their fears, I received it largely as the former. It revealed to me the startling discovery that human lives are not standard issue; that there would be casualties, and that the yearbook would not be even handed. And that scared me. But with the benefit of a little more road behind me, I can see that this song is really about growing up and letting go. About realising that, yes, some of the people you know and love will die, some will end up unhappy, and life will still continue to roll on regardless, at least until the day you join their ranks.

    That really it’s about enjoying the day, enjoying the moment. That’s why we get that exultant “had a lot of fun, had a lot of money” – the implication is that the fun is all in the past, and maybe the money too, and that’s OK because the joy of the occurrence outweighs the loss of its passing. We get the cryptic, repeated “the cross is in the ballpark”, which seemed so sinister to me on first encounter, but which Simon himself has confirmed to denote a kind of self acceptance: “The cross, the burden that we carry, is in the ballpark. It’s doable”.

    Nowadays, when I listen to The Obvious Child, I hear the echo of the great aphorism of one of my literary heroes: “So it goes”. Because that’s the message of this song, that great truism of human experience. Simon lays it all out for us over those rattling, express train drums: what is going to be is going to be, and then eventually it will be no more. And that’s alright. It’s doable. And then at the end of the song he closes us out with that series of “ooh-eeh-ooh”s, like a kid whistling to himself on his way to school, all cares cast to the wind. A man fully at peace. And really, music doesn’t get a great deal more beautiful, a great deal more soothing than that.

    The Obvious Child is a song that probably only Paul Simon could have written. The clever use of language, the way every phrase seems to hide a volume, the openness and vulnerability. That timeless, kindly vocal, delivering unto you the wisdom of age through the voice of youth. It’s a song I’ve listened to a million times, a song I’ve thought about constantly since I was a kid, rolling round and round in my head its mysteries: what was the cross in the ballpark, what is the obvious child? Riddles that could only time could resolve.

    And I remember listening to the song and wondering about all of this, sat in the back of my mother’s car, peculiarly chilled by this joyous thing. Twelve years old, my family wobbling, my parents unsteady. Feeling like it was my responsibility to find a way to hold it all together, trying to prop everyone up, waiting for the catastrophe I could feel in the air. I sat on that back seat and it seemed perfectly clear to me in that moment that I was the obvious child, and that eventually, surely, someone – some adult – would see me. Would somehow infer that behind all the stoic capability I was still just a little kid, and that this was all too much, even as I tried so hard to hide that simple fact.

    I heard The Obvious Child back then and it scared me, because I was frightened of being washed away. Was terrified that I was fated to become one of those forced to flee from themselves, that I might not survive intact whatever this new test was, might become one of the lost ones, lost to the opprobrium of my surroundings. And it helped to confirm to me that I would need to be steadfast. Would need to enjoy every day as much as I could, keep myself as strong as I could, until that great black wave finally arrived to test me.

    Thirty plus years on, and the black wave hasn’t arrived – not yet at least. My family remained intact, my parents remained together. We did not implode, not quite. And yet I know that wave is still out there for me, like it’s out there for all of us – as that other great poet said: “no one here gets out alive”, and life will have its sun and showers.

    It’s funny, because just as I once listened to The Obvious Child and recoiled a little from its truths, now I find them enormously comforting. Comforting in that the song tells us that in as much as it’s painful that the good times have to pass – that Sonny has to stop being the little boy who gets sunnier day by day and become the man with the baby and bills to pay – that same passage of time is also our guarantor that the black waves, as and when they do arrive, will eventually sweep on through, and that life will ultimately resume in their wake. Because that’s what life does, in some form at least.

    The Obvious Child has proved to be a foundational song. In youth it woke some part of me up, in adulthood it’s calmed that same part down. It’s singular and gorgeous and wise, and when I listen to it – perhaps more than any other track – I am transported back to first encounter. I can feel what it was to be me, the different texture of time passing, the anxieties and disquiet and joy: these songs are ours, these days are true, these tears are free. I can say to that kid: I see you. And – not for the first time – I am forced to wonder what on Earth life would even be like without music, and how we would have any hope of making sense of it at all.

    • Wonderful write up. Paul Simon has been such an amazing artist for so long, always mature beyond his years. My favourite song is Peace Like A River is from 1972, eighteen years before Rhythm Of The Saints, and he’d already had a very full career by then.

        • Superb stuff Bingo. I played the live in New York version on my radio show the other week. Fan that I am I have never delved into that track. That was remiss of me.
          Be nice if Mr Simon got to read what you have written.

          • Cheers, Junior! I love the New York version, not least because you can hear all these massive cheers from the crowd that die out completely as he begins to sing the line “Sonny sits by his window and thinks to himself…”. The reverence is quite lovely.

  11. 4. The Western (Conrad Remix) – PFM feat MC Conrad

    Part of what makes music such a great adventure is that you never know what’s around the next corner. Whether you’ll go to the record store and come home with an absolute dud, or something that will be with you forever, something you’ll love so profoundly that at a certain stage you’ll struggle to even imagine an existence without it. One of those areas of life where you can stumble upon adventure simply by following your nose.

    Not for the first time on this list, The Western is another example of my own unearned good fortune. Drifting round the Lakeside branch of HMV, drawn inexorably to Logical Progression, LTJ Bukem’s seminal collection of spaced out, jazzy Drum & Bass. I can still remember how it felt looking at the CD case, holding it in my hand and deciding to buy it. I had never heard LTJ Bukem, I simply liked the cover, with its brooding moonscape, and was in the market for something new. Oh, and the case opened via a magnetic strip, an innovation I’d not seen before and which added to the sense of exotic mystery.

    While I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, I can never claim I was mis-sold. As it turned out, that moonscape was the perfect image to encapsulate the prevailing energy of Logical Progression: a compilation of dreamy, atmospheric Drum & Bass excursions with a distinctly astral flavour.

    I loved Logical Progression – loved it with a capital L, as if it had been made for me personally. It seemed to open up a whole new avenue for this music, tilting it even further away from the industrial aggression of Jungle and towards a broader palette of mood. But it was the album’s ninth track which truly sold me; PFM’s The Western, remixed with MC Conrad chatting over the top – a track like nothing I’d ever heard before.

    In many ways, Drum & Bass was the sound of my youth. I was fortunate to be a teenager during its period of early innovation, when the genre was being stretched and pulled into strange new shapes and people were still working out what could and could not be done with this music. When we were learning how expansive it could be, what feelings it might provoke, where it could take a night out, take a mood.
    And The Western was a crowning moment in that process – this track that felt so warm and knowing, that achieved an intimacy it had never even occurred to me that D&B would ever be capable of.

    Let’s start with the track’s first minute and a half; ninety seconds of nothing more than ambient swirling and a couple of brooding keyboard tones. No beats, no voice, just this stately scene setting, in no particular hurry to go anywhere, happy to twinkle for twinkling’s own sake. And then the beat drop, which goes all the harder for all that prior ambience – the ricochet gunshot sounds, the cantering drums, the sense of a posse riding into town and disturbing the peace.

    But it was the vocal that really blew me away. MC Conrad, deep and biblical, not so much riding the beat as body surfing it. One of those voices that you hear in youth and which stays with you forever, Conrad did not emerge from any recognisably extant MCing tradition within this form of music. There was no trace of the usual Jungle Ragga chatter which sought to match the energy of the drums, and from which most of the scene’s MCs had emerged. Instead, he settled in with the bass, taking the energy up and down to meet the demands of the track, a glove-perfect fit for Bukem’s Jazzier, more ruminative take on the sound.

    Conrad had started out as a Hip Hop MC, and you could feel it in his flow. He’d cut his teeth toasting on sound systems, developing a style that oscillated between singing and rapping, deploying his natural gravitas to play the role of shaman, guiding you through the spirit journey of a long night in some distant warehouse. He sounded like absolutely no one else, and he was entirely perfect for this music. I hear him now and I flash back to exactly what it felt like to be out on the dancefloor as a kid, prickled to action by the drums, pummelled by the bass and with Conrad floating across the top of it all, urging us on from some unseen spot. How perfectly copacetic it all felt.

    Part of Conrad’s gift was his facility with words, but even that was unusual and off-kilter. He had a knack for saying the right thing in the right moment; one liners that met the needs of the music, of the crowd, but that made little or no sense when read off the page. Gibberish that sounds fucking fantastic when put to sound and used to instruct a dancefloor. The Western is full of such lines: “Pay attention, you’re next on the agenda”, ”we got sounds assured for those who are selective”, “I tell you action stations, people get ready/twist you like spaghetti, boo you like Betty”, and the frankly unbeatable “vibes causing symphonic spasms/and babies having secret orgasms”. Everything felt like a freestyle, and because of his delivery, everything would land. A totally organic style that felt like me might take you anywhere, and you’d happily follow.

    But he also had a musical ear, and enough humility to put himself at the service of the song. Just listen here to how he shifts his pacing to mirror the track, how he takes us to a peak with the shout of “Ex-treme”, how he tones down as the song comes to an end (“as we…drift away/away we drift”). Conrad had my favourite flow of any MC who ever lived, a kid from Northampton who came up on Hip Hop, Jazz and Soul and found a way to merge the vocal stylings of all three and then deploy them for this new music he was helping to define.

    So, the Western reminds me of all that 90s Drum & Bass energy, and of Conrad, who gave me so many happy hours and perhaps the defining voice of my teenage years. But the song also reminds me of other things too. Of the way it seemed to match my own peculiar brain chemistry, the way it has always seemed to soothe me. Of a hundred occasions when I’ve listened to it late at night to reset myself, and that opening astral swirl has immediately transported me off to some other plane, swooping low over that lunar landscape.

    The Western was always my escape valve tune, the tune that facilitated quietening the noisier parts of my brain. On some level, life is about learning to get out of your own way; to stop overthinking and engage with the here and now, and this song was my personal soundtrack to figuring out how to get a little better in that department. How to let it all go.

    But there’s another memory here too. Final year of secondary school, still in the school building on a Sunday night, rehearsing for some play or other. Long periods sat idle waiting for our turn on stage, penned in with my classmates, for whom little mutual affection remained. Waiting to escape this place, this sense of a great wall between me and so many of my peers. And then someone produces a tape deck, and we take turns to play our stuff, and when my turn comes I stick on The Western. And we lie on the sofa, this gaggle of familiar strangers, and we stare up through the great glass windows at the night sky and the chatter falls away and we listen in silence as the track unfolds, as Conrad weaves his spell. Looking up at the stars, a sort of magic occurring, as if for a short while we’re all finally coexisting in the same moment, finally on the same wavelength. And for seven and a half minutes I get this little taste of what it would have felt like to actually belong in this place, and it’s powerful enough that I still remember it 30 years on.

    The Western is one of the great defining songs of my life. It’s been there for me across three decades, providing this weird serenity I have never been able to find anywhere else. Calming my thoughts, allowing me to step outside myself a little. It’s a song I struggle to separate from sufficiently to ever truly see it clearly; a song where I can’t really tell any more where it ends and I begin. A song without which my life would have been immeasurably poorer, and the very first song I would reach for in a crisis.

    I play the track now, and it’s striking that even to this day nothing else sounds quite like it, because it’s the peak of a certain moment in a certain genre, when creating and playing with mood was the order of the day (“twisting up the atmospherics”, as Conrad would put it). And that singularity only adds to its cache; adds to the sense of a kind of alchemy occurring here.

    A few weeks after that Sunday night in school we all finished our exams and I never saw any of those people ever again. A year after Logical Progression released, Roni Size won the Mercury Music Prize and the energy began to drift out of Drum & Bass, wending its way to the next big thrill, which I suppose was Speed Garage. The moment moved on, as moments are prone to do. And I moved on too, but I took The Western with me, and I carry it with me still, because of what it did for me then, and what it still does for me now. Because it brought me peace, and brings me peace still.

  12. Can’t get the “Gratuitous” thread to work on mobile, so posting here. One of my favourite songs of recent years caught out in the wild, being an absolute generational banger. Merry Xmas Afterword.

  13. All of your picks have been interesting at worst, even if I’ve not entirely connected with some of them.

    The writing, however has been universally fantastic and, as you approach the top 3, just a Seasonal thank you from me.

    • Aw, cheers Ainsley. Just a couple more to go now and we’re home free. I’ll probably look to finish up the final entry in the first week of Jan as don’t want to impinge on the planned festive sloth.

      Wishing you a very Merry Christmas – have a good one! 🎅

      • Thank you, Tigger – and thanks for your kind comments across the year.

        In fairness, I think posting all of this on here has probably tested the limits of self indulgence quite enough; a book would probably be a bridge too far.

        Merry Xmas mate ❤️

  14. 3. Sweet Thing – Van Morrison

    It’s the late 90s, and I’m sat at the breakfast table in the home of one of my dearest friends. We’ve known each other since we were six years old, grown up alongside one another, shared discoveries, traded musical recommendations. He’s the first person who played me Nine Inch Nails, the kid with whom I attempted to construct Jive Bunny style remixes using only a pair of old tape decks, the pal who once memorably woke me up by blasting Roots Manuva’s Dem Phonies at ear splitting volume and bouncing up and down on the bed right next to my head, whacking away at me with an inflatable hammer.

    We’re students now, touched by that glorious combination of indolence and curiosity, wide eyed kids with time to burn. He’s sat eating his cereal and reading the paper, his Mum busying herself at the far end of the kitchen, when he suddenly puts down the spoon, looks me dead in the eyes and declares “we need to go to HMV today”. When I ask him why, he replies, in a voice steeped in the kind of moral clarity of which only the young are capable: “because I need these”.

    He slides the newspaper over to me; it’s a list of the 100 greatest albums ever made, and at its peak, at numbers one and two respectively, freshly circled in blue biro, are What’s Goin’ On by Marvin Gaye and Astral Weeks by Van Morrison. And a couple of hours later we go to HMV and cop these records and then come home and listen to them, and good lord what an impossibly great day that was, and how extraordinary that a day so completely perfect could simply be purchased for a little over £20 and bus fare.

    Those records blew our minds, the same way they’ve blown minds for more than half a century, but the truth was that, while it was my first time with What’s Goin’ On, I did have some prior knowledge of Astral Weeks, by simple virtue of having grown up in a house with Van Morrison. Van was part of the furniture in my home just as much as the great oak pine dresser that stood in the corner of the living room, or the extended fold out table on which the stereo sat. He was an integral component of the domestic mis-en-scene, played endlessly to the point that the echo of his voice is probably still reverberating around the brickwork to this day.

    Mum loved Van Morrison. I can’t tell you where that love began, or what prompted it, only that it abides, and that it seemed to form a sort of peak as the 80s slipped on into the 90s, with the release of what was a pretty spectacular “Best Of” compilation. The one with the metal microphone on the cover, and stacked seemingly back-to-back with absolute classics, from the opening Bright Side Of The Road to the closing Dweller On The Threshold.

    This record, more than any other, was the sound of my childhood as it entered its final chapters; Wonderful Remark, Cleaning Windows, Jackie Wilson Said, And It Stoned Me, Here Comes The Night, Domino, and all the rest – played loud and repeatedly. And I loved those songs because I could see that they made my Mother happy, but I also loved them because even at that tender age I could recognise the greatness of that preposterous, once in a century voice. Could recognise that this man had somehow lucked into a voice that no Earth-bound white boy could ever have been meant to possess.

    We listened to that Best Of endlessly, and it made me happy every time, made me happy to hear Van sing and watch my Mum smile. But every time we listened to it, I would wait – wait for the sweet spot, the magic that occurred at track 7, right in between the intoxicating exuberance of Brown Eyed Girl and the bucolic Soul of Warm Love. I would wait for Sweet Thing, because I had already intuited that somewhere in that song’s four minutes and twenty one seconds lay all life’s great secrets, splayed out casually for anyone to see.

    Van Morrison was just 23 years old when he recorded Sweet Thing, an exile in the United States, an artist on the lam from the expectations created the prior year by the success of Brown Eyed Girl, playing small folk clubs with minimal accompaniment and feeling his way towards a different sound. Van’s label, sensing that his direction of travel was more free form than the pure Pop of his Bang Records incarnation, sent him in to Century Sound Studios in New York with a crack team of Jazz musicians, capable of letting the vocal take the lead and shepherding the music in its wake. Morrison, perhaps intimidated, perhaps simply not (ahem) a people person, spent most of the sessions skulking in the vocal booth and avoiding interaction with his musicians. Instead, he let his singing do the talking.

    Astral Weeks was recorded over the course of just three days, with most of the songs nailed down in first or second takes. Famously, it abandons the amplified sound of Van’s earlier work in favour of acoustic arrangements and minimal percussion; all the better to give space to the lyrics and their tales of a childhood played out in the streets of London, Dublin and the rolling hills around Belfast. Its glory is in a combination of that nostalgia, some of the most potent ever to be committed to tape, Van Morrison’s striking vocal performances and the gloriously ethereal arrangements, which do not crowd the vocal, but which have retained their energies as the decades roll past. The magic of Astral Weeks is that these don’t feel like songs that were written, they feel like songs that simply happened, and that’s what vouchsafes their immortality.

    I was fascinated by Astral Weeks from the very first time I heard it, because it sounds like absolutely nothing else. It’s not Soul, it’s not Rock and it’s not Folk, but somehow it’s a little of all three, and more besides. It received minimal promotion on release, and was not an immediate commercial success, but its legend has grown and grown over time. Bruce Springsteen said that the record gave him “a sense of the divine”. Greil Marcus memorably compared it to Bob Beamon’s record-breaking long jump performance at the Mexico City Olympics, a singular achievement “way outside of history”. It’s one of very few albums I know that gives you minimal cues as to its provenance; it feels like it might have been recorded at more or less any time in the last half century, like it could slot in anywhere and yet still be an outlier.

    In one of my favourite pieces of music journalism, Lester Bangs said that Astral Weeks was “proof that there was something left to express artistically besides nihilism and destruction”. And, funnily enough, it’s that precise aspect, that sense of a lost innocence being reclaimed, that drew me so powerfully to Sweet Thing as a kid.

    Sweet Thing is the only song on Astral Weeks which looks forward, rather than backwards. Powered by Richard Davis’ propulsive upright bass, and marrying Morrison’s vocal to a descending, circular progression, it evokes a deep and resounding joy. Placing the listener in a sumptuous Eden and inviting them to wander free, Sweet Thing reminds us to “never grow so old again”, to never “read between the lines”, to cast aside experience and recover innocence, to loop right back round to the start. It urges the mind to slow and quieten, so that the heart might speak loud.

    There’s a beautiful contrast here between the instrumentation, which is gentle and soothing, but which rises and falls with each new urgency, and Van’s voice, which is so full of passion and wisdom, bearing the hallmarks of both youth and age. A dynamic tension which grants the song its power, as the band provide the latitude for their singer to simply roam free, to speak his truth. And roam free he does: Sweet Thing contains some of the finest off-lyric vocal expression you will ever hear; the stretched “oh-ooooohs”, the cry of “my my my my my my my my” – it’s a man totally in the zone and letting it all out, a completely singular voice revelling in its own finest hour.

    The song is generally interpreted as being about the first flush of love; a paean to a lover who remains just out of sight, barely within reach. And in a sense it is just that, evoking that period where the world can wait, and other things are put on hold so that you can simply be in the moment and enjoy the bliss as it sweeps across you. When your entire field of vision narrows to a single subject, and life is abruptly simplified in all the ways life typically resists being simplified.

    But that’s not how it seemed to me as a kid, and consequently it’s not how I read Sweet Thing to this day. Sure, this seemed to me a love song, but a love song of a different stripe; a song about falling in love with yourself, utterly and forever. About achieving that total satisfaction of looking yourself in the mirror and feeling your own heart skip, because you’ve recognised that essential truth: that we’re all born just about perfect, and that underneath it all its perfect we remain. About stripping away the detritus of life and accessing our own essence; casting aside our fears and anxieties and returning to the very start of it all.

    Perhaps I took this reading of Sweet Thing because I was still innocent when first I heard it. Perhaps it’s because I’m innocent no longer and I’ve spent my entire adult life idealising that kid I once was, that purity of heart. Wishing to go back to that first listen, to once more stroll the merry ways and jump the hedges first.

    But I remember what it felt like as a boy to reach the song’s apex, that unmatchable ten seconds of pure magic in which Van’s voice lifts in emphasis and intent and he sings perhaps the most beautiful sequence of words I have ever heard emerge from a stereo speaker: “I shall drive my chariot down your streets and cry/hey, it’s me, I’m dynamite and I don’t know why”, as the strings hop and galavant behind, following on like the woodland creatures that trailed behind Snow White. I remember listening to those words as a kid, delivered in that free form Soul shout that could have rivalled Sam or Otis, and thinking just two words to myself. Fuck. Yeah.

    Ultimately, Sweet Thing seems to me to be about the self; certainly I’ve never had the sense when listening to it that he’s actually singing about anyone else. It’s about the glory of self-acceptance, of what Rousseau termed “amour de soi”. About knowing in your heart that you’re simply dynamite, and that it’s OK to shout about it. That it’s OK to remind yourself, just as Sweet Thing reminds each of us that we still have the wonder inside, that it never went away.

    I thought of that lyric a million times as I grew up. In those moments where no one seemed to be telling me the things I needed to hear, so I told them to myself, more or less literally. As I played Sweet Thing over and over, and every single time it sent me back to the source, because when something is this profoundly cleansing and euphoric it’s enough to make you believe in the possibility of a return to innocence; that we can all go home again if we only choose to.

    When all is said and done, this is a song that taught me, while still a child, perhaps the single most valuable lesson of my entire life. That I, like everyone else, was already in possession of something great, something valuable. That life would try to take it from me, would attempt to dull my own sense of its majesty, and that it was my calling to prevent that theft from occurring. That I was to be the watchman of my own immortal childhood soul.

    It’s a song that reassured me that I didn’t need to understand myself in order to value myself (that all important “and I don’t know why”), that I already had everything I would ever need to be happy. To be satisfied. That the answers are not to be found between the lines, but in the margins.

    I listen to Sweet Thing today and I think of my Mum, who I’ve watched drive her chariot down more than her fair share of streets. I think of the time we shared together when I was still small, and of this great gift she gave me, this idea she instilled inside me, that life is a joy, and that we are all beautiful. And of how I knew this must be true because there was so much beauty, so much life, in her. How she simply could not be contained, how she still can’t be contained to this day, and of how much that has scared and inspired me.

    I think of Van Morrison, who delivers here quite possibly the greatest vocal I’ve ever heard (bar perhaps one, and we’ll come to that), and who somehow momentarily embodies that same sense of joy and beauty, despite being an irretrievable curmudgeon. I think of how this song touched my heart, of the number of times it has soothed and inspired me, of that quite incredible ten seconds when the record’s power and beauty unfurls in a great sweep that lifts you from your feet. I listen to Sweet Thing and I remember that I, like everyone else, am dynamite, and that it would be a crime to forget it. That it would be a crime to ever grow so old.

    • Well you can’t really argue with any of that. I’ve said it before that AW is the closest pop music has brought me understanding the religious experience. I’m gonna have to think hard about what vocal performance you think might top this one.

      PS/ATM: does anyone think the 2015 remaster adds anything new or improved to the original?

    • Astral Weeks is one of those albums I don’t listen to often, but, when I do, it never fails to astonish me. Sweet Thing is its core. I’ve only ever heard it in the context of the album. I’ll have to give this compilation experience a go. It must be mind blowing in that sequence.

      • I’m biased, but I think it’s a truly brilliant “Best Of”, not least because it really showcases his range.

        In the first seven tracks alone you get Gloria, Have I Told You Lately and Sweet Thing, which collectively sound like the same person covering three different artists.

          • I have a deep, sentimental attachment to HITYL, for all the reasons above, but objectively it’s super syrupy MOR.

            That said, a huge part of what I enjoy about that compilation is that HITYL is nestled in there between one of the foundational tunes of Garage Rock, and Sweet Thing, which is this kind of ethereal Folk/Soul/Jazz hybrid.

            These three tracks have no business at all being on the same album. I absolutely love it.

    • I love the Waterboys’ cover of this. One of the many stories about Van Morrison’s jovial amiability is the time Mike Scott asked him if he’d heard said cover, to get the response “it’s not as good as the original, is it?”.

      • The Waterboys cover is superb. I’m also partial to the Jeff Buckley.

        There’s probably a whole other essay to be written on how on Earth this song emerged from Van Morrison. It’s like he takes all the joy inside him and expels it through song, leaving nothing left for life.

  15. 2. Mogwai Fear Satan – Mogwai

    Where do words reach their limit? It’s a question that has confronted me more than once in the composition of this list and its various entries.

    How can you possibly find the language to explain the joyous abandon with which Janis Joplin sings Kozmic Blues, the warm campfire glow barely discernible in the background of Ex-Factor but so integral to the song? What it feels like when you listen to Blood Bank and discover the sweep of life – your life, their life, any life – shrunk down so it fits inside a snow globe? How simultaneously reassuring and unsettling that is?

    How do you explain why a beloved song means what it does to you, without recognising that the tale is as much of the soil as it is the seed? How do you ever hope to explain what it was to be you, to hear each of these songs and fall in love with them forever? To explain how and why that happened. Has that language even been invented yet, or are we still practicing the same dance moves for the same old architecture?

    Words have been my life. I was hungry for them from the first moment I opened my eyes, and they have poured into and out of me in volume, and at varying degrees of quality. Words I knew could get me into trouble, and then words I knew could get me out again. Words to elide and convey truth. Words to make me myself. As a kid I knew instinctively that words were my golden ticket; that I loved them, and they loved me, and that they would ease my path, would solve any problem. Any problem. What a fool.

    Mogwai were the first band who showed me that you didn’t really need language if you could only induce your instruments to speak prose. That lyrics ultimately matter so little that you don’t really need them at all. That you can take atmosphere and dynamic tension and run all the way with it.

    I remember I picked up the band’s debut album proper, Mogwai Young Team, on the way back from a day at the British Library spent conducting research for an essay on Moral Philosophy. Having never heard a note of the Mogwai’s music, my purchase was made largely off the back of a series of characteristically gobby quotes recently delivered to the NME by Mogwai’s ostensible frontman, Stuart Braithwaite, in which he boldly declared that his band’s decision to operate without vocals was a cultural shift on a par with Dylan going electric. Catnip for a kid still obsessively listening to the recently released Albert Hall bootleg, which of course documented the real thing.

    With that hyperbole ringing in my ears, and freshly returned from an afternoon surrounded by books and ideas, I stuck the CD on as soon as I got home, and perused the back cover. The first track began, and immediately recalled a slightly slowed down Siamese Dream instrumental, locating me squarely in my sweet spot. Comforted, I settled down to do other things, letting the music drift to the background as track two, Like Herod, began. Fantastic title. My eyes wandered down the CD case, and I noticed that Mogwai appeared to be operating their own bespoke naming convention, the absence of lyrics liberating them from the obligation to pull a title from the song itself. Summer (Priority Version)? A Cheery Wave From Stranded Youngsters? Who wouldn’t want to find out what those would sound like. And that’s when my attention settled on the title of the album’s final track. Mogwai Fear Satan.

    Mogwai Fear Satan is quite possibly my favourite title for any song ever. Powerful and evocative, it’s a genre curveball that speaks to the Metal sensibilities of a band whose lovely, intricate guitar work might have more readily placed them on the side of the angels. It fascinated me immediately, drew me in completely. And as I was contemplating all this, Like Herod, which had spent its opening three minutes noodling in a polite but slightly sinister fashion until the song dropped away entirely into virtual silence, came crashing back in with a vengeance, all howling, outraged guitars and drum fills, volume suddenly maxed. Lulled into a false sense of security, I was so shocked I almost physically fell out of my seat – the trick could not have worked more perfectly, the message could not have been clearer: do not take your eyes off this band, because this band can detonate unexpectedly.

    The reason I mention all of this is to set the scene. Mogwai Fear Satan had no right to catch me off guard; I had been warned, and I was prepared. I sat and listened to the end of the album, guard up, desperate to hear what this song would sound like, expectations mounting, and when I eventually got there it still somehow managed to completely blow me away.

    Mogwai Fear Satan was the first Post Rock track I ever heard that really showed me how powerful this music could be. And yet it’s an unusual example of the genre, powered along by that relentless tribal drum for all of its sixteen minutes and change, a twisting, tumbling storm of tension and release that structurally recalls more an EDM track than anything that should have come out of a band. A banger, with lulls and drops, with cues to go mental and cues to rest.

    Perhaps accordingly, it’s Martin Bulloch’s drumming that holds down this track. Post Rock bands are usually obsessed with the guitar sound, and percussion often takes a back seat, but here it’s firmly in command, pounding and pummelling the song into shape, standing the whole thing up, marshalling the track’s power to its own dark ends. It’s the closest Mogwai ever came to a traditional Rock sound, the hardest they ever worked the quiet/loud/quiet angle. And the loud here is loud indeed; the track, something of a calling card for the band, is traditionally played at their live shows at ear splitting volume, their own equivalent of My Bloody Valentine’s You Made Me Realise, a similar vein of sonic terrorism.

    Mogwai Fear Satan made immediate and perfect sense to me, as if I’d been waiting to hear it. The lack of lyrics, the lack of a vocal – all perfect, integral to the functioning of the song. The lush sweetness of its valleys, the harrowing chaos of its mountain passes. It squarely hit something inside me on that first listen, and its power has never really diminished in the intervening quarter century. It teed me up for Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Explosions In The Sky and Mono and Slint and a dozen other bands I love. It sounded like a Metal act covering Underworld. It made me throw up the proverbial horns. But it also comforted me.

    Despite its length, this is a song I’ve listened to constantly since that first encounter. A song that’s soothed the soul in adolescence, adulthood and now middle age. That’s kept me company late at night and delivered me a sense of purpose where one was lacking. Because somehow, somewhere in the midst of all that noise, all that chaos, I located a sort of peace.

    It’s taken me a very, very long time to really understand why Mogwai Fear Satan has proved to be such reliable comfort food. Originally, I thought that the secret was the stretching out of the quiet/loud dichotomy, the seemingly endless firestorm of guitars followed by several minutes of comparatively serene and tranquil calm. And that’s true in a way, but what I overlooked for many years was the role played by Mogwai Fear Satan’s unexpected and preposterously incongruous secret weapon: the flute.

    Shona Brown, a resident of Motherwell, was twelve years old when she took up the flute. She was just thirteen when Mogwai invited her to play on Mogwai Fear Satan; thirteen years old when she laid down what is quite probably my single favourite instrumental contribution to any song ever recorded. Brown’s flute is present throughout Mogwai Fear Satan. It’s there in the background in the noisy sections, and there in the foreground in the quiet moments. It surfs the track’s 40 foot tall waves one after another, outlasting them all, until nothing else is left, until it is permitted to take centre stage and play us out to completion. It is the balm that acts in contrast to the song’s wild abrasion.

    It was only in recent years that I finally clocked that when I listen to Mogwai Fear Satan, what I’m really listening to is a young girl and her flute facing down a raging beast; a snake charmer bringing to heel a charging monster. The track writhes and claws, it bellows and howls, but the flute remains resolute, unmoved, perfect. No words, just catharsis.

    And looking back, of course all of that would resonate with me. Off at university, but still carrying the wounds of school, still trying to find peace with myself, with the raging beast of my own mind. Still unable to explain to anyone anything I felt, and consequently unable to prevent myself from constantly telling everyone everything I thought. Words, words, words – all of them getting me nowhere, running hard on the spot.

    In amidst all of that, Mogwai Fear Satan gave me an early glimpse of an alternative path and enabled me to calm myself a little. I would stick the track on and play endless rounds of F Zero X on the N64, a strikingly lo fi but impossibly high speed racing game that seemed to invite the player to enter a sort of zen state, and feel everything else just drift away. A release not easily achieved in a life without drink or drugs. An escape from thought, from words, from the crushing pressures of the self. Peace, at last.

    One day in the Summer just gone, I went to watch the cricket with my Father; not a past-time in which I have ever had much interest, but the kind of thing that becomes more precious to both parties as the supply of such golden opportunity begins to dwindle. I sat beside him in the sun, and for a long while I tried my best to say nothing, to simply be silent and sit with him. Because after all these years contemplating the wasteland of things left unsaid between us – things that will in all likelihood never be said – the penny finally dropped that maybe silence is all that he wanted, all that was needed, all along. The one thing I probably wasn’t even capable of giving him; words, tripping me up and sabotaging me.

    So we sat in silence for a while, and it was beautiful in a slightly melancholy way. Occasionally I’d ask a question about what was happening, or he’d point out some interesting detail. A conversation at his cadence, not mine. And in those quiet moments, as I sat there in slight surprise that I was even capable of such basic restraint, as I tried to keep my brain under control, I swear I heard this faint but familiar noise in my head, a noise where all the chatter might otherwise have been. And that noise was a flute, clearly audible above the din, corralling and channeling the noise away to some distant back room. Shona Brown’s flute.

    Mogwai Fear Satan is a song that changed a lot for me. It has changed how I think about words, about what can be achieved with and without them. It made me reflect that for all my perspicacity, words had a tendency to fail me in the most crucial moments. When I needed them from my Father, and couldn’t get them. When I tried and failed utterly to find the right words to ease the pain I always sensed in him. When I tried to talk my brothers back to the straight and narrow. When I tried to explain to myself, let alone anyone else, all the things that were unresolved inside me.

    I’ve made a living off words. Off being able to talk my way into and out of any situation. I’ve blagged my way through life, and enjoyed it, gone to meetings without preparing just to see what would come out of my mouth when put on the spot. I’ve sparked groups of people to action, spun tall tales, made my loved ones laugh, found ways to help friends, and convinced myself of the things I needed to believe. Told myself stories that were convenient; sometimes self empowering and sometimes self limiting. Some of the same stories that have featured in these essays; the happy reassurances and connections that can make human life seem to make just a little more sense. But the truth is that words never fixed anything truly important, because what you need for that is time. Time and good fortune.

    Accordingly, it wasn’t words that first brought me true peace, it was Shona Brown and that glorious, snake charming flute. It spoke so much more elegantly and eloquently than I ever could have, tamed the beasts I never could. It’s poignant that this came from someone so young, more poignant still that it took me so many years to recognise and understand it.

    Mogwai Fear Satan taught me that sometimes I would need to slow my brain a little. To watch the thoughts go by instead of allowing them to pick me up for a ride. To let go of a little ego. It took me a very long time to properly understand those lessons, but they had their roots in that first listen, and I grasped and stumbled towards them subsequently. I’m still learning them even now.

    But there’s a narrower reason for the love here too, and that’s the music itself. Mogwai Young Team is, push come to shove, amongst my very favourite albums. It was released in 1997 – arguably the single best year for music of my entire teens – and Mogwai Fear Satan is that record’s absolute crowning glory. The shimmer of the opening guitar, the sense of forward propulsion, of constant movement for movement’s own sake. The sense that no element here is complex, that what we’re being confronted with l has the form and shape of Prog, but the simplicity and emotional energy of Punk.

    Mogwai have proved to be a band with a long tail; they inspired a lot of other musicians, both because they were clearly normal kids who just loved what they did and worked very hard at it, and because they brought with them a sensibility that felt entirely a la mode. They were simultaneously grandiose and yet attainable. Much like Ash before them, they were kids our age, and we recognised in them all the same mischief and flippancy.

    Ultimately, I love Mogwai Fear Satan because it’s probably the closest any song ever came to expressing what it feels like to be me, to be comprised of wild energies that will take you wherever you want to go, if only you can tame them first. Listening to it was like looking hard into a mirror, with all the good and ill that entails. And the track achieved all of this without words, because maybe sometimes for this type of thing words aren’t what you need. Because words are for telling stories, but sound is for telling truth.

  16. 1. A Change Is Gonna Come – Sam Cooke

    Good music can change your life, that much we take for granted. Sometimes, it’s a slow process: a song that keeps you company down the years, that seems to grow richer and more profound as time performs its tragic dance. But just as often, it’s a bolt of lightning: your whole existence, your entire sense of self, spun on its axis in the time it takes to boil an egg. Music is magical, and magic works fast and slow.

    There have been perhaps half a dozen occasions in my life where a song has risen to meet the moment so perfectly and profoundly as to leave behind the sense that a sort of divine kismet had been staged for my own personal benefit. Some of those occasions are detailed in the various other entries to this list. None have had an impact remotely so profound as A Change Is Gonna Come.

    While I have, of course, been scrupulously careful to ensure that this remains a list of “favourite” songs, rather than a list of “best” songs, here at the very summit the distinction becomes moot. A Change Is Gonna Come is my favourite record of all time, by some distance. It is also, to my mind, the greatest track ever, recorded, also by some distance. It’s a song that defines its moment and yet remains timeless; it sounds fantastic, it’s blessed with peerless arrangement and vocals, it has a powerful back story and a message that resonates both at a cultural level and a personal one. It’s a track based on the simple and immutable truth: this too shall pass, and as such it is entirely evergreen; a song for all seasons. A song for all people.

    A Change Is Gonna Come is as close to perfection as music has ever come, perhaps will ever come. Sliding in on that glorious waterfall of strings, Sam Cooke hitting that first line about as hard as any vocalist ever has: the elongation of the word “born”, as profound and powerful an assertion of humanity as you will find anywhere. The contrast between the grandeur of those strings, the way they clear the stage and prepare the spotlight, the rumble of the kettle drum behind them a distant thunder across the waters, and the humility of the opening lyric: “I was born by the river, in a little tent/and just like the river I’ve been running ever since”.

    The instrumentation here is fabulous: a different arrangement for each verse, with the lead instrument changing on the final line of each. The first verse dominated by the rhythm section, the strings ascending for the second and the horns bringing us on home in the third before the entire orchestra swells up behind Cooke for the grand finale. It’s a song about life; humble, regular life spent under the bootheel of prejudice and oppression, buffeted by fickle fate, running hard but never getting anywhere, and yet it’s soundtracked by an arrangement fit for an Emperor. And it’s that dichotomy that gives the song at least part of its power: that sense of desperate vulnerability combined with a dignity bordering on majesty. That sense that we are all kings, no matter how we may be treated in this life.

    Offsetting all that lush instrumentation, the lyric is clear and direct, conveying a lifetime of pain and struggle in terms so simple a child could understand them, yet impossible for any adult to forget. “It’s been too hard living/but I’m afraid to die/cause I don’t know what’s up there/beyond the sky”. “I go to the movies and I go downtown/somebody keep telling me “don’t hang around””.

    Sam Cooke was famously inspired to write A Change Is Gonna Come upon listening to Bob Dylan’s Blowin In The Wind; his younger brother reporting “Sam always said a black man should’ve wrote ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, it was unfair, so he said ‘Nah, if he can write a song like that surely, I can come up with something equally as good”. But it’s striking that the lyric of A Change Is Gonna Come is far less oblique than Dylan’s effort; there is no room for metaphor here, no “how many seas must a white dove sail”, because maybe metaphor becomes redundant when you’re living this stuff day to day. Perhaps you need to have lived through the event to articulate it with such absolute clarity and candour. To be quite as painfully honest as “brother, help me please”.

    Cooke, of course, delivers a vocal befitting the occasion; almost certainly the finest of his glittering career, perhaps the finest vocal we’ve ever heard from anybody. There’s a slowness to his voice here, trailing ever so slightly behind the arrangement, stretching every line, taking his time to wring the power out of every syllable of the lyric, fully enunciating the struggle, ensuring that the point cannot be missed.

    It’s a vocal full of sorrow and hope, a vocal that speaks to both intense vulnerability and yet which retains at all times a sense of its own power, and Cooke balances all these aspects perfectly. Listen to the way he extends the words “long” and “know” on the chorus, the way he sings the words “brother” and “please” in the song’s most poignant passage. The frankly unbeatable delivery of the line “back down on my knees”. Sam Cooke is taking risks here, singing A Change Is Gonna Come – a song he knows has the potential to ruin his carefully constructed career – about as bravely and powerfully as it’s possible to sing anything.

    It’s worth stopping for a moment to consider the context of this song. Famously inspired by Blowin In The Wind, but arguably owing an even greater debt to Paul Robeson’s rendition of Ol’ Man River (key lyric: “I’m tired of livin’ and scared of dyin’’”), A Change is Gonna Come was originally released three days before Christmas 1964, as the B-side to Shake. It had been recorded just six weeks earlier. In between the two events, on December 11, 1964, Sam Cooke had been shot and killed.

    Cooke had written the song almost exactly a year earlier, and while the final production would take quite some time, the tune itself came remarkably easy. Cooke’s biographer, Peter Guralnick, offers the following: “It was less work than any song he’d ever written. It almost scared him that the song — it was almost as if the song were intended for somebody else. He grabbed it out of the air and it came to him whole, despite the fact that in many ways it’s probably the most complex song that he wrote.”

    Cooke was repeatedly warned that the content of the song would alienate the white section of his audience, potentially curtail his career, and maybe even place him in outright danger. Nonetheless, he pressed on with it, expressing the hope that it would make his father proud. Right from the start, a heavy vibe hung over A Change Is Gonna Come – when Cooke first played it to his friend, Bobby Womack, Womack responded that it sounded “like death”, to which Cooke replied “Man, that’s kind of how it sounds like to me. That’s why I’m never going to play it in public.”

    He was almost true to his word. Remarkably, A Change Is Gonna Come was performed in public by Sam Cooke just once, with its debut on The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson, in February 1964. Cooke had been scheduled to perform Ain’t That Good News, his then current single, but was persuaded late on by Allen Klein to make the switch. As far as I’m aware, there is no surviving footage of the performance (the network didn’t save the tape), and two days later the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, well and truly moving the spotlight away.

    Even in the studio, the song continued to scare people. John Boudreaux, the drummer originally slated for the sessions, was intimidated by the orchestral arrangement and refused to leave the control room; session player and close collaborator Earl Palmer was working next door and filled in.

    It’s difficult to overstate how risky “A Change Is Gonna Come” was for Cooke. He’d worked extremely hard to achieve a mainstream crossover, something not many black artists were being permitted in 1963, and it didn’t sound remotely like his other work. It was as if The Beatles had jumped from Love Me Do, direct to Strawberry Fields Forever, in the space of months, rather than years. To have made this quantum leap forward, to have harboured the fears we know he had about this song, and yet to have pressed on to deliver and record it in such imperious fashion is mind boggling; there isn’t a tentative moment in that vocal, he’s in there with both feet, because he’s speaking his truth, even if he’s afraid the world is not yet ready to hear it.

    Consequently, despite the song have been subsequently covered by artists no less stellar than Otis and Aretha – the latter of whom modelled herself on Cooke to the point she changed her brand of cigarettes to match his – Cooke’s vocal is so utterly, utterly commanding that every other version you’ll ever hear sounds like someone mucking about with their mum’s hairbrush in front of the mirror when placed in direct comparison. They all have gravitas, but it’s a gravitas drawn from the deep well of that original vocal performance. A well to which other artists have been returning ever since.

    A Change Is Gonna Come became, of course, the anthem of the Civil Rights movement, and a major milestone in US race relations. It inspired others to take greater risks in their music, to sing from the heart, whatever might be the cost. Equally importantly, it put the listener in the artist’s shoes, enabled them to see the world through his eyes, to understand a little better the iniquities being endured. Four years after its release, it was the song Rosa Parks played over and over the night Martin Luther King Jr was killed, weeping in her mother’s arms, trying to find some solace in the song’s promise of better days ahead. Forty years after that, the same song was performed at the inauguration of Barack Obama, marking at least a partial fulfilment of said promise.

    And it’s that promise – of better days to come – that is integral to my own relationship with A Change Is Gonna Come. That single, powerful idea that time will roll on, and that change will follow with it if you’ll just hold on and wait long enough. That this can be true of the fate of a people, but also of an individual.

    I was 25 years old when A Change Is Gonna Come hit me like a lightning bolt. Sat on the banks of the River Plate in Montevideo, with several months of solo travelling around the Americas ahead of me and several years of familial disturbance behind me. I was a troubled soul, still suspecting on some level that I personally must be the source of the discontent which surrounded me, still struggling to hold faith that any kind of peace might lie in wait for me. I sat on the sand alone with my iPod, as the sun went down on the same beach I’d played on as a child, and I looked across at the distant lights of Buenos Aires, the next stop on my journey, a figurative and literal future in waiting, and I wondered what might be waiting for me. And then A Change Is Gonna Come popped up on shuffle, those strings rolled in, and I was swept suddenly and unexpectedly off my feet.

    I had heard A Change Is Gonna Come several times before that day, but perhaps I’d never really listened to it, never really permitted it to land. Here it came to me at a great hinge moment in my life, and it made perfect sense, seemed to speak to my troubled sense of self so directly and comprehensively it could have been written for me alone. The vocal appeared to emanate from somewhere entirely beyond the reach of time, articulating a truth that I knew to be universal and yet which delivered the precise message I needed to hear in that moment, in a tone of such gravitas and clarity that its logic was impossible to deny.

    As the song rolled on, I felt a weight lift from me, replaced by the most enormous and inexplicable sense of hope and certainty. Certainty that whatever lay across the river would be good, that my future would be bright. It was as if, just for a moment, the universe opened a window and allowed me to peer ahead, to see everything that was to come – all the love and good fortune I’ve unaccountably enjoyed since that day. To catch a glimpse of my own salvation. And by the time the song ended, Sam’s voice tailing away to leave in its wake a chorus of swooning angels and a drumroll for the ages, all the uncertainty had fallen away entirely and I knew my fate. I know that sounds preposterous, but it’s exactly how it happened, exactly how it felt.

    I’ve lived the next two decades under the happy auspice of that moment, all the fear and doubt replaced by an absolute clarity of conviction. Able to live in the happy knowledge that good things were fated for me. I went across the river and made lifelong friends, came home and fell in love. It was a moment that assured me on some level that I was not, in fact, the problem, and that liberated me to enjoy my life properly. That a change was going to come, and that it would be good. A prophecy of brighter days.

    And I can still recall how all that felt; to sit on that sand and feel that full body tingle as music moved me to somewhere I’d never been before, as music transformed my sense of my own life in three minutes and change. Because although this song was written for a specific people in a specific time, its lessons are universal; you may have been on your knees, but it’s time to get up and carry on, because nothing lasts forever, for good or ill, and because better times lie ahead. And lie ahead they did.

    I think about A Change Is Gonna Come all the time. It’s the only song I never sing at karaoke, the only song I literally ration listening to, because I never want its magic to fade, never want to fully digest it to the point I can no longer hear it. And that’s partly a mark of respect, but also partly because somewhere deep down perhaps I suspect that I may one day need this track to work its magic again; no lucky streak lasts forever, and change is as fickle as it is inevitable.

    I’ve waited 20 years for another moment like the one on that beach that day. For another song to move me like this one did, to deliver that same tingle of delight at having your internal chemistry permanently rewired on the spot, to provide that same sense of certainty and serenity. And, although there have been a few moments that came close, the wait still continues.

    But that’s OK, because I know I was lucky to get even one moment like that in a lifetime, and because while I wait there’s an opportunity for gratitude. Gratitude that the iPod pulled up precisely the right song at the right moment that day, gratitude that Sam Cooke wrote and performed something so perfect and profound, and gratitude that I live in a universe where this sort of magic exists at all.

    A Change Is Gonna Come is my favourite song of all time because of the great charge of hope it carries with it, because it reminds us that the future is always worth fighting for, that the untouched future is as yet still perfect. Because this song represents the absolute best of what music can do for us; that great gift of allowing us to transcend our day-to-day concerns and live a moment or two in the eternal, briefly connected to the great mainline which flows right through life. Briefly ourselves to the fullest. Briefly divine.

    • Who could dispute this choice as best ever?

      Aretha’s mum died when she was ten. The great Mahalia Jackson was one of the regular child-minders/rearers for the Reverend C.L Franklin. Jackson was a fierce purist when it came to Gospel. It was all about praising God. She disapproved strongly of Sam Cooke using its sound to sing about sex. Imagine her horror when her protégée had her head turned and embraced that same commercial world. The two conducted a frosty relationship from there on. This godless song probably horrified her.

      Otis is responsible for one of the greatest albums, ever. Otis Blue was released in 1965 and includes three Cooke songs, including both Shake and ACIGC, plus his own Ole Man Trouble, a sort of cross with Old Man River. Otis’s singing and the MGs playing is raw and less polished but just as powerful in my view, one of the greatest covers.

      Nevertheless, none of that changes the peerlessness of this particular record. A wonderful choice, Bingo, again beautifully described. Bravo. A fitting finale to a brilliant set of threads.

      Thank you.

      • Cheers, Tigger – and thanks for all the kind words across the year.

        This last entry made me reflect that there’s a really interesting story to be told about the influence of Sam Cooke, which you could probably run from the time of his unfortunate demise to the present day. Such a beautiful singer.

        And I agree about Otis Blue, one of the greatest albums ever made by anyone.

  17. Just a quick note to say thank you to anyone who has stuck with reading this exercise right to the end (if such a person exists at all).

    When I began writing these essays a year ago, I didn’t really have much of a destination in mind beyond seeing whether I could find the time and space outside work and life to write regularly on a single theme, to have an excuse to listen to some songs I love, and to perhaps explore a different way of approaching the now familiar “100 best” format.

    I guess on some level I also wanted to put my money where my mouth is; having moaned for years that people should spend more time writing about music they love and less writing about music they hate, what better way to subject yourself to the limits of your own wisdom than by spending a full year doing just that?

    It’s been an interesting road to travel. There have been entries where it all felt very easy, and others where I struggled for meaningful things to say. Songs that were a joy to listen to and think about, and which only seemed to grow in my affections, and others where the labour of trying to explain them made me seriously question whether they even belonged on the list at all.

    Pretty quickly, it became clear to me that it’s not really possible to articulate your “favourite”, rather than “best” songs without also explaining a little of yourself, and so that became part of the challenge too. Because, to give but one glaring example, no explanation of why A Change Is Gonna Come is my favourite song could possibly be complete, could possibly be remotely honest, without an account of what happened on that beach in Uruguay. Because the things that make us fall in love with music are so often bound up in the details of our own lives and emotions.

    I suppose ultimately that’s what I take from all of this; that so many of these songs make the list because I had on some level already been primed for them by the events of my own life. Whether that’s true of others and their own relationship with music, I have no idea, but it’s certainly proved to be the emerging core theme here.

    With that, I wish you all a Happy New Year, and assure you that 2025 will be blissfully free of any further list making shenanigans from me, my full quota of navel-gazing now having been entirely discharged. The tolerance has been appreciated.

    I will look forward to no longer spending my commutes to and from work trying to figure out what I’m going to say about my love for Young Thug, but I will miss the admittedly pretty sporadic joy of stumbling my way to putting a finger on the merits of a track quite as squarely as I’d have wished.

    Here’s to music, and all the many good things it brings us.

    BL

    x

  18. I knew from your previous posts that this was going to be the missing song.

    Thanks for the words, the “new to me” music I’ve been gently prodded toward and some of the familiar stuff I’ve been reacquainted with. It’s been a pleasure going along for the ride.

  19. A very fine end to a magnificent series of threads, Bingo. Though never commenting on them before, I have followed all the way through, checking in on all the posts and reading parts, browsing others and listening to some (though far from all) of the tracks posted. Very personal stories, and thank you for sharing them on the Afterword.

    The banter, lists, YT threads and I suppose the endless Wordle are part of what is the AW, but it’s series like this of deeply thought through, passionately held and clearly articulated content that is at the heart of the Afterword and which enriches the site for us all, whether we follow it closely or not.

    Thanks again, and have a great 2025.

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