THESE ARE A FEW OF MY FAVORITE SONGS

I love to write. I wish I was better at it, but regardless I still try. A few months ago (the last day of September actually) I came up with an idea that would entice me to write more regularly.

I love lists. To that end my buddy Neal & I have always played the game of Top 10 Favorite _____ Songs. (Beach, Road, Stones, etc). He would always give me grief because he said I always changed mine. He would quiz me – like there are right and wrong answers – LOL – important stuff that. I have always had a poor memory so I decided he must be correct and that I should commit them to paper (digitally, anyway). Well, no one will ever accuse me of NOY being a flighty bastard so I decided to try to create a list of my favorite songs.

I started thinking it would be Top 100. So I started plunking down names in a Excel spreadsheet as they entered my head. I would rank them after I had a “list”. Well that first list took me about 15 minutes to build and once I started to rank them I realized that I had almost 300 that I had to call my Top 100. Well, being severely detail oriented and liking a sense of order in the world I looked at 300 (or so) and it just didn’t seem right. It wasn’t a good round number to get excited about.

So I kept going. Each milestone I came to I thought would be good to encapsulate my favorites I would think of 25 more that would come blurting out from my brain through the keyboard to the screen. A great many of these songs have memories associated with them – some are specific recollections of things that happened while the song was playing, some remind me of people in my life, some are just songs I have loved because they incited (and continue to incite some 50 years on) a visceral reaction when I hear them.

Anyway, somewhere around 1997 or so I settled on my Top 2500. I have been carting this thing around like a steam trunk filled with aural souvenirs ever since. It is a dynamic thing. Some songs that were my favorites as a teenager are still favorites but have dropped down the list a bit after repeatedly hearing them year after year (e.g. LAYLA, WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN). Some have moved up as time has passed because I may have heard them first with a young man’s ear, but the song has become much more meaningful to an older man’s ears (e.g. SONG FOR SHARON, LOLA). Some hardly have moved at all. Some have gotten added on as late as this year – 2020.

But the list always stays at 2500 slots. So that is the list.