When tasked by a friend last year to compile a playlist of my "top "top 50" songs—a worthy and fun exercise!—there was one segment of songs in my listening history that befuddled me:
Songs that I mostly liked as a whole—but that I loved one moment of.
It's interesting to listen to these songs in the digital, because I'm often tempted to skip ahead to the bit I like. It's so easy to just, you know, thumb or mouse my way to the part of the song that I care about.
And so I often do...but I discovered that it's oddly meaningless to excerpt these favorite bits like that. A climactic note isn't so climactic when listened to in a void. A crystal clear crowd singalong on a live album is ridiculous to skip to, without the context that leads up to it.
These songs force me to have some patience. It's an old, pre-digital way to listen: give up control of the song and let it run. Sure, I could skip ahead...but it would ruin the whole point.
So, in no particular order, are several songs that I like a lot, but love one moment of. Heck, I guess I just love these songs.
- "St. Robinson In His Cadillac Dream" — Counting Crows. The moment: The song concludes with a typical Adam Duritz sentiment: "Let's just get into my car and drive." The drive is a soaring, soaring note, backed by a piercing organ note.
- "Lass of Loch Royale (If I Prove False to Thee)" — Kelly Joe Phelps. The moment. Phelps launches a dobro note into the stratosphere, the note spinning lazily up the fretboard to melt into silence. He's playing rhythm on the lower strings of the dobro the whole time, and I've never found a video that shows him playing the song. If not for the believable crowd noise in the background, I'd think it was faked.
- "Your Wild Years" — The Menzingers. The moment: The peak of this surprisingly mature punk rock song (the narrator finds himself on a visit to his girlfriend's childhood home in Boston to stay with her parents) comes with the title reference in the third verse: "We stayed in your adolescent room / Rummaged through the boxes labeled "former you" / The souvenirs of happiness in the moment / Your wild years that you often mention." Besides placing rhymes at the start of these two lines ("the souvenirs" / "your wild years"), Greg Barnett also sing-shouts these little phrases, just barely cracking his voice.
- "Gringo Honeymoon" — Robert Earl Keen. The moment: I've never seen Robert Earl Keen in concert, but I want to just to hear the crowd's knowing reaction at the end of the third verse, as heard on the live version of this song. The couple on their honeymoon have been hanging out with a cowboy "running from the D.E.A." who they follow back to his little shack. After toking up (I think), he says: "I aint' never goin' back." This last line is shouted by the crowd, with the band falling momentarily quiet to revel in the singalong.
- "Clyde Waters" — Anaïs Mitchell & Jefferson Hamer. The moment: Margaret goes down to the Clyde River to look for her lover William, who has drowned. Mitchell sings: "But the louder that this lady called / The louder blew the wind" and then it sounds like she steps back from the microphone and does this wailing impression of the wind. Just this weird, mournful note that gets me every time.
- "Lake Marie" — John Prine. The moment: Towards the end of the third verse in this weird trip of a song, Prine asks the listener the rhetorical question "You know what blood looks like in a black and white video?" and then shouts in response "Shadows! Shadows, that's exactly what it looks like." I laugh every time.
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