This post is part of a series counting down my favorite songs of all time. Follow the links at the bottom of this post to read related posts.
65. Guided by Voices – Echos Myron
Robert Pollard has the unique ability to make nonsense lyrics evoke an incredible amount of urgency. It’s a gift, really. For generations, pop songwriters strove to viscerally evoke a mood, an emotion or a scene. Then Dylan came around and nobody knew what that guy was talking about. It was a great moment, the liberation of lyricism from the kingdom of the literal. Sure, things quickly descended into parody and self-indulgence, but I’ve always been a keen supporter of conveying a lot while saying very little. And as far as the 90s go, Guided by Voices was a foremost practitioner of the art. If you polished the production on this song, made the words more literal and tweaked the sound ever so slightly, it might have been a huge hit. As is though, it’s a masterpiece.
64. The Velvet Underground – Who Loves the Sun
Here’s a little spoiler: There are four Velvet Underground songs on this list. That’s more than any other artist. So I guess that makes them my favorite band of all time. Yep, that sounds about right. Even if their mystique is fashionable – perhaps a bit hipster-passé at this point – they laid the groundwork for just about every rock band that has ever mattered to me. Outside of influence, the sound of the Velvet Underground is also the soundtrack for plenty of scenes in my memories. I’ve been listening to them since the nascent interest in music began to spread like a cancer. But let’s not get too sentimental. As for this song, a give it a slight edge over iconic favorites like “Rock & Roll” and “Sweet Jane” because I love the dopey vocal harmonies.
In 1973, a fall from a fourth-floor window left Robert Wyatt paralyzed from the waist down. Prior to the fall, Wyatt had made his career as the vocalist and drummer for pioneering psychedelic band Soft Machine. Though he still played percussion, for his sophomore solo album “Rock Bottom” Wyatt made a much more pronounced shift to keyboards. Typical rock and roll drumming was obviously out of the question, so the emphasis on piano-driven compositions forced the album to take on an ethereal quality. This song is the opening track from that album. Wyatt’s distinctive voice is the centerpiece here, only accompanied by piano, synthesizers and a sparse, metronomic rhythm.
Songs like this one make me really want to learn Portuguese. There’s something about the phrasing and tonality of the language that brings a unique rhythmic element to a song. Just listen to “Eu Vou Torcer.” The fricatives sizzle like a mid-summer afternoon in Rio. And even if Ben doesn’t have a technically graceful voice, his performance here is flawless. The hypnosis of acoustic strumming and the florid percussion only add to the effect. Side note: this song is from the album “Tabua de Esmeralda,” which is one of the best albums of all time. Cop it if you can find it.
61. Shuggie Otis – Inspiration Information
I don’t know when I first heard about Shuggie Otis. All I can say is that there was a time when I wanted nothing more than to listen to every odd-ball soul album ever released. I started with obvious albums, stuff by Isaac Hayes, Funkadelic and Curtis Mayfield. Gradually, I moved toward weird soul hybrids and obscuro classics by folks like Jon Lucien, Eugene McDaniels and Terry Callier. And somewhere in between those two stages, I came across the Luaka Bop reissue of Otis’ “Inspiration Information.” The title track is a gorgeous piece of soul that parallels the work of Sly Stone and predicts the sensual glitter space funk of Prince. It’s a showcase of an absolute genius. But like so many geniuses, Shuggie Otis registered as a mere blip in his own time. I’ve heard suggestions that he turned out to be a bit of a prima donna, but the whole story about his disappearance from the music scene is still untold. The guy should have been bigger than Jesus.
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