"Suspicious Minds" is my favorite Elvis Presley song and it's durability as a great song is stretched in a couple good directions by Fine Young Cannibals and Waylon Jennings' duet with Jessi Colter.
Another nice duet is on "Sign Language", written by Bob Dylan for Eric Clapton. Not a duet, but a collaboration, is the cautionary tale "The Bottle" by Gil Scott-Heron with Brian Jackson.
"Lanquidity" by Sun Ra is one of his most accessible musical peaks--I thought this was a word I didn't know, but it's not in any dictionary I can find. Which means Sun Ra made it up, appropriately enough. He spent most of his adult life insisting he was from outer space. Maybe "lanquidity" is a household word up there.
Also here: "Hammer" by Bob Marley, "Divine Hammer" by The Breeders, and a live late 70s version of "Shattered" by The Rolling Stones. Somehow, these all go together.
After which, "Pick Myself Up" by Peter Tosh makes some sort of sense as he was championed by the Stones in the late 70s. "Back Like That" by Ghostface Killah with Kanye West and Ne-Yo has a different take on picking up.
Two versions of Cat Power's "Good Woman", one off her You Are Free album, the other a more acoustic version she recorded for eMusic.
"Have You Ever Seen The Rain?" by Creedence Clearwater Revival is so timeless...I would guess that their songs will be sung by kids at summer camp hundreds of years from now.
"Take Me Out" by Franz Ferdinand, as great as it is, does not seem as timeless, but here I include a slowed-down version by Scissor Sisters that really reinvents the song.
We're down to my favorites. "Young Girl Bluez" is an overlooked 90s hip hop masterpiece. Biz Markie's story about an unwitting affair with an underage girl is given bittersweetly lush production and a killer Slick Rick sample.
"One", written by Harry Nilsson, was a hit for Three Dog Night and many others in the 70s. Chris Clark was a beautiful six foot white blonde who sang for Motown and recorded a version of "One" that, to me, is the very best. My favorite part is her "yeaaahhhh" about 15 seconds in before the instruments kick in. Very sexy.
Finally, "Something In The Way". I had, to the point of putting together this mix a couple years ago, somewhat overlooked this song as one of the slighter ones from Nirvana. Yet the arrangement is so haunting and the lyrics, sad and a little disturbing.
Supposedly Kurt Cobain wrote them while living under a bridge and spray painted them on the wall of that bridge until the city erased them in an effort to clean up the neighborhood.
I'm sure now there's a cell phone ad there instead.
