The top 1% of the songs across my weekly mixes of 2003 total 4 songs. Here's a countdown of them to my favorite of the year.
4. "I Can't Go To Sleep" by The Wu-Tang Clan featuring Isaac Hayes
This weird, haunting song lodges in your head and stays there. It so heavily samples Isaac Hayes' soul-drenched cover of the Burt Bacharach standard "Walk On By" that they invite Isaac on to coo a few soothing words as the various members of the Wu detail all sorts of psychological and emotional trauma that would give anyone insomnia. This came out less than a year before 9/11 but stuck around for me the first couple years after and was a perfect mood piece for 2003.
3. "Rainbow Connection" by Willie Nelson
Willie's gentle cover of the ballad from the original Muppet movie is one of my very favorite songs ever. The original song brought me to tears as a little boy in the theater. It was the year I lived with my mom, after I lived with my dad but before I moved back with him. This song cut through all that chaos with one giant dose of hope for a more peaceful and happy future, one that never quite came but that we all hold onto like a dream. Willie's version, of course, gets to the heart of the lyrics in an understated but deeply effective way.
2. "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" by Tom Waits
As I started cataloguing songs with these weekly mixes, essentially ordering my very favorites, I started to enjoy the macabre game of picking songs for my funeral. This is the first song I ever attached that dubious distinction to and no other song has surpassed it. It combines the best of Waits' music: the casual cultural borrowing, in this case New Orleans horns, against a sort of maritime melody and his gloriously croaked fatalism, which on closer inspection reveals deep human optimism.
1. "Head Title" aka Distant Lover by Marvin Gaye
This in-studio improv by Marvin Gaye captures his genius like no other track I know. He is singing over a backing track for what later became the lushly romantic "Distant Lover". After he apologizes for not yet having the lyric, he promises to sing what comes "right from my soul". What follows is brilliant, uncharacteristically gospel singing with great clip-clop percussion over such effusive and heartfelt words. It grabs you by the heart and doesn't let go.
