Over five calendar years and 53 mixes of 1,082 songs these are my favorites in ascending order:
11. Ooh La La La Run The Jewels
The first time I heard this when it came out in that ominous spring of 2020 it was instantly familiar to me, with that titular snippet from the 1992 classic "DWYCK" by Gang Starr with Nice & Smooth. It's an update of a party song that came out when partying was not only not on anyone's minds, but actually impossible or at least impermissible. Maybe that made the swaggering defiance of Killer Mike and El-P even more thrilling. DJ Premier's beat and Greg Nice's repetitive wordless chorus were just as captivating.
10. U.F.O. Jim Sullivan
It is impossible for me to divorce story from song. Whether that story is what that song means in my life or the story behind the song or some messy mix of the two. That said, my ears can't lie. Meaning, I can not fall in love with a song because of the story, it has to work its own magic. Yet the story of a young, failed songwriter in the 70s who mysteriously disappeared in New Mexico without a trace fits neatly with this airy but slightly melancholic song called "U.F.O.". But it's the song that sticks with me, with its eerie strings, mournful horns and the sort of backbeat you'd tap along with on a dashboard, looking out into a night sky wondering what the world holds for you.
9. Walking On Thin Ice Yoko Ono
I had John Lennon's final album of his lifetime (before so many posthumous releases he had no involvement in making) Double Fantasy and like any Beatle acolyte, fell in love with the singles, dutifully listened to the deeper cuts and ignored the Yoko stuff, including this song, recorded right after that album. What a revelation it was so many years later. I had already gradually warmed to some of her solo work. This was the last song he ever played on, with his throwback guitar a steady classical element to a fantastic modern club beat, Yoko's amazing vocals, hypnotic spoken word and delightfully insane wordless singing all against deceptively simple and brilliant lyrics that even John Lennon would envy. Like so many people the last few years, I felt the scary and uncertain feeling of walking on thin ice, not sure of what comes next.
8. I Like It (Buckwild Remix) Grand Puba w/ Sadat X
So much of my love for hip hop has been a story of playing catch up. Missing things that were happening when I was young and should have heard it as it happened, only to find them many years later. This was released in 1995, the year I got to New York City as a young man who was still really a boy. It was a summer hit after the sunset of hip hop's first golden age, before some of its towering figures were murdered and before anyone knew where all this would go. Grand Puba is one third of Brand Nubian, and here he enlists one other member in Sadat X. The original is great but it was this rare Buckwild remix that I fell hard for, with its inspired sampling of Henry Mancini's mid 70s theme "Here's Looking At You, Kid" from "The Return Of The Pink Panther". It adds a sweetly nostalgic glow to the song, and my "remembering" something I should have heard long before. "And you say New York City?" the song seems to ask as a question first, then after repetition it is then simply inflected as an answer, "And you say New York City". My answer will always be yes.
7. Seventeen Sharon Van Etten
I saw Sharan Van Etten live early in the batch of these songs, when the pain of losing the beloved original fox was still fresh. This song was just released, and when she performed it, it was certainly brand new to me, so it was not familiar like a lot of her other emotionally cathartic work. Like The Run The Jewels song above, the video was indelible. The song is a storm of emotion: regret, tenderness, confusion, anger, and above all empathy. Empathy for one's self, the younger naif who ran around this brutal playground of New York City and somehow survived. That younger self that, if you can see it, still lives inside of you. I'm not sure anyone else could have made a song about that better than her, and I'm lucky for finding it when I did, when I really needed to hear it.
6. New York City Serenade Bruce Springsteen
Having grown up as a boy who discovered Bruce when he was still a cult figure and then suddenly a superstar as I entered my teenage years, I went through his back catalog way back then and actually had the early album this appeared on. Yet I somehow skipped over it in favor of even other slow songs that rarely made the radio. How did I miss it? I think of that a lot with songs, and my best answer is that it found me when I was ready for it. By then, I had already lived in New York City for a couple decades of adulthood, so in some sense this overly romantic paean to the city is about a city that was long gone before I even got here, and perhaps before he even wrote it. But the operatic sweep and bizarre characters feel true, as does the whispered advice "walk tall/or baby don't walk at all". I was grateful Bruce still had something to say to me.
5. Good Friday Coco Rosie
I've made reference to losing the original fox, and how I felt more alone than I ever had. Of the handful of songs on the "best of" that became my unofficial soundtrack of mourning, none captured my heartbreak and love for him more than this odd ballad. The messily-tuned guitars are against warbly vocals sounding like a couple of drunk women imitating Billie Holiday, all with lyrics that range from the jejune to the poetic. Yet it all works like a spell, one I fell under in trying to conjure some sort of communion with a dog who left me after 16 years, the longest I had ever lived with anyone and not nearly long enough. I sang this lullaby to him in the middle of more than a few nights, knowing he heard me somewhere.
4. Days (acoustic version) The Kinks
I do not know how the original version of this song failed to make the "best of" in the batch it appeared, as it is one of my favorite songs in the world. I can not say for sure that this acoustic version from the same recording session is better, but it certainly is tremendous. I was certain the vocal track was different, but after careful research, I determined it's simply the original but with just guitar. Yet something deeper in Ray Davies' vocal is revealed when the drums and other instruments are stripped away. It does sound even more elegiac and heartfelt than before, which I could not have imagined possible. This was another that lingered as comfort when I lost the fox. I still wonder how to live with the grace he had his whole life and at the end of it, and this song is about the best instruction for that I know.
3. Cross My Heart Billy Stewart
I had loved Billy Stewart's tragically short career, curtailed by a fatal car accident, long before I found this song a few years ago. It has vocals as big as he apparently was, the self-described "fat boy" with his heavenly wordless chorus backing up his drawn out words of a simple lyric that sounds like a prayer. The drums are as dramatic as the lyrics and singing. It's as sweet and beautiful a love song as I've ever heard.
2. Rapp Snitch Knishes MF DOOM ft. Mr. Fantastik
Like "Days" earlier on this list, but perhaps more surprisingly, this could have easily been my number one song. MF DOOM died during this batch and I quickly went to the well of his songs I loved that had not already made so many playlists over the years. This one stuck with me as much as any one did, by him or anyone, during the whole five years of just over one thousand songs. It starts with a jazzy downbeat guitar that is an obscure sample of a 70s new age cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" and over half the song is first given to a mysterious deep-voiced rapper called Mr. Fantastik. He appears on only one other DOOM song and no one knows who he is or was even 20 years later. Rumors abound, was he actually DOOM in an altered voice or was he so underground that he is hiding from the law? His talent is undeniable, one that like his mysterious story, allows him to credibly hang with the mythic genius of MF DOOM. "Do you see the perpetrator?/Yeah, I'm right here" he taunts, and their easy-going flow and bemusement at an increasingly incomprehensible world was a precious balm for me.
1. Free Money Patti Smith
Over the years bits and pieces of Patti Smith's music found me, and while I knew a bit about her debut album Horses, this song knocked me out when I finally heard it and it's lost none of its power since. Her voice has such range, tonally making sharp turns from a coo to a snarl, using the metaphor of money to tell someone you love how much you'd love to give them everything in the world, "scoop the pearls up from the sea/ cash them in and buy you all the things you need". It has all the desperate longing and poetry and drama and sweetness and toughness of all the songs on this list and seems to perfectly capture all of the incredibly challenging life events I went through these five years. I saw the ugly intersections of dying and money, as well as the beauty of what it means to keep going even when you feel you don't have what you need. If I ever forget any of that, I will always have this song to remember.
