top five songs?
my favorite songs of all time? wow that’s a really hard question. i guess i would say my favorite song would be “The Engine Driver” by the Decemberists. it’s such a beautiful song with achingly simple lyrics and….i don’t know…do you ever feel sometimes that listening to a song you feel a pain in your heart or your chest with the song - like you feel as if you understand exactly how the singer is feeling and even if the lyrics aren’t deeply personal or relevant to your life that they just resonate with you? that’s how i feel when i listen to that song. it’s so painful and sad, but also plaintive, simple, and truthful. you feel (or at least, i feel) the same kind of ache that i imagine the abstract person or narrator of the song is feeling. the arrangement is so plain but the real power of the song is in the simplicity of the melody and the way that colin meloy delivers the lines. i have a live version that i think is almost better than the studio one because it strips the arrangement down even more. agh! yeah i really love this song. it’s a song about unrequited love! i think everyone feels that way sometimes….maybe all the time. unrequited love is awful, terrible, and more painful than maybe anything else.
other favorite would be “We Looked Like Giants” by Death Cab for Cutie. I love in the beginning when the backup guitars come in and it makes the song much heavier and…the guitar melody is kind of cloying and interesting before the verse comes in. it’s just about blundering teenage love and sex and the way it’s presented in the song is so intense, i think. i’m the kind of person who finds mundane things, presented the right way, vastly more profound and interesting than overly complicated abstractions about girls or love or (god forbid) being on tour (gross). it’s almost ironic the way that the lyrics are so mundane and the guitars are all distorted and the beat is very intense…the whole song is kind of intense and then it lets up towards the end. i like simple things that grab you like that.
third favorite is “Chicago” by Sufjan Stevens. it’s kind of his quintessential song….he has ones that i think i find more compelling. like some of the lines that he writes kill me. the lyrics to “The Perpetual Self” are actually my favorite. “is it strange that you perpetuate yourself?” it’s like….things that you love and love that you convey to other people is a continuation of yourself, a way that you perpetuate your image to other people…you give some of yourself to others and put it out there and through that you perpetuate, sustain, yourself. RIGHT!? anyway Chicago kind of typifies his songs and it’s the most popular one so I think i would pick it to just show that i like all of his other songs. i’m not even going to talk about the musical style because i don’t want to make this RETARTEDLY long.
and then to a lesser extent my other favorite songs are “Seed” by TAI, “Black Sandy Beaches” & “Red Hands” by the Dear Hunter. OH AND “My Mother Was a Chinese Trapeze Artist” by Tarkio.
that’s more than five and this is completely tl;dr but i kind of went on a kevin-esque tangent. sorry!
