Showing posts with label help me decide. Show all posts
Showing posts with label help me decide. Show all posts

Saturday, July 6, 2019

What Kind Of Fool Would Try To Name The Top 100 Songs?


In a previous post, as I bemoaned the current state of music, as all old people are required to do, I made a rather audacious statement:

Give me a lined tablet numbered one through one hundred, and I could sum up the entire essence of popular music.

Well, that's just insane. How many recordings have exploded into the world's ears since the advent of recorded music? Some say 97 million, but I think that's low-balling it. Shoot, my band alone has released maybe fifty, and that's an independent band. Regardless, even if the ninety-seven million number is somewhat accurate, how does one whittle those multiple millions down to a measly hundred?

And no two people would ever agree. Who is the arbiter of such things? Nobody. The glorious thing about music is that it's personal. It's mine. And it's yours. If my husband and I compared lists, we would be lucky to share one, maybe two songs. But I'm guessing probably one. And I have no idea what that one song could possibly be.

So, an exercise:

Let's pick a few famous artists and try to isolate the one song (one song!) by each of them we like the best.

I will begin the list of artists arbitrarily, with whomever happens to spontaneously flash into my flabby skull. Comments welcome and encouraged! And I haven't decided anything on my end, since I don't even know which artists I'm going to pick.

Let's go...

  • The Beatles (duh)
  • The Beach Boys
  • Dwight Yoakam
  • George Strait
  • The Glenn Miller Orchestra
  • Any Instrumentalist
  • Elton John
  • Merle Haggard
  • Any One-Hit Wonder
  • Anyone Outside Your Comfort Zone
  • Roy Orbison
  • Patsy Cline
  • Gordon Lightfoot
  • Buck Owens
  • Buddy Holly
  • Little Richard
  • Prince
  • U2
  • Chuck Berry
  • The Bee Gees
  • Creedence Clearwater Revival
  • Rosanne Cash
  • Jerry Lee Lewis
  • Emmylou Harris
  • Led Zeppelin
  • The Doors
  • The Rascals
  • Randy Travis
  • The Everly Brothers
  • The Rolling Stones
  • Ray Price
  • Bruce Springsteen
  • Bob Dylan
  • Dion/Dion and The Belmonts
  • Hank Williams
  • Elvis
  • Tom Petty
  • Marty Robbins
  • ABBA
  • Tammy Wynette
  • Sam Cooke
  • Lynn Anderson
  • Tommy James and The Shondells
  • The Eagles
  • The Judds
  • Steve Earle
  • You Name 'Em 

Whew! What was I thinking? That's a lot of names that won't necessarily make my top one hundred. Somehow I'm thinking The Beatles probably will.

Since this is a video blog, I'm going to feature Someone Outside My Comfort Zone:



 

Help! I need to know the 100 best songs of all time, and I don't know if that's an attainable goal.

What did I get myself into?









Friday, December 2, 2016

Undecided And/Or Uncommitted






I've got two projects going.

Well, "going" is a relative term. I've been diddling around with a new novel for eight months and I'm only on Chapter Five -- and they're short chapters.

Obviously, I haven't committed.

Subsequently, I had an idea to write a non-fiction book about country music. So I started that. It's not going entirely how I envisioned it. I want to write about artists who influenced my love of the country music genre, but I find that I don't know every (or any) minuscule detail of their lives, and I'll be damned if I'll write a book based on Wikipedia articles.

I'm wondering now if either of those ideas were rational.

I'd really like to have a third April Tompkins novel; kind of a boxed set, if you will; to go with the other two novels nobody's purchased. The three of them would look nice side-by-side on Amazon, and I'm all about aesthetics. Plus, three is simply a more appealing number than two, and I'd have better bragging rights (to myself).

The thing about writing novels that no one reads, though, is that at some point it begins to feel like a time-intensive slog; quixotic. A waste of the few brain cells I have remaining. I loved Radio Crazy -- no one else (agents; publishers) seemed to. I think, in fact, I might purchase it and download it to my Kindle. I might even read it again for the seventy-fifth time, but this time with fresh eyes.

So, I'm uncommitted. Obviously I need to write or I wouldn't be tapping out these words tonight. Writing soothes my nerve endings that jangle for forty or fifty hours every week.

My question to you is, would you rather read a novel about a dysfunctional family and a main character who's carrying around a big secret or an anthology of the past fifty years of country music?

Help!