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Sunday, July 3, 2011

30DSC DAY 1: YOUR FAVORITE SONG



This entry was completely up in the air right up until I picked "All Cats Are Gray". I love so many song so deeply that marking out one as my favorite bordered on painful. It may sound melodramatic and nonsensical, but music makes me feel alive; listening to it, performing it, in all of its guises, makes me who I am, and narrowing down that portion of myself to one song seems worse than limiting. It's almost like lying, really; I feel like I'm trying to boil my personality down to one specific thing that only represents a small facet of who I am.

I picked a Cure song because I knew one would be easy to find online. I picked this particular Cure song because it is one of the few that it always on my shortlist of favorite pieces of music; the simple percussion line mixed in with those haunting synths and the plaintive vocal line, followed by that aching coda... not only is it well-constructed and performed, but it's also an emotional sledgehammer rife with imagery. The album it comes from, Faith, is 30 years old this year, but in many ways it still feels like it was just released yesterday.

There are many other songs I could have posted here; take, for example, this:



I first performed "Take him, Earth, for cherishing" as a college sophomore with the Harvard University Choir. This was my second year singing in a church choir and it really formed the backbone of my college experience, especially as a musician. In fact, the main reason I am a church musician now is tied into the fantastic experiences I had with that group at Memorial Church. The song itself is one of many outstanding pieces of choral literature that we did during my college career; the shifts in tempo and how it hops through different tonalities make it a living beast, even setting aside the occasion for which it was written, as a memorial to the recently assassinated John F. Kennedy. Adding that layer into an already heady mixture makes it one of the most personally meaningful pieces I've ever performed. I'll never tire of it, and I am always thankful I was introduced to it during my college experience.

Conversely, I could have gone this route:



I've cycled through several favorite electronic acts, ranging from synth pop through industrial acts and lots of styles in between, but the album that has stuck with me the most is Orbital's In-Sides, largely because of this song, "Adnan's". Most of the album looks to meld the dancefloor with the epic but this is the track where all of the pieces really fall into line. The synth melody that appears around 4:05 encapsulates much of what I look for in music; simplicity augmented by repetition into something much more majestic than the sum of its parts. In fact, I stopped writing and just basked in the music coming from my headphones once the track hit that midpoint.

Finally, there is Prince:


Housequake Live 1987 by samsarax

I can't find a link to the Sign 'O' The Times version of "Housequake", which literally is one of the greatest things ever recorded. It's pure, visceral, booty-shaking funk as only Prince can do it; this kitchen-sink live recording is also amazing but you really need to hear the stripped-down album version to really get the genius melding of iciness and heat that elevates this song into genius. So basically, go get a copy of Sign 'O' The Times. Almost every song on it is as amazing as this one and this one melts your face.

So, there you have it; several different perspectives on "what is my favorite song?" Even now, I want to keep going and list even more songs, but I really need to save at least a few for later entries.

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