Category : Faves

This blog wouldn’t be complete without some reviews of my favorite things, movies not the least among them. Here’s a list of reviews of my Top 10 All-Time Best (and beware – there may be a few spoilers among them):

1 The Shawshank Redemption :: If life’s got you in a cage – of any sort – watch this film.

Shawshank is ranked Number ONE on IMDB, which proves that the wisdom of the crowds trumps that of paid entertainment industry hacks who claimed it had the wrong tongue-twisting title, would never succeed because it was a prison film, an indie film, or this or that, all of it falling on the deaf ears of those whose good taste lifted it above the din of the so-called tastemakers. In summation: you can’t keep a good story down, and this one delves into everything – injustice, friendship, perseverence, corruption, extreme hardship, payback, assault, murder, rape, suicide, hope, fear, vindication, escape, and most of all, freedom of body, mind and spirit – everything that both acknowledges harsh reality and soothes the human soul without all the oversold placations, overt preaching and “be happy” cliches foisted on us all too often these days.

Tim Robbins’ Andy Dufresne, wrongly convicted of murder, first escapes within his own mind before he escapes from Shawshank Prison in fact, and watching how it all unfolds is riveting in a blow-by-blow narrative delivered by Morgan Freeman’s Ellis Redding. This film cuts to the bone and uplifts at the same time; it is the very mix of all that comprises the human condition without a hint of pretense. A perfect piece with no want of special effects or gimmicks, it relies only on stunning acting and cinematography built around an unforgettable story, and drops memorable quotes by the dozens – including the iconic mantra “get busy living, or get busy dying.”

In the end, it begs some big questions – who is your Andy Dufresne? Who (or what) awaits you when you decide to get busy living?

2 Silence of the Lambs :: A jarring film that exemplifies how digging in the deepest, darkest dirt of humanity can effect triumph over fear.

Jodie Foster is astounding as young FBI cadet Clarice Starling, who is tasked with the unenviable mission of solving a gruesome set of crimes in which the perpetrator skins his victims. To meet the challenge, she walks out on a big ledge – confronting a beast in human form (one Hannibal Lecter, exquisitely portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in a career-making performance) in order to gain information critical in pursuing her case even though it means allowing him to feast on the fears filling her own mind. It is Foster’s breathtaking portrayal of raw, vulnerable courage in the face of that fear that drew this viewer in and would not let go.

So…would you approach a monster to get to the answers you seek? A great film to watch when things are gnawing and gnawing at you even though you know you gotta just go for it.

3 Pi :: It could be Pi, Requiem for a Dream or even Black Swan where Natalie Portman actually does some acting, but anything from Darren Aronofsky hath charms to soothe any savage(d) beast – and he can damn well thank Leonardo Da Vinci if he wants to.

Pi is a film for math geeks and conspiracy freaks alike, featuring a self-tortured, pill-popping genius protagonist who answers all the questions and questions all the answers. Chaos, paranoia and claustrophobia dig in as lo-fi, a budget in the mid-five figures and high art combine in this psych thriller that traces the amazing Sean Gullette’s Max Cohen, aka Computer Prodigy Going Off the Rails.

In his quest to uncover the stock market’s secret sauce of pristine order, Max builds a supercomputer that spits out some very weird (but 100% correct) stock predictions and a 216-digit number just before it crashes and fries, those few half-seconds being when computers become “self-aware” according to Max’s former professor, fried himself by a career-ending stroke when he got too close to his own mathematical holy grail. Thinking it worthless, Max throws it out, becoming his very own antagonist among the many, a gamepiece being pushed and/or led around because of what he might have had. A cadre of characters all hoping to find their projected messages in the number close in, akin to Max’s tiny NYC apartment, wall-to-wall screens, hardware, and a trigger in the form of a computer return key that serve up yet another set of antagonists as his sanity diminishes. He ultimately succeeds in his quest to replicate the number, which he memorizes after yet another one of his strange benders, brought on following a childhood incident where he stared straight into the sun against his mother’s wishes.

This unforgettable film seems an allegorical tale of Big Data and the Little Guy versus the Institutionals, mimicking all those who seek the magic number locked in Max’s head, including some who claim it represents the true name of God and will unleash even the Messianic Age if they can only know it. Max’s descent into numerically-driven madness is no small pleasure for the voyeurs among us who like to watch.

4 Alien :: Mmmmmm-mmmm, girl fight!!! Sigourney Weaver is just delicious in this role of far-flung-into-outer-space-heroine-extraordinaire, a rugged individual left alone to fight a bitch of a stowaway alien, whose amoral need to reproduce impregnates a male crew member before killing off all the other worthy comrades of Weaver’s Ripley in a battle for survival.

From the start, the film gives you a deep sense of the creeps – that not-so-peaceful, uneasy feeling you get when the walls around you seem to have eyes and the air shafts almost breathe. Trapped within the confines of the earth-bound Nostromo, the ship wakes its crew when an unidentified signal is received from a planet thought to be uninhabited. When an exploratory party returns to the ship, Ripley’s refusal to let her alien-infected crewmate back on board is overridden, and so a plot and a movie are born, the alien filling its role as the very embodiment of that faceless fear when things go bump in the night and you can’t explain why, and your mind races, your heart pounds and you can do just about anything except go the hell to sleep.

It doesn’t help that the color scheme is dark and computer-glow, and the feel approaches the almost-gothic, the sets ahead of their time, seemingly designed to reflect the darkness that both surrounds and awaits. This is a gut-wrenching, not-to-be-missed study of how to use suggestive bits and pieces to force the viewer’s brain to fill in the rest, for never do we see the whole alien, and therein lies the fear. Such is the art of a great horror/sci-fi hybrid.

5 Life of Pi :: “Without Richard Parker, I would have died by now. My fear of him keeps me alert. Tending to his needs gives my life purpose,” narrates Irrfan Khan’s Pi Patel as he recites his story to a writer who’s come to interview him.

His is the tale of a child named after a pool in Paris – the Piscerne Molitor – who learns to overcome the shame of his name by memorizing the number pi to however many hundred decimal places. His parents operate a zoo in the botanical gardens in a part of India controlled by the French, where he becomes all at once a Hindu, Christian and Muslim (among other things) and practices them all simultaneously while his father kindly injects the need to think rationally no matter what else may be on tap – and to always go back to reason as the cornerstone.

Circumstances see Pi’s family booking transport along with their animals on a Japanese freighter that unexpectedly sinks in the Pacific on its way to a better life in Canada. Pi is the lone survivor, floating in a lifeboat with several of the animals, including a zebra, hyena and an orangutan named Orange Juice. OJ and the zebra are both killed by the hyena, and then a tiger named Richard Parker surprises Pi, exiting from a covered compartment of the lifeboat and killing the hyena.

Pi and Richard Parker become uneasy companions with the realization they need each other to stay alive, as uncomfortable as that is. Along the way, they happen upon numerous challenges, including a carnivorous island, where the freshwater holes turn acidic at night, driving the island’s meerkat inhabitants up into the trees after dark. Pi and Richard Parker recharge on this island, but realize it is a mere stop on their way and not their destination when Pi discovers a disembodied human tooth, “eaten” by the nocturnally acidic island. Eventually they beach in Mexico, where Pi laments about Richard Parker’s unceremoniously leaving his life.

Two Japanese insurance adjusters show up at Pi’s hospital bedside to gather facts and his story in hopes of determining why the ship sank. Pi recites his tale, but the adjusters tell him bluntly that they need a version of the truth that everyone can believe. So he tells them a second story, one where a set of people kill each other off instead of the animals. In both, the ship sinks, Pi’s family is gone and he is the lone survivor. But neither can be proven.

“And so it goes with God,” Pi tells the interviewer, encouraging him to choose which story he likes better, in other words, to believe what he wants to believe. So…which story about God do you believe…if any?

6 Forrest Gump :: Serendipity. That is the story this film tells, about a character who lives life as it unfolds, not once trying to control outcomes.

Tom Hanks’ Forrest Gump is not smart enough to fight against the flow of his life, so he does what he is told and is serendipitously rewarded handsomely for it. He finds the love of his life on a schoolbus on his first day of school in the form of a girl named Jenny, and non-judgmentally defends and loves her ’til the very end, even as her abusive past takes its toll on her life, leaking its programming of self-hate over all her aspirations, creating the circumstances for a disease to take hold that would eventually take her life.

Forrest lives through (and participates in) many fine historical-cum-fictional moments, including the Watergate Hotel break-in that sunk Nixon’s presidency, the film suggesting Mr. Gump’s irritation at all the lights coming into his room and his reporting it to hotel staff might just be the reason we inherited Mr. Ford.

Forrest becomes a war hero, a celebrity and a millionaire, almost haplessly. Near the end of the film, the go-lucky Forrest has a moment where things just stop, and appropriately so does Tom Hanks’ narration as the past meets the present and finds Forrest conversing with the gravestone of his beloved Jenny in real time. To her, he says he doesn’t know “if we each have a destiny… or if we’re all just floatin’ around accidental-like on a breeze..but I think…maybe it’s both…maybe both happen at the same time.”

Breathtaking, tearjerking film with stunning cinematography that begs the viewer to answer those same questions – is it destiny? Is it just random chance? Or a little of both? The film also makes me want to ask, who is the love of your life? Is it someone who, like Forrest, “knows what love is?”

7 The Shining :: This one’s my yearly Halloween tradition, and I confess…it soothes me to sleep. Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance is possessed – or maybe repossessed – by a hotel high in the Rockies (though the real hotel used for the film’s externals is in Washington State).

The Overlook Hotel brings to mind places I have lived and/or stayed in and/or visited where the air was quite a bit heavier with history than in other places – in other words, a door to “the other side.” Some places really do have a convergence and preponderance of energies and in this film, those energies want only to possess the psychic energy of Jack’s young son Danny, who, like his father, sees things in the halls and spaces of the Overlook Hotel after it empties out for the harsh winter ahead with the addictive and easily manipulable Jack on hire as its seasonal caretaker.

It is Danny – through his invisible friend Tony, who lives in Danny’s mouth and retreats to his gut – who senses things are not quite right while Jack is led in like a lamb to slaughter to do the Hotel’s murderous bidding, the unforgettable scene here being Jack at the bar being served up Earth only knows what as he laughs crazily at Lloyd, the ghost of an Overlook bartender past.

A Deus ex Machina in the form of Scatman Crothers’ head chef Dick Halloran returns from Florida after hearing – or shining – Danny’s plea for help telepathically, rescuing the boy and his mother Wendy (played by the mesmerizing but underscripted Shelley Duvall), sacrificing his own life in the bargain to the now-crazed shell of Jack, whose own end comes at the hands of the snow-covered walls of a labyrinth made of shrubbery.

In the waning scenes, the hotel’s spirits come to life and take reign, in the end reclaiming Jack, whose image chillingly shows up in a group photo taken in 1921 at an Overlook Hotel shindig, tux and all. All work and no play indeed!

8 World War Z :: At least one zombie flick had to come in here, and it easily could have been 28 Days Later as well as this one.

But there is something about seeing your nearby home city overrun by zombies that 28 Days couldn’t deliver. 28 Days is among the best of the genre, but by setting a critical intro scene of World War Z in Downtown Philadelphia and watching the people there get bitten into zombies and run amok under the statue of William Penn atop City Hall, well, I coulda told ya so. And besides, you’ll catch a glimpse of my award for the Best Looking Head of Hair on a Zombie that I’ve ever seen. They really know how to grow ’em in Philly!

But it’s even more than that – there is also the intentional, yet carefree way the zombified fling themselves off rooftops and over walls and such, the herd mentality front and center via special effects that are an absolute thrill to watch.  As well, the story takes the lead character around the globe in a not-so-typical search for Patient Zero, with memorable scenes befitting a nearly $200 Million budget, including Israel giving it all away for a song.

The plot is trite in spots, yes – of course we all want to avoid those with deadly illnesses for our own survival – and if being a zombie means total health in that regard, I’m in. No other movie made me so interested in being a zombie me-self. For that reason alone this makes my list. It sure as hell ain’t Brad Pitt, though according to recent press, he’s producing World War Z’s second installment, set for release in 2016 or perhaps a little further out.

9 Kill Bill (The Whole Thing, Vol. 1, 2…and 3?) :: “I am going to … kill … BILL.” Oh, this is a feast, one that I can watch over and over and over.

Arguably Tarantino’s best, though Django Unchained blew me away as well. Completely. Jamie Foxx easily earns his lead role – the guy can do just about anything on screen (makes me curious as to what he’s really like off it) and everything I see him in, he makes the pic happen. That’s what they mean by an actor being able to “open” a film, and that he certainly does.

The same goes for Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, which is a must-see among all must-sees. It is no wonder there’s talk – maybe more than talk – of a Vol. 3. She carries this series like no one else could, and along the way, we’re treated to Uma’s fierce and lovely Bride, who studies the art of revenge and exacts it over all who ever wronged her, ending appropriately at her estranged Bill’s doorstep, his having turned out to be the one who stole the love of her life, her very own daughter. She kills him in retaliation, using a nearly-sacred move reserved only for the baddest of the bad, one that causes death only when the target tries to move after a series of points on the body have been activated.

Full of sword-fights, surfer punk and some of the best revenge “music” you’ll ever hear, get this series into heavy rotation. You will not be disappointed.

10 Bad Boy Bubby :: If you only see one Australian film, it’s gotta be this one.

Easy to understand why this is considered a classic, but brace yourself for a long, long first act where Nicholas Hope’s Bubby barely eeks out a sorry existence in his sexually abusive mother’s sick house of horrors, never having seen the outside world. Plastic wrap finally provides salvation as Bubby puts his mum and his just-as-bad-an-apple dad in their proper place and goes outside for the first time.

Bubby turns out to have a real talent for (humorously and inappropriately) injecting phrases he’s heard in earlier situations into later ones…where they’re not always called for to say the least. Eventually, his strange knack for vomiting up new language bits lands him a frontman gig in a band, where he delivers a diatribe that had me laughing until my sides hurt.

Eventually, the damaged Bubby finds love to conquer all that had befallen him. Quite the character arc here, don’t overlook this one just because it has a truly happy ending.

Runners-up: American Beauty, Day of the Jackal, The Spanish Prisoner, The Graduate, 28 Days Later. And too many others to mention. I’ll probably get a Second-Tier Top 10 out of them at some point.

Given that cortisol is public enemy number one, getting high on music is one of my favorite pastimes. Songs that match my inner mood resonate like internal endorsements – no matter what I’m feeling, I can listen and I know I’m okay. At certain points in my life, there have been tunes that mean so much they’ve changed my entire outlook, including my body chemistry. Endorphins are great, no?

A humble collection of fave artists and songs, including those heart-achingly, gut-wrenchingly beautiful songs that lifted my spirits and made me want to write music, sensual gems that get my juices going (over and over again, yes!), floor movers and ass-shakers, some socially conscious protest numbers that stick to the brain, and then some. This is just a small selection here – a Volume One, if you will (there will be others!) – and I don’t discriminate by genre. “It’s all music to me…”

A Richard Ashcroft & The Verve :: Probably one of the best singer-songwriters of the 90s, whether he was with The Verve or not. He can sing in my ear anytime…

Song for the Lovers – “Don’t wanna wait…Lord I’ve been waiting all my life but I’m too late again I know but I was scared…and DJ, play a song for the Lovers…tonight…”

Sonnet – “Yes, there’s love if you want it…don’t sound like no sonnet, my lord…” The choruses on this one will lift you up and over the clouds, and gotta love that out – it sounds like Mr. Ashcroft is personally escorting me into a heaven all my own.

The Drugs Don’t Work – “If Heaven calls, I’m comin’ too…” There’s something about his voice when he sings this line that hits a nerve.

A Nadia Ali :: Anything this woman sings/is featured on. Hers is one of those unique voices – you always know it’s her. Good to have that with EDM, otherwise some of it starts to sound alike…

A Anastacia :: Sick and Tired – “I lost my peace of mind somewhere along the way…I knew there’d come a time you’d hear me say…I’m sick and tired of always being sick and tired…” Is Anastacia singing about her ongoing fight with cancer, or is it really all about leaving behind some bad love? In any case, what a song, what a voice. Be well…

A Tasmin Archer :: Sleeping Satellite – “Have we lost what it takes to advance? Have we peaked too soon? If the world is so green…then why does it scream under a blue moon? We wonder why the earth’s sacrificed for the price of its greatest treasure…” Another unforgettable vocal performance, from ethereal whispers to the gritty. Two instrumental bridges wind their way around this tune as it just keeps building and building expectations, kind of like the abandonment of space exploration the song laments so well. Have we lost it? I worry about this in 2016 as I write this compilation piece, because look what’s happening all around: Backlashes against progress. Isolationism. Fear. Lack of follow-through. The tendency to look back on eras that never really existed, except in someone’s wishful-thinking mind. My response in just two syllables: Forward! 

B Borgeous :: Wildfire – Stuck-on-the-ceiling orgasmic! Romantic. Sensual. Breathless. I first heard this driving through the desert from Vegas to LA on BPM via satellite radio. Can’t get enough of the passionate urgency and brilliant shifts of energy in this…and truth be told, I’d not mind at all a collab with this Miami-born LA transplant. If he would have me.

C The Carpenters :: Superstar – Ahhhhhhhhhh, wow, what a song, what a tragic ending to the life and career of Karen Carpenter, whose voice often soothed me to sleep as a young kid…this woman is right up there with Freddie Mercury as far as the loss of a truly singular voice. Love to do my own version of this, which I listen to often when love (and other things) suddenly and inexplicably disappear.

C Christopher Cross :: Ride Like the Wind – “It is the night…my body’s weak…I’m on the run…no time for sleep…I’ve got to ride…ride like the wind…to be free again…and I’ve got such a long way to go…to make it to the border of Mexico…” This song always gives the escapist inside that spectacular feeling of being in motion, of running, of the wind in my hair, blowing across my skin. It is that good, and by far the best tune as backdrop for all my offshore planning needs…and all those trips to Mexico to retrieve the good health I once had, and now have again, thanks to that wonderful country.

D Dido :: Dido’s No Angel album soothed me into a different world at a time I’d felt like I’d been banished, for health reasons, to a different planet. Pulled this one out often to get into healing mode; just her syrupy voice is enough to sweeten any sour mood.

Here With Me – “I don’t want to move a thing, it might change my memory…” Oh, I am what I am.

Hunter – “If you were a king up there on your throne, would you be wise enough to let me go…for this queen you think you own wants to be a hunter again…I want to see the world alone again.” How’d she know the first thought on my mind waking up every day the past couple of years? Wanderlust has taken strong roots…

Don’t Think of Me – GREEEEAAATTT. SONG. How’d she get the Bee Gees to do backings? LOL!

D Dixie Chicks :: Not Ready to Make Nice – I really get this one. I mean really. Censorship abounds, lucky for the DC they already had a platform. What happened to them after speaking their first amendment-protected truth was nothing short of disgusting. But it wasn’t their exercise of free speech that cost them – it was the bad behavior of those too insecure to acknowledge another opinion. Their plight confirms that music industry blacklisting is alive and well – and don’t I know it.

D The Doors :: Touch Me – “Can’t you see that I am not afraid?” Something in Jim Morrison’s intensely deep, resonant, overtly sexual and intoxicatingly seductive voice just gets me every time. And his poetry in The Lords and the New Creatures is intriguing to say the least. Favorite line? The one where he declares television to have reduced us “from a mad body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes staring in the dark.” 

E Earth, Wind & Fire :: Fantasy – I’d have loved to have been a fly on the wall of the studio where this was produced. Amazing, just the spatials alone. One of the inspirations for my naming my ASCAP publisher January 32nd Music – “Our voices will ring together…until the twelfth of never…we all will live love forever, as one…” Oh, yeahhhh!!!

F Filo & Peri :: Anthem – Took me away from first listen. “This is an anthem for…the world of yesterday…” Love the acoustic guitar juxtaposed with the club sound here, that’s the sort of contrast that reminds me of what happened in my past as compared to how much better my present is. I’m still here, right? LOL!!!

F Fuel :: Yep, it’s a band from Penn’s Woods…transplanted from Tennessee though they may be.

Shimmer – “And I’m somewhere in between…I never really know a killer from a savior…’til I break at the bend.” Yeah, and you really don’t. Not until you’re broken in half, which is when all things come to light, because in that place, you’ve got a real view to seeing things clearly.

G Jeffrey Gaines :: Hero in Me – There’s something about a song that starts with the line: “He’s lived as long as he possibly can, given the circumstance” that is absolutely jarring. Then, once you’re already hooked and slightly off-balance comes: “Here in my security…I’ve put a limit on my self-potential…and my possibilities…” and now you know you’re squarely in rock-bottom, reality-based territory, full-on.

The relief comes with the crescendo: “And I sleep and dream of the person I might have been … and then realize that there’s got to be some hero in me,” and all of it just hits…every. Damn. Nerve.

This Pennsylvania singer-songwriter has so much guts and nails it in just as many ways with this tune that has gotten me through sicknesses, silences, adversities, catastrophic misunderstandings, breakups and family matters that literally shattered me to the core. Simply one of the most hauntingly spot-on human compositions I’ve ever had the disturbing, yet hopeful pleasure of hearing. I feel like I’m inside this song when I listen to it.

G Garbage :: Perfect mix of rock, pop, metal and electronic. Genius = Vig + Manson.

Vow – When Shirley Manson belts “you crucify me, but I’m back in your bed…like Jesus Christ coming back from the dead…” well, now, that’s sayin’ somethin’…

G Marvin Gaye :: Mercy Mercy Me – A song truly ahead of its time. And an artist who needs no introduction.

J Freedy Johnson :: Bad Reputation – “Suddenly I’m on the street … seven years disappear below my feet … been breaking down … do you want me now? Do you want me now?” Yeah, I do want you now, but this tune is what losing years to anything…a long, baaaad roll in the hay, or a multi-year cancer case that just takes everything “you know I haven’t got.”

M Manic Street Preachers :: If You Tolerate This – “And…if you tolerate this, then your children will be next…” An absolutely stunning song that reminds me to learn from the past…or live on infinite loop. The Spanish have a recent memory of fascism…in their back yards, front yards, houses and streets…and that explains why they are out in the streets all time, building pyramids out of people, occupying their own spaces, making their presences known and felt. The chorus on this one is so fucking killer, it lifts, haunts, enthralls and always sends chills down my spine.

M Sarah McLachlan :: I’m convinced Sarah McLachlan’s voice can raise the dead; it has raised this songwriter from deep sleep into pre-dawn, just-awakened poetic repose. She is only one of a few singers that manage to wake me from my dreams…and she sends me straight back into dreamland with her beautiful vocals and striking lyrics. These are just two of a long list of faves from this talented songwriter:

Possession – “Oh into the sea of waking dreams…I follow without pride…nothing stands between us here…and I won’t be denied.” This song possessed yours truly from its very first note. No, I won’t be denied. The spirit is strong, it is resilient, and it lives on to so many new days, bridging new connections to new experiences, intertwining with whole, new lives. So haunting, so frightening…so beautiful and alive!

Sweet Surrender – “It doesn’t mean much…it doesn’t mean anything at all…the life I left behind me…is a cold room…I’ve crossed the last line…from where I can’t return…where every step I took in faith betrayed me…and led me from my home.” I feel the same. I left home, left the fold to deal with things on my own. But, that past is gone. A lot of it lived in those cold rooms – of illness, of loneliness, of trying to disassociate from it all…but then learning from it, finally, after all the resistance, which is a killer in itself. Sweet surrender indeed, a concept as close to divinity as can be, and no wonder it’s such a rarity to actually achieve it in this life. This driving tune takes hold and never lets go until its message sinks in while swirled-in vocals take me elsewhere. Great for the road, driving, travelling…or for just plain listening-and-losing-yourself in those pre-dawn hours in expectation of the sun’s next appearance. Surrender…it will be there!

N Shane Nicholson :: I first heard this guy while streaming Nordwestradio from Germany, part of my habit to hear something different. Simply a great singer-songwriter (among my most-loved genres) whose album Faith & Science soothes the inner beast.

Faith & Science – A Rhapsody page with snippets as I can’t seem to find the vid for Set Me Up: “Cause I’ve been waiting for something beautiful to blow up in my face…and I’ve been looking for something dangerous to come and take it’s place…” My thoughts exactly.

N Nine Inch Nails :: Trent Reznor, another Pennsylvanian. Shows that some of the most interesting music comes from small-town PA…

Head Like a Hole – When he sings “God-Money’s not looking for the cure,” you can believe it. I’ve lived it. Had to go outside of God-Money’s borders to find it.

Q Queen :: The Show Must Go On – “I guess I’m learning, I must be warmer now…I’ll soon be turning, round the corner now…outside the dawn is breaking…but inside in the dark I’m aching to be free…the show must go on…” The day Freddie Mercury died was among the worst in my life. Just to know that voice, belonging to that riveting, tower-of-energy showman, was really gone was enough to crack my heart and soul into bits and pieces. RIP.

R Rush :: Love Rush, love how Geddy Lee uses his bass as the lead. Always in awe of these three people making ALL THAT MUSIC. Among my must-listens…

The Pass – I don’t even remember how many times this song saved my skinny arse (and it’s still happening): “All of us get lost in the darkness…dreamers learn to steer by the stars…” Best line ever.

Subdivisions – “The future pre-decided…detached and subdivided in the mass production zone…nowhere is the dreamer or the misfit so alone.” Says it all.

Red Barchetta – “Suddenly ahead of me across the mountainside…a gleaming alloy air car shoots towards me, two lanes wide…” Reminds me of one of the many constituent inventions in my father’s barn lab in Pennsylvania.

S Scorpions :: Send Me an Angel – “Wise man said find your place…in the eye of the storm…seek the roses along the way…just beware of the thorns…here I am…will you send me an angel…” This song floors me. Unabashedly lovely, and in the face of all wisdom, not at all afraid to ask for what it really wants. Why not an angel? If you’re going to go for it, go for it all.

S Al Stewart :: Broadway Hotel – An achingly lonely song from an album I can only describe as spy novel by one of the best storytellers in 3/4 timing I’ve ever had the pleasure of listening to. “Love was a smile away…just a defile away…I sought it every way…no one came near.” And those violin solos just lay me flat every time I hear them.

Year of the Cat – “She comes in incense and patchouli…so you take her, to find what’s waiting inside…” Simply gorgeous! And those pianos…mmmmmmmm.

Roads to Moscow – “The eyes of the city are opening now, it’s the end of the dream…” Epic.

S Bob Sinclar :: World Hold On – Loved this one from first listen. The repetitive nature of club, house and other EDM sub-genres I’ve found to be quite helpful in getting my body moving (movement doesn’t lie) and my brain reprogramming. Being a fan of pop songs, I tend to like pop-structured dance music like this one, though some deep house has been flowing through my veins lately.

S Jon Secada :: Just Another Day (Without You) – This song saved my (romantic) life on more than one occasion…and it always works 🙂 Impassioned, unique vocal arrangement on the verses on this one, part mellow backing layers woven in with strong leads. Takes hold and never lets go (maybe that’s why it works?), LOL!

T Tears for Fears :: Advice for the Young at Heart – “Soon we will be older, when we gonna make it work?” Hmmm…now there’s a question.

God’s Mistake – I remember a few people who had a real problem with this one. Whatever for? “God does not play dice…yet if he’s everywhere…he’s in casinos with aces to spare…oh, love is god’s mistake…”

U U2 :: Beautiful Day – This song is pure magic eco-spiritualism-with-a-warning. The song describes the beauty of nature, and don’t let it get away, because there’s traffic, there’s tuna boats clearing the seas out. I love how Bono’s voice reaches up during the second verse in that nice build/contrast from the very conversational first verse: “You’re on the road…but you’ve got no destination…” and that great line, “You’ve been all over…and it’s been all over you.” It’s almost as if to revisit that saying, “Wherever you go, there you are.” And so are our destructive habits.

Unforgettable Fire – “Ice…your only rivers run cold…” This song wasn’t played much on the radio as I remember, and what a shame. One of U2’s absolute best.

W Ween :: “These guys have no future.”  – Beavis and Butthead

Local guys from New Hope, Pennsylvania no less…coolest experimental act since Zappa, saw them at parties and gigs all the time. So many great memories; they did NOT ignore their hometown crowd. Best Ween memory: When Route 611 became a parking lot outside their Tohickon Tavern gig in 2001 just after I’d gotten back from Australia. Best. Show. Ever!!!

Voodoo Lady – “I feel you now inside me…never once did you deny me, doin’ that stuff that you do…knockin’ me out with your voodoo…”

W Bill Withers :: Ain’t No Sunshine – This song is sent to us from heaven, through Bill Withers. Just incredible and sensual, and there are sooo many times when I need nothing more than just that.

Y Neil Young :: Philadelphia – “Sometimes I think that I know…what love’s all about…and when I see the light…I know I’ll be all right…” Another mind-blowingly gorgeous tune from beyond the stratosphere, from the Philadelphia movie soundtrack, where mind-blowing songs and performances from gifted actors abound. If any song on this list can bring on the tears, it is this one – ohhh, those piano riffs, how they tug on this listener’s heartstrings. How is it possible to write a song this sad and beautiful?

According to Vanity Fair, it is safe to believe again…I wonder if Deep Throat, the Lone Gunmen and Marita Covarrubias will show up 😉

[photo credit above: Vanity Fair – background photo: Alison Lorraine]