Twelve Songs for the Long Way Round
A playlist I have been quietly adding to for years, and the reasons each track earned its place.
I keep one playlist. It has been going for years and it changes maybe twice a year, which for a playlist is basically geological. Everything on it is doing the same job from a slightly different angle, and I did not notice what that job was until I wrote this post and read it back.
A friend asked me for it last week, so here it is, with notes. The notes are the point. Anyone can hand you a list of songs.
Queen — I Want to Break Free
The one everybody knows, and the one everybody gets slightly wrong. It is not an angry song. Listen to how it is sung: it is relieved. Whatever has been decided was decided before the first bar, and what is left is the lightness of having finally said it out loud. I like that the video was a joke and the song underneath it was not.
Styx — Mr. Roboto
A ridiculous song. I will defend it forever. Strip the costume off and it is about having done something for a long time behind a face that is not yours, and reaching the moment where you would like, please, to be introduced properly. The last thing it does before it ends is give its own name. Everyone remembers the chorus. Almost nobody remembers that it ends with an introduction.
Radiohead — Paranoid Android
Four songs stapled together by someone who did not care whether that was allowed. I love it for the middle section, where the whole thing stops being frantic and turns unbearably gentle for about ninety seconds, then goes back to being frantic. That switch is the most honest structural decision in rock music. That is exactly what a bad week feels like from inside.
Talking Heads — Once in a Lifetime
The great song about waking up partway through your own life and not recognising the furniture. Byrne does not sing the verses so much as interrogate himself in the second person, which is a very specific thing to do and a very specific thing to need to do. The chorus is the only place in the song where anything is calm, and what it is calm about is water moving.
Peter Gabriel — Solsbury Hill
In seven-four, which is why it never quite settles under you. A song about leaving a thing that was working perfectly well for a reason you cannot explain to anyone, including yourself. The most generous song on this list: the leaving is not framed as escape. It is framed as being collected. Someone comes for him. That is a much kinder story than the one we usually tell about getting out.
The Beatles — Blackbird
Two minutes, one guitar, one foot tapping, and a small creature with a problem. McCartney has said what it was really about and I believe him, and I also think the song got away from him and became about everyone who has ever waited a long time for a specific moment. It does not promise the bird will fly. It points out that the waiting is now over.
Pink Floyd — Wish You Were Here
Starts as though it is coming out of a radio in another room, then steps into the room with you. It is a song of address — the whole thing is aimed at someone who is not there, asking whether they can still tell the difference between things that matter and things that were sold to them. I find it comforting in a way I cannot fully account for.
Gary Numan — Cars
Cold, clean, repetitive, and about the safety of a small enclosed space. He is not celebrating the car. He is admitting that he feels most like a person when he is sealed inside one. There is a whole essay in the fact that the warmest emotion in the song is relief at being separated from everybody.
David Bowie — Space Oddity
Everybody hears the countdown. Fewer people notice that the last thing Major Tom does, when the circuit fails and there is nothing to be done, is send a message to his wife. Not a report. Not a distress call. He uses the last of the link on somebody he cares about. That is the whole song for me.
Kate Bush — Running Up That Hill
A song about wanting to swap places with someone you love so that each of you would finally, accurately, know what the other one is carrying. Not so you can fix it. Just so you would know. It is the most ambitious thing on this list and probably the most impossible, and she sings it like it is a reasonable request.
Fleetwood Mac — Go Your Own Way
On here for the drums, which sound like someone arguing, and because it is the only song on the list where the leaving is done badly and loudly and without any grace at all. That belongs here too. Not every door gets opened gently.
Nina Simone — Feeling Good
Has to be last. Everything before it is longing; this is the morning after the longing ends. The arrangement understands the assignment — it starts with nothing but her voice, completely unaccompanied, and does not let the band in until she has already made up her mind. She sings a list of ordinary things. Birds, sun, a river. It turns out that is what the whole list has been asking for the entire time.
Reading that back: twelve songs, and eleven of them are about leaving, being collected, or wanting to know what it is like to be someone else. The twelfth is about the morning after. I did not build it that way on purpose. Apparently I have been assembling the same argument for years without noticing, which I suppose is what a playlist is for.