Fading Light of Youth

The topic of catchy songs is one of my favorites and something that has been discussed with family and friends for as long as I can remember.  This list could have been gigantic but I decided to keep things mainstream and limit artists to one song. My main criteria should be obvious: how memorable a song is and how likely it is to get "stuck" in my head. I gave bonus points to songs that I like singing and songs that have stood the test of time. I included some newer songs in the Honorable Mentions list at the end.  I would love to hear your suggestions or comments, here or on FB :)  10. Journey - Any Way You Want It (1980) Having a guitarist/songwriter as talented as Neil Schon guaranteed Journey's success. His driving, mathematically perfect melodies soar across the band's entire catalog. What makes the band one of a kind and true gods of pop rock are Steve Perry's vocals. His performance here, across a layered and varied vocal delivery, is flawless. I think of ...

 I revisited the entire discography for this post over the course of ten days. Most songs I had heard countless times and there was a practical enjoyment to grading them. The albums themselves were much harder to grade. At more than one point in their career, the Beatles were releasing admittedly fragmented and unfocused albums, sometimes by design. In the end, I decided to grade the albums using a simple total average of the individual songs. Nothing else was considered because of just how different the albums are in origin and scope.  The songs themselves were graded on a 100 point scale, 0.0 to 10.0, based on two key criteria: 1) Listenability/Enjoyability: Gut reaction response, personal connection/preference, how happy I am if it comes on the radio 2) The Bar Band Factor: How impressed I would be by the song if I heard it performed by an unknown band at random [Editor's Notes: Cover songs, marked with an * , count towards an album's final score but are not included in the...

75. Exumer - Hostile Defiance SCORE: 6.5 Genre: Thrash Metal Label: Metal Blade Place in Discography: Fifth album Tags: Safe, Competent Review: Exumer plays an aggressive form of thrash metal but they keep things interesting with lots of classic heavy metal melody. This album beat out the other thrash albums because it has great quality control with no filler and most of the songs have at least one memorable riff or movement. I don't even know if it is possible for thrash metal to progress or be any more interesting, but I did appreciate this album's variety and it was strong from start to finish. 

This was going to be a quick and easy top ten list. Just before I was ready to publish, I checked out some top ten lists from the around the internet and realized I had a missed a lot of albums. Seeing as there was no rush whatsoever, I made a huge list of my own by scouring end of year lists and set about listening to, grading, and reviewing all of them.  With about fifty albums reviewed, I was once again ready to publish. I got my laptop set up in the bedroom, a baby Mountain Dew at my side, and put an on-topic album on: "Beyond the Circular Demise" by the Japanese band Coffins, one of my favorites of last year...which I realized was nowhere to be found on my best of list. 

I adopted Bubby with my then girlfriend Tekla in the fall of 2006. I had graduated college just a few months earlier and was still reeling from the immediate and permanent splintering of my social circle. Going to school had been my purpose my entire life, more than twenty years. I hated my "college" job, resented my social circle for splintering, and had a tumultuous relationship with a beautifully complicated woman who desperately wanted a cat. The White Doe of Rylstone by John William Inchbold

There was a dark age during which I was not a blogger. I don't like to think about it because the sheer amount of lost content is just dizzying. Episodes of Dr. Phil, and important cultural events like...well I'm sure there was something. For the record, this was 2014-2016. I was SO depressed that even when I got excited about being creative, by the time I had actually sat down to do so the feeling was long lost. I'm just grateful I was able to hold down a job and help put food on the floor because I wasn't good for much else. I certainly wasn't achieving the level of human potential that I am today, running a blog with several readers, attending important artistic and society functions if there were any. The only reason I mention that hideous, murky and fortunately interim bloglessness is because I was reminded of the lone bright spot of my "creative" life during that time: a Reddit forum called Music Theme Time. Every day a new person would pick a th...

Tomorrow is the fourth of July, American Independence Day. If you're like me and don't drink alcohol or light fireworks, it is just yet another day to watch Independence Day, The Patriot, Natural Born Killers, and all the other classics of American film. You know, bald eagle shit that makes you wanna rev up the dualie and head down to the quarry. I studied American history a great deal in college and there's no denying the American Revolution and "our" independence is worthy of celebrating. I'm just not sure what we have to celebrate in the last thirty-seven years outside of me being born and this blog. And that goes doubly for tomorrow, as I'd be hard pressed to find a single thing America as a geographical entity has had going for it in 2020. One (supposed) trait of Americans is our resilience, typically in reference to some problem we created ourselves through stupidity. It seems like a big piece of that resiliency in modern America is just surv...