Music motherfucking rules

Me

I hear the aged footsteps
Like a motion on the sea
Sometimes I turn there’s someone there
Other times it’s only me

Bob Dylan

They say that victory’s sweet
Even deep in the cheap seats

Conor Obrest

Note: This list speaks for itself, it is simply my 20 favorite songs of all time that include lyrics. For this list I have included extended commentary on each song. When I first published this list it was 110 songs long, and I will publish a full 250 this time in 5 installments. With the first publication, several people let me know that they had discovered new songs from it, and honestly that is the best outcomes I could hope for. This list does not include ambient music or jazz, two genres I also love. This list is a product of nearly 40 years of intensive music listening, so it is, at a minimum, highly curated. Thank you for reading, and may you find a new favorite somewhere on this list.

1. Cape Canaveral — Conor Oberst

For the first time since I began making versions of this list, I have a new number one. Conor Obrest’s Cape Canaveral has slowly, almost imperceptibly, worked its way past every other song I love. I didn’t exactly wake up one morning and decide that it was the greatest song ever. I simply noticed that I had already begun treating it that way. I return to it constantly, and it still gives me full-body chills and moves me to tears almost every time I hear it. After nearly forty years of obsessive music listening, Cape is as good of a number that I can come up with.

Conor is my number five artist of all time, and the fact that Cape Canaveral has become the song above all others that explains why. Number one. There it is. Man oh man. I didn’t see this one coming.

I have loved Cope for about eight years since I first heard it shorty after the release of the record it is on, Conor’s solo self titled debut from 2008. It is in my opinion his most beautiful and moving song. Conor also wrote my number 13 favorite song, Easy/Lucky/Free, which I write about below. Cape Canaveral uses the space program—those televised launches from decades ago, the spectacle of rockets lifting off into the unknown—as a proxy for growing up in America in the latter part of the 20th century. It’s about distance, aspiration, and the strange way in which memory reshapes people and moments over time.

It is one of the most gorgeous American songs ever written. “I watched your face age backwards / changing shape in my memory / you told me victory’s sweet / even deep in the cheap seats.” This is one of the loveliest passages ever set to music. Oberst is doing something subtle and devastating here—he’s taking the language of triumph and reframing it from the margins. Victory’s sweet even deep in the cheap seats is not a grand statement, however it is oddly triumphant. It’s about making meaning over time, with partial access, and moving from watching to participating.

That’s what the whole song feels like: an attempt to construct something lasting out of fragments—TV images, half-remembered conversations, the emotional residue of growing up. The rockets go up, but the song stays grounded in what it felt like to watch them, to want something more without knowing exactly what that “more” was. Full body chills every time. Conor is my number three artist of all time, and Cape Canaveral is exactly why.

2. Leaving LA — Father John Misty 

As of recently, “Leaving L.A.” is my second favorite song of all time. I first heard it when Father John Misty released Pure Comedy in 2017, and I can remember almost exactly where I was. I was walking after work, headphones on, going down the stairs at a train station on my way to a Starbucks. I have had exactly two genuine musical epiphanies in my life. The first came in the summer of 1991, when I heard Bob Dylan’s acoustic “Every Grain of Sand”—the famous barking-dog version—on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3. The second came walking down those stairs listening to “Leaving L.A.” The song absolutely fucking flooded me.

And it is a motherfucker of a song. Thirteen minutes long, mostly acoustic, essentially one enormous unfolding narrative, and utterly unconcerned with whether you have the patience to follow it. Misty moves through his accelerating fame and his profound ambivalence about the same; Los Angeles and the absurdity of being a successful singer-songwriter there; marriage; self-mythology; artistic pretension; mortality; and his own suspicion that perhaps writing a thirteen-minute acoustic song about all of this is itself ridiculous. He even takes a drive-by at Amy Grant and contemporary Christian music along the way. Nobody is safe, least of all Father John Misty.

One of the song’s funniest passages is his description of music that sounds like “dollar signs and Amy Grant,” part of a larger assault on commercially manufactured profundity. But the jokes never exist merely as jokes. Misty keeps using comedy to approach things he cannot quite approach straight on. The strangest and best example is his childhood story about nearly choking to death on watermelon candy while shopping with his mother. An apparently ridiculous memory suddenly opens onto mortality: the adult artist looking backward at the child who could simply have ceased to exist right there, before any of the fame, records, marriage, drinking, jokes, or bullshit ever happened.

That movement—from comic digression into something unexpectedly frightening or tender—is the song’s great trick. “Leaving L.A.” keeps wandering away from its subject only to reveal that the wandering is its subject. This is a song about the stories we construct around ourselves, and about the increasingly absurd position of a man becoming famous for constructing stories about himself while simultaneously distrusting the entire enterprise.

And then the song closes movingly by bringing all that sprawl back down to two people and the possibility of another life: he could quit drinking; she could write her script. Yeah, right. As of this writing, I have no real clue whether Father John Misty has quit drinking, and no idea whether his best girl ever wrote that script. I hope so. What matters inside the song is that for a moment another version of their lives becomes imaginable—less spectacular, perhaps, but also less ridiculous. After thirteen minutes spent exploding his own mythology, Misty ends with something remarkably small and human.

I keep this one beside me at all times. It is one of the handful of songs I love falling asleep to, partly because its length and pace allow me simply to disappear inside it. Sometimes I make it to the end and sometimes I don’t. It hardly matters. I love this song and every line in it.

“Leaving L.A.” is the towering centerpiece of Pure Comedy, and it is by some distance my favorite Father John Misty song. There are plenty of others I greatly enjoy—“I’m Writing a Novel,” “The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt.,” “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings,” “Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins),” “Mr. Tillman,” and “Nancy From Now On” among them—but none has ever hit me remotely like this one.

Thirteen-minute acoustic songs are not generally how one goes about acquiring casual listeners. Fine. If you are a literate music fan with any tolerance at all for the long, digressive, dirge-like form, give it thirteen minutes and let the bastard work on you. It has been working on me since the first time I heard it walking down those train-station stairs.

Number two. Father John Misty fucking rules.

3. Cruiser — Red House Painters

“Cruiser” is my third favorite song of all time. It narrowly nudges out Whiskeytown’s glorious “Houses on the Hill” and Craig Finn’s absolutely amazing “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight.” Right now I have it placed just behind “Leaving L.A.,” but damn, is it close. Full-body goosebumps. Tears. The whole fucking thing.

Like “Leaving L.A.,” “Cruiser” is a long song, and it has absolutely no interest in hurrying. It seems to be about the singer’s love for, or fascination with, a Japanese woman living in Los Angeles. According to the song, she possesses the “biggest smile from Tokyo,” and she came out to Los Angeles five years earlier. So there we are: Kozelek, a recent Japanese transplant, Los Angeles, and a car. That is more than enough to build a world.

The song meanders and takes its time. Along the way we get a tour of Los Angeles as it existed when Kozelek wrote it: driving around, streets and neighborhoods passing by, the city experienced not as a collection of landmarks but from inside a moving car. That matters. “Cruiser” really does cruise. It has the strange floating quality of driving around a city with nowhere particularly urgent to be, when the person beside you and whatever is coming through the speakers become more important than the destination.

And naturally, music is part of the landscape. One of the things I have always loved about artists like Kozelek is that beneath all the songwriting, mythology, and accumulated weirdness, they remain genuine music fans. Kozelek has spent his entire career listening, absorbing, interpreting, and arguing with other people’s songs. He has covered AC/DC, Modest Mouse, John Denver, Kris Kristofferson, Paul McCartney, and many others, often transforming the source material so completely that the cover becomes a Kozelek song.

I especially love his version of AC/DC’s “Rock ’n’ Roll Singer.” The original is a little too goofy for me; Kozelek strips away the attempted humor and plays the thing completely straight. Under the Red House Painters name, he recorded an acoustic version, and later, under his Sun Kil Moon moniker, he returned to it electrically. Suddenly what had been a cocky young rock song becomes something closer to a statement of purpose: this is what I wanted to become, and this is what I became. His cover of Modest Mouse’s “Never Ending Math Equation” is similarly amazing. Kozelek is an incredible singer, but he is also an extraordinary interpreter of the rock-and-roll canon.

And that musical consciousness matters in “Cruiser,” because the song feels partly like Kozelek constructing his own little canon in real time: the woman, the car, Los Angeles, whatever is playing, memory already forming while the experience itself is still happening. The city becomes inseparable from the music, and the music becomes inseparable from the person sitting beside him.

There are many Kozelek songs I love, and several more will appear below. “Have You Forgotten,” “Michigan,” “Japanese to English,” “Rock ’n’ Roll Singer,” and others all have legitimate claims on me. But “Cruiser,” for my money, stands head and shoulders above the rest.

It is romantic without being sentimental, sprawling without becoming shapeless, and beautiful without seeming to work particularly hard at being beautiful. It just rolls along until somehow you realize it has completely fucking destroyed you.

Number three. My man.

4 (t). Houses on the Hill

“Houses on the Hill” appears on Whiskeytown’s 1997 masterpiece Strangers Almanac. Until about a month ago, I was convinced that Strangers Almanac was by far Whiskeytown’s best record. Their final album, Pneumonia, is great too, of course, and contains “Jacksonville Skyline” as well as the absolutely glorious and unbelievably beautiful ballad “My Hometown.” But recently I’ve been getting deep into their 1995 debut, Faithless Street, and today I consider it every bit as good as Strangers Almanac. Songs such as the title track, “Lo-Fi Tennessee Mountain Angel,” and “Mining Town” stand out, along with many others.

However, it is “Houses on the Hill” that remains my very favorite Whiskeytown song.

The lyric is simply wonderful. The song reaches backward into another generation and constructs an entire vanished life out of photographs, letters, houses, war, and memory. My favorite moment comes when the narrator describes a young man being sent off to World War II. He leaves behind the woman he loves and carries her picture with him when he goes ashore. That tiny sequence absolutely destroys me. Ryan Adams can toss off an image like that almost casually and suddenly an entire life—love, separation, war, mortality—is sitting there inside a couple of lines.

Motherfucking full-body goosebumps. Full-body tears.

A lot of songs make me cry, and “Houses on the Hill” is right near the top of the list. Part of its power is how little it insists upon itself. There is no giant emotional announcement. Adams and Caitlin Cary, who co-wrote the song, simply let these remnants of somebody else’s life accumulate until the emotional weight becomes almost unbearable. It is a song about what survives people: houses, photographs, letters, stories—and the people who come afterward trying to reconstruct what those objects once meant.

I especially love the live-in-the-studio version included with the deluxe Strangers Almanac. The studio version is great. I love the studio versions of virtually all my favorite songs, obviously. But for whatever reason, I tend to love live versions even more, and this one is no exception. The performance was recorded for KCRW in September 1997, and it opens the song up beautifully; even the instrumental ending seems to let some additional air into the story. 

Ryan Adams has gone on to have an almost absurdly prolific career. His official discography already runs to dozens of releases, beginning with his solo debut Heartbreaker in 2000 and continuing right through new music in 2026. Heartbreaker contains “Oh My Sweet Carolina,” another of my favorite Adams songs and one that appears later in this list. There are many, many others.

But for now, “Houses on the Hill” remains my favorite Whiskeytown/Ryan Adams song by a little ways.

It simply fucking rules. Stay tuned.

4 (t). It’s Never Been a Fair Fight

5. Tulsa Queen — Emmylou Harris.

For years, “Tulsa Queen” was my answer to the question “what is the greatest song ever.” It was number one I thought. Don’t bother asking me again. And then, eventually, Cape Canaveral by Conor Obrest slipped past it. Barely. This isn’t really a demotion so much as the smallest possible movement inside the topmost tier: Tulsa Queen remains one of the most overwhelming pieces of music I have ever heard, and Emmylou Harris remains, for my money, the greatest vocalist who ever lived.

Then straight into:

I get full body chills and my eyes well up with tears every time I hear it…

The existing conclusion needs the corresponding tiny adjustment. Instead of “The GOAT. Pure legend. Full stop,” which contradicts #2, I’d go:

For a very long time, Tulsa Queen was the GOAT. Now it is number five. Nothing about the song has changed. I did. It is still absolutely legendary. Always will be.

I get full body chills and my eyes well up with tears every time I hear Tulsa Queen. Emmylou is the greatest vocalist of all time by far, and Tulsa presents the clearest evidence—not because it’s flashy or showy, but because it is so perfectly, devastatingly controlled. She doesn’t overpower the song; she becomes it. The song starts—“I saw the train/ in the Tulsa night/ calling out my name/ looking for a fight”—and it’s just pure magic. Just unbelievable. The phrasing, the restraint, the sense that the story is already in motion before you’ve even arrived—there is nothing like it. You’re not being introduced to a narrative; you’re being dropped into the middle of one that already feels lived-in and already carries weight.

What makes Tulsa Queen so overwhelming is that it distills everything that makes Emmylou Harris who she is as an artist across her entire career: the fusion of country, folk, and rock sensibilities; the emotional clarity; the ability to inhabit a character without ever losing the self; the sense that every line has been earned. From her earliest work through her later records, she has always been able to locate the emotional center of a song with uncanny precision, but here she doesn’t just locate it—she holds it, perfectly, for the entire duration. It exists in the same emotional universe as something like “Boulder to Birmingham”—another wonderful, better-known masterpiece—but Tulsa Queen goes deeper.

Where “Boulder” is open grief, expansive and communal, Tulsa Queen is interior, private, almost dangerous in how close it lets you get to the narrator’s unrest. It feels less like a performance and more like a confession you were never meant to overhear. There are no words in any language to fully describe the feeling of listening to Tulsa Queen. That’s not hyperbole; it’s recognition. The song operates at a level that bypasses explanation and goes straight to the nervous system. It doesn’t ask to be analyzed—it insists on being felt. Emmylou baby you remain the GOAT.

6. Faded — Afghan Whigs.

The Afghan Whigs’ lead singer Greg Dulli does something remarkable of Faded, which is blend swagger, menace, mystery, bravado, and also deep insecurity in one package. Seeing the Whigs play this as the encore at the Paradiso in Amsterdam in 2017 was one of the highlights of my life. It lands as an encore because it has to—it’s the only place a song like this can go. It doesn’t just end a set; it empties it out. Faded closes Black Love, which is not just an album but a fully realized world—cinematic, shadowy, saturated with urban crime, bad decisions, and the kind of late-night moral drift that never quite resolves.

Across the record, songs like Going to Town and Honky’s Ladder are all forward motion and attitude, pure swagger on the surface. But that swagger always feels a little overextended, like it’s covering something fragile underneath. By the time you get to Faded, the cover is gone. What’s been hinted at all along—doubt, damage, a kind of spiritual exhaustion—comes fully into view. There is no mystery as to why this has been the encore for every Whigs show for 30 years.

When Dulli asks to be lifted out of the night, to have someone look down and see the mess he’s in, it doesn’t feel performative. It feels exposed. The bravado is still there, but it’s cracked open, and what comes through is something far more human and far more dangerous. Not only is this the best Afghan Whigs song, Black Love is their best album by a mile. Everything they do well converges there—the mood, the storytelling, the tension between control and collapse—and Faded is the final, perfect release of that tension. He is a genius and the motherfucking man, and Faded is the best of many great Whigs songs. A worthy inclusion at number seven.

7. My Life Is Sweet — Simon Joyner.

“Met the drinker for a drink/ back when I was drinking everything but the kitchen sink”—and sure enough this song is about drinking, and drunks. Joyner’s friend is an alcoholic, and at the time of writing so is Joyner. They go to a bar and sit together, talking a little, mostly not, letting the night pass in that particular way that only two people who know each other well can manage.

Ultimately, this song is about male companionship, and how a quiet drink with a quiet friend can be life-saving when you really need it. Joyner takes a taxi home—drunk, or hungover, or somewhere in between—and collapses on the floor. And then the song ends with that extraordinary sequence where the city drops away, becomes something almost beautiful from a distance, and he arrives at that fragile, hard-won conclusion: my life is sweet. Anyone who is, or has been, a drinker will immediately recognize what Joyner is doing here—he is rationalizing the unrationalizable, but at the same time he’s not lying about it.

Is drinking so, so sweet? Yes and no, of course—and that tension is the point of this truly magnificent song. Part of what makes Joyner so compelling is how deeply rooted he is in the Omaha scene that would later produce Conor Oberst. Joyner is the elder figure there—born in 1971, a few years ahead of Oberst, who came up in the early ’80s generation—and his influence on Conor is both documented and unmistakable. Oberst has cited Joyner as a major influence, and you can hear it: the diaristic honesty, the willingness to let a song feel unfinished, the comfort with contradiction.

Joyner was mapping that terrain before it had a name, and before it had an audience beyond the local. He’s also massively underrated. He has other great songs—Fearful Man, One for the Catholic Girls—but My Life Is Sweet feels like the purest distillation of what he does best. There’s no artifice, no attempt to resolve the contradictions he’s living inside. Just a voice, a night, a friend, and the uneasy grace of getting through it. Anyone who’s been there knows: that’s more than enough.

8. Never Aim to Please — Tommy Stinson

Tommy Stinson, the bassist from The Replacements—went on to have, in my opinion, an even better solo career than the band’s lead singer Paul Westerberg. And considering that Westerberg is a genius and an absolute legend, this is saying something.

Stinson was barely out of childhood when the Replacements were at their peak—a teenager holding down the low end in one of the most chaotic, brilliant bands of their era. That early immersion shows up everywhere in his later work: the instinct for melody, the looseness, the sense that a song should feel lived-in rather than perfected. But what’s striking about his post-Replacements career—through Bash & Pop and his solo records—is how much he refines that instinct. The pure thrash and glorious sloppiness of early Replacements material gives way to something sweeter, more polished, but never sanitized. The edges are still there; they’re just better framed.

Never Aim to Please comes from Bash & Pop’s first record, Friday Night Is Killing Me, and Stinson has alternated between Bash & Pop releases and solo records over the 35 years since the Replacements broke up. In the first verse, Stinson sings about the absence of a point of view, and that marvelous line always reminds me of Westerberg’s writing on “Someone Take the Wheel”—that same sense of dislocation, of trying to find footing in a world that keeps shifting under you. There’s a great anecdote from Westerberg that early on, the Replacements pretended to hate The Rolling Stones—it was part of the pose, the punk posture. But it was just that: a pose. They actually loved the Stones.

And you can hear that lineage clearly in Stinson’s work. For all of his originality, he’s very much working in that classic rock tradition—songcraft, groove, emotional directness—but he does it in the best possible way, without nostalgia or mimicry. It feels inherited, not borrowed. Stinson may not claim to have a point of view in this song, but he’s been a remarkable curator and keeper of the Replacements’ legacy, especially as Westerberg has retreated from the music scene over the last decade. There’s a quiet authority in that, a sense of continuity that runs through his work. And the song itself? It just fucking kicks. It hits me in all the feels every time, and it is a worthy number nine.

9. A Bathtub in the Kitchen — Craig Finn.

My favorite of many possible Finn contenders. Bathtub is about friendship, guilt, redemption, betrayal, and mostly about thankfulness. It’s the greatest song ever written about New York City and also about moving to a big city in general. Finn compresses an entire early chapter of a life into a few lines—the arrival, the uncertainty, the desperation to be claimed by the city, and the friend who makes that possible by opening his door. That friend—Francis—is the emotional center of the song. Twenty years earlier, he’s the one who shows the narrator the ropes, lets him crash on the couch, gives him a foothold when he doesn’t have one. He is, in a very real sense, the reason the narrator makes it at all. And now, in the present of the song, Francis is down and out, struggling, a diminished version of the figure who once seemed stable and generous.

What makes the song hit so hard is the narrator’s response to that reversal. There’s hesitation, even avoidance. He tries, briefly, to pass the responsibility off—to suggest that someone else, someone more put-together, might be in a better position to help. It’s a small moment, almost throwaway, but it reveals everything: the discomfort, the guilt, the instinct to deflect when confronted with a debt that can’t really be repaid. Because that’s the truth the song circles around—some debts can’t be repaid. Not cleanly, not proportionally.

In the end, the narrator does give Francis money—two hundred bucks—but it lands with a kind of quiet insufficiency. It’s something, but it’s not enough, and it never could be. You can’t square that kind of ledger. You can only acknowledge it. And that’s where the thankfulness comes in. Not as a resolution, not as a way of tying things up neatly, but as a recognition that what was given mattered, even if what is returned will always fall short. Finn doesn’t offer redemption in the traditional sense. He offers something more honest: awareness, discomfort, and the attempt—however partial—to do right by someone who once did right by you. It’s a stunning, stunning song and an absolutely worthy number nine.

10. Dreadful — The Violet Burning

“Dreadful” by The Violet Burning fucking slaps. That’s really all there is to it. It just slaps. So damn hard.

The song is only two minutes and twenty-eight seconds long, and it is just totally dialed in. There’s no wasted motion, no long setup, no attempt to turn itself into something grander than it needs to be. It comes in, kicks ass, and gets out. I spend a lot of time in hotels and if “Dreadful” is playing when I leave the room, I usually leave it playing as loud as I can for, as I like to say, my good angels. Angels rule. Why not?

The Violet Burning are a criminally underrated band. Basically nobody today knows who they are, but I do, and I have loved them for years. The band began around 1990 in Orange County, California, and from the beginning the central figure has been singer, guitarist, and songwriter Michael Pritzl. The musicians around him have changed repeatedly over the decades, but Pritzl has remained the constant—the voice, songwriter, guitarist, and creative mainspring of the whole enterprise. 

And what an enterprise it has been. Pritzl has made more than twenty albums, EPs, and live recordings under The Violet Burning and related names, toured relentlessly through the United States and Europe, and somehow maintained a fiercely loyal audience while remaining almost completely outside the mainstream. Their early sound drew from post-punk and alternative rock—The Cure, U2, Echo & the Bunnymen—and over time expanded into the huge, atmospheric guitar music that has over time became unmistakably theirs. 

The Violet Burning came out of the Christian alternative-rock world, although Pritzl has never exactly fit comfortably inside that box. That puts him in the same broad lineage as people like Larry Norman, Gene Eugene, and Michael Knott: artists for whom faith was part of the work but never sufficient to explain the work. The music is too strange, too wounded, too beautiful, and often simply too fucking loud for that. Pritzl himself has always seemed interested in the collision between devotion and doubt, beauty and damage, transcendence and straight-up rock and roll.

R.I.P. Gene Eugene, the man. And R.I.P. Michael Knott, the motherfucking badass of all badasses.

In addition to being hugely underrated, parts of The Violet Burning catalog remain frustratingly difficult to find on the major streaming services. That is a real shame, because this is precisely the sort of band that should be continually rediscovered. They built an enormous body of work without ever becoming remotely as famous as the quality of that work deserved. Even at their commercial peak they were essentially an independent proposition, building their audience through touring and word of mouth rather than anything resembling mainstream success. 

I wish more people knew The Violet Burning. I wish more people heard these songs.

My number two Violet Burning song is “Gorgeous,” which we’ll get to a little later. That song is enormous, emotional, and glorious in an entirely different way. But for now, “Dreadful” is the one.

Two minutes and twenty-eight seconds. Nothing wasted.

Number nine.

This bad boy fucking slaps.

11. The Traitor — Leonard Cohen

Cohen’s early career began not as a songwriter but as a poet and novelist—already established in literary circles before he ever stepped into popular music. When he moved into song, it wasn’t a reinvention so much as a translation. Early breakthroughs like Suzanne and later Bird on the Wire introduced a voice that felt unlike anything in contemporary pop: formally literary, emotionally restrained, but spiritually enormous.

Across a career that stretches from that early poetic minimalism to late-period gravity, Cohen repeatedly returned to the same emotional territory in different registers. Seems So Long Ago, Nancy carries quiet tragedy without spectacle. Death of a Ladies’ Man leans into chaos and contradiction. Alexandra Leaving and That Don’t Make It Junk show a late-career clarity—less ornament, more acceptance. And then, right at the end, The Night of Santiago from Thank You for the Dance—completed after his death by his son Adam—feels like a final echo rather than a conclusion, as if the voice is still resolving even after it has stopped.

But it is this passage that sits at the center of everything: “I told my mother, mother I must leave you / preserve my room and do not shed a tear / should rumor of a shabby ending reach you / it was half my fault and half the atmosphere.” Quite possibly the greatest verse ever set to paper.

There is something almost unbearable in its tenderness—the attempt to leave without destroying what you came from, to depart without turning departure into permanent damage. “Preserve my room” is not a realistic request; it is a desire for time to stop, for memory to remain untouched while the self moves forward into uncertainty, drift, and likely failure.

Cohen does something very few writers ever manage: he distributes responsibility without dissolving it. “Half my fault and half the atmosphere” is not an excuse—it is an ethics of existence. The self is accountable, but so is the world that formed it. There is guilt here, but no self-pity. There is clarity, but no absolution. He is naming the condition of being human with a precision that feels almost too large to hold. And what makes the song extraordinary is that it refuses resolution. Cohen never tries to solve the tension he has introduced. Instead, he inhabits it fully.

Across his work—from the early poetic breakthrough to the late songs of acceptance and erosion—he speaks to the quester, the striver, the poet, and the mystic in each of us. Not by offering answers, but by dignifying the act of searching itself. Leaving, longing, failing, seeking—these are not problems to resolve, but conditions to endure with awareness. His voice carries all of it: resignation, yearning, and a kind of quiet, unbreakable grace.

His best by a mile. Simply marvelous.

12. Gorgeous (live)— The Violet Burning

“Gorgeous” is gorgeous. It is gorgeous, as indicated by the title, and probably one of the most gorgeous songs ever recorded. This is my number two favorite Violet Burning song, as indicated in my discussion of “Dreadful” above. The Violet Burning is a criminally underrated band. I will never understand how they don’t have a bigger footprint. They deserve to be widely recognized and appreciated.

While Dreadful is almost certainly the slappiest song of all time, if that is a thing, Gorgeous is absolutely one of the sweetest. It starts with Michael Pritzl, the band’s lead singer and creative center, singing, “I swear it was the Fourth of July.” Oh yeah, Michael? Are you sure? Okay, baby, whatever you say. So yeah, it’s the Fourth of July: patriotism, mom and pop, apple pie, fireworks—the whole nine. But Pritzl immediately turns all of that American iconography into the language of romantic awe. The fireworks aren’t really the point. The person he is looking at is.

And then the song eventually delivers its payoff: baby, you’re so gorgeous.

Motherfucker.

Of course.

Gorgeous originally appeared on Demonstrates Plastic and Elastic, released in 2001, one of the strangest and more adventurous records in The Violet Burning catalog. The album moves between glam, alternative rock, electronics, enormous guitars, and quieter atmospheric material, with Gorgeous arriving towards the end. It is a perfect example of what makes Michael Pritzl such an unusual songwriter: underneath all the sonic experimentation is a deeply sincere romantic. He can build a wall of noise around a feeling, but he never seems embarrassed by the feeling itself.

Pritzl has described honesty and vulnerability—including honest conversations about God and ordinary human life—as central to what the band does. He specifically included Gorgeous among the songs on Demonstrates Plastic and Elastic that embody that impulse. That combination—spiritual yearning, romantic yearning, distortion, beauty—is basically the Violet Burning universe in miniature.

And Gorgeous has endured. It remained important enough to the band to appear late in sets and sometimes close them many years after its release. I particularly love the live versions because Pritzl can stretch the song outward until what begins as a simple declaration of attraction becomes something much larger. The sweetness survives the volume. If anything, the volume makes it sweeter.

That is also why I can put Dreadful and Gorgeous this high on the same list without feeling remotely repetitive. They represent opposite poles of what I love about this band. Dreadful fucking slaps. Gorgeous fucking glows. One makes me want to turn the stereo up until the walls shake; the other reminds me that sometimes the most effective thing a songwriter can do is look at another human being and say the simplest possible thing: you are gorgeous.

And Michael Pritzl makes me believe him every goddamn time.

13. Albuquerque — Mark Kozelek (Neil Young Cover)

Well, they say that Santa Fe
Is less than ninety miles away
And I got time to roll another number and rent a car
Oh, Albuquerque.

Oh my God, Neil. What are you doing to me? Neil, baby, you’re breaking my heart. Neil, shut the fuck up.

“Albuquerque” appears on the back end of Neil Young’s 1975 record Tonight’s the Night, immediately before “New Mama.” “Roll Another Number (For the Road),” with which I constantly confuse it for reasons that will shortly become obvious, appears a few songs earlier. Tonight’s the Night, as many readers will remember, is Neil’s record most haunted by death. It was largely recorded in 1973 but held back until 1975, and the deaths of Crazy Horse guitarist, singer, and songwriter Danny Whitten and Young’s roadie Bruce Berry hang over the entire thing.

Berry is famously eulogized in the two versions of “Tonight’s the Night” that bookend the record: “Bruce Berry was a working man / He used to load that Econoline van.” Neil, my man.

Obviously Neil Young loved Bruce Berry and Danny Whitten. He basically wrote an entire record out of the grief that followed their deaths. Tonight’s the Night is consequently a strange, ragged, drunken, grief-stricken motherfucker of a record. It sounds at times as though everybody involved is barely holding the thing together, which is exactly why it works.

Tonight’s the Night also includes one of the first Neil Young songs I ever heard, “Tired Eyes,” with the stone-cold classic opening: “Well, he shot four men in a cocaine deal / And he left them lying in an open field / Full of old cars with bullet holes in the mirrors.”

Neil. Bullet holes in the mirrors? Really, baby? Again: oh my.

In any case, I often get “Albuquerque” and “Roll Another Number” confused, simply because “Albuquerque” itself contains the line, “So I’ll roll another number for the road / I feel able to get under any load.” Obviously Mr. Young was rolling his own during this period.

Probably other periods too.

But my favorite lines from “Albuquerque” are these: “So I’ll stop when I can / Find some fried eggs and country ham / I’ll find somewhere where they don’t care who I am.”

Motherfucker.

By 1975, Neil Young was already a global superstar. He was massive in his native Canada, massive in the United States, and increasingly massive around the world. In his wonderful song “Don’t Be Denied,” Young writes about reaching that point—record executives suddenly all over him and the band when all he really wanted to do was play rock and roll. Neil, fucking do it.

And that context is part of what makes “Albuquerque” so moving. This is a famous man singing about wanting to disappear. He doesn’t want the record company, the expectations, the mythology, or apparently anybody asking where the hell Neil Young is. He wants to get into a car, roll another number, eat some fried eggs and country ham, and go somewhere where nobody cares who he is. It is an almost comically modest fantasy of escape, which is precisely why it works.

And then there is Mark Kozelek. I love Neil Young’s original, obviously, but it is Kozelek’s cover that gets the spot on this list. Kozelek has always been a magnificent interpreter of other people’s songs—AC/DC, John Denver, Modest Mouse, Paul McCartney, Kris Kristofferson, and many others—and he understands exactly what makes “Albuquerque” work. He doesn’t try to improve Neil Young. He slows everything down, opens up the spaces between the words, and lets the loneliness that was already buried in the song come completely to the surface.

That is what the best covers do. They don’t replace the original; they reveal something that was already there. Neil Young wrote a great song about escape. Mark Kozelek heard the loneliness inside the escape and made it almost unbearably beautiful.

Fried eggs. Country ham. Nobody caring who you are. Sometimes that is the whole fucking dream.

Neil, my man. My god what an amazing song.

14. Oh My Sweet Carolina — Ryan Adams

One of the most beautiful and sad songs in modern American songwriting. The record Heartbreaker—Adams’ solo debut after his run fronting Whiskeytown—remains his peak for many listeners. It’s also the album where everything still feels unforced: the writing, the pacing, the emotional exposure. Later records like Gold brought wider recognition, and something like Chris gets close in flashes, but Heartbreaker has a coherence of mood that he never quite replicated.

What defines Oh My Sweet Carolina is its dual perspective. On the surface, it’s a travel song—young man on the road, drifting through cities like Cleveland, accumulating damage, spending energy and money with a kind of reckless momentum that feels both chosen and inevitable. But underneath that motion is something much older: a pull backward, toward origin, toward a place that isn’t just geographic but emotional. North Carolina isn’t just home—it’s coherence.

The Cleveland passages (“So I went on to Cleveland and I ended up insane/ I bought a borrowed suit and learned to dance/ And I was spending money like the way it likes to rain/ Man, I ended up with pockets full of cane”) carry that classic Ryan Adams contradiction: charm and collapse in the same breath. The narrator moves through instability with the confidence of someone still convinced that motion equals meaning, even as that belief is starting to fail him. It’s the sound of someone learning, mid-stream, that movement alone doesn’t resolve anything. And then the emotional center of the song reveals itself: (Oh mw sweet Carolina/ what compels me to go/ oh, my sweet disposition/ may you one day carry me home), the longing not just to return, but to be returned in one piece. Not improved, not transformed—just intact.

This is where the collaboration with Emmylou Harris matters. Her voice doesn’t decorate the song; it stabilizes it. It sounds like witness. Adams has written other songs that brush this same emotional territory—English Girls Approximately, Oh My God, Whatever, Etc., Still a Cage, Birmingham—but none of them quite hold the same balance of youth and exhaustion, romance and reckoning. Oh My Sweet Carolina feels like a hinge between those states: a young man already speaking like he understands what the older version of himself will miss. It’s a debut record moment that feels strangely final. A song about going forward that only makes sense when you understand what it costs to leave things behind. A truly majestic entry—and a worthy entry here at fifteen.

15. (T) Montreal Rock Band Somewhere — Happyness

“Montreal Rock Band Somewhere” is totally out of control. Of course it is. What else can you say about a song that contains the lyric, “I’m wearing Win Butler’s hair / There’s a scalpless singer of a Montreal rock band somewhere”? Win Butler is, of course, the lead singer of Arcade Fire, who suck.

They suck.

Arcade Fire hit the big time with Funeral, released in 2004. I like Funeral okay, but I haven’t listened to it in more than a decade, and I probably never will again. It just isn’t my speed. It sounds to me like a concept record: operatic, overblown, and the production lets it down at every turn.

So yeah, I don’t like Arcade Fire.

However, Happyness is massively underrated. Other than The Violet Burning and maybe Daddy Issues, Happyness is, to my mind, the most underrated band of all time. And that is saying something.

“Montreal Rock Band Somewhere” runs 5:04, and it is a sprawling guitar workout that somehow feels much bigger than its running time. The Happyness boys can really fucking play. That sometimes gets obscured by how funny they are, and by the deliberately tossed-off quality of the whole operation. The songs can sound as though three guys wandered into a room, made each other laugh, picked up their instruments, and accidentally recorded something brilliant. But listen underneath the jokes: these guys know exactly what they are doing.

There is also some weird history surrounding the song’s placement. Weird Little Birthday was originally released in the UK in 2014 as a 13-song record without “Montreal Rock Band Somewhere.” The expanded 2015 release added four bonus songs, with “Montreal” coming immediately after what had originally been the album closer, “Monkey in the City.” That expanded record also contains “Orange Luz” and the wonderfully titled “Refrigerate Her,” but those were already part of the original album. 

I am fascinated by song order on records, and I spend a ridiculous amount of time thinking and writing about it. “Janie Jones” goes first. “Rocks Off” goes first. Some songs simply announce themselves as openers or closers. “Montreal Rock Band Somewhere” feels to me like a closer: sprawling, funny, strange, guitar-heavy, and just unresolved enough to leave the record hanging in the air after it ends.

There are plenty of other great songs on Weird Little Birthday, including the title track and “Leave the Party.” In “Leave the Party,” for example, the narrator proposes killing everyone at the party and then heading home.

Really, baby? You’re going to murder the whole party and just jet like that? Settle down. Take a shower. Think things through. Not the best move perhaps.

They followed the debut with Write In in 2017 and eventually Floatr in 2020, a much slower, denser, stranger record. I like Floatr, but it is not an easy record to get into. The immediacy and wiseass humor of Weird Little Birthday are still there in places, but everything feels more submerged. It is the sort of record that asks you to come toward it rather than coming toward you.

And maybe that helps explain why Happyness never really broke through. They were always slightly sideways to whatever might have made them commercially successful. They can write hooks, they can make enormous guitar noise, the songs are genuinely beautiful, and they are extremely funny. However for some reason they never seemed particularly interested in making things easy for their audience. Even their best songs tend to wander around, stop somewhere unexpected, make a joke, get sad, and then suddenly fucking explode.

“Montreal Rock Band Somewhere” contains almost the entire Happyness proposition in five minutes. It is funny without being a novelty song, melancholy without announcing itself as melancholy, and loose without actually being sloppy. Beneath the Win Butler joke is a genuinely beautiful piece of guitar music made by a band that understood exactly how much room a song sometimes needs.

They never became Arcade Fire. Good.

I’ll take Happyness every day of the week.

15. (T) Crushed Out — Bad Moves

17. Caribbean Wind — Bob Dylan

18. (T) Center of Asia — Paul Pena 

19. (T) Rocket and a Bomb — Michael Knott

This is Knott’s best-known—and, for many people, only known—song. It’s the one that traveled beyond the small, fractured world he spent his career navigating, the one that people who don’t know the rest of his catalog can still recognize. And that’s fitting, because it captures almost everything that made him singular. Knott never fit comfortably inside the Christian rock community that was supposed to be his home. He clashed with labels, bounced from one situation to another, tried repeatedly to start his own imprints just to maintain control of his work, and spent much of his career existing in the margins of an already marginal scene. There were too many expectations, too many rules about what a “Christian artist” was supposed to sound like, what he was supposed to say, how cleanly he was supposed to resolve things. Knott refused all of it.

You can hear the lineage—artists like Larry Norman laid some of the groundwork—but Knott is no inheritor in the traditional sense. He’s a total original. Where Norman and others often leaned toward proclamation, Knott leaned into contradiction, mess, unresolved tension. He wasn’t interested in presenting faith as an answer; he was interested in showing what it felt like to live inside it when the answers didn’t come.

His career reflects that restlessness. From the early chaos of Popsicle and Popsavers, through the darker, more aggressive phases of L.S. Underground and LSU, into his solo work and projects like Aunt Betty’s, Knott kept shifting forms, refusing to settle into anything that could be easily categorized. The sound changed, the bands changed, the labels changed—but the core impulse didn’t: tell the truth as he experienced it, even if it didn’t line up with what anyone wanted to hear. Rocket and a Bomb distills all of that into something deceptively simple. There’s humor in it, almost absurdity—“Mr. God, is there a Ms. God? Can she help me find a job?”—but it lands because it’s so nakedly real. This is a man of Christ who is also a man of the world, standing in the gap between those identities, not reconciling them but living them both at once. He’s not asking for salvation in the abstract; he’s asking for something immediate, practical, human. He just needs a goddam job.

That tension runs through everything he ever said and did. His line—“I know Christ. It doesn’t make me good; it doesn’t make me bad; it doesn’t make me anything. It just means I know Christ.”—might be the clearest articulation of his entire ethos. Faith is not a moral upgrade, not a solution, not a transformation you can point to and quantify. It’s a relationship, and relationships are messy. So what is a rocket and a bomb? They’re things most people don’t get to touch. Power, transcendence, impact—forces that exist beyond the everyday. The narrator wants a job, something stable, something achievable. But he also wants more. He wants access to something larger, something explosive, something that breaks the limits of an ordinary life. Knott lived that contradiction. He lived fast, pushed hard, refused to smooth out the edges that made him difficult to categorize or contain. He burned through systems that couldn’t hold him, left behind a body of work that feels both deeply personal and strangely universal. He had to.

20. There Must Be More Than Blood — Car Seat Headrest.

This is a tricky one, because it forces us to deal with a shift—not just in a song, but in an artist. My thesis is that this is Will Toledo going into a kind of relative hiding, and the song reads like a document of that transition in real time. His early work—from Beach Life-in-Death through Nervous Young Man to Sleeping with Strangers—was as direct, as exposed, as heart-on-the-sleeve as anything in the last decade of rock music. He wasn’t just confessional; he was incapable of not being confessional. He was the heart on his sleeve songwriter of his generation. You didn’t have to work to understand him—you just had to be willing to feel what he was feeling.

And then you put that next to someone like John Darnielle—super prolific, deeply lofi in his early approach, but always a little more mediated, a little more constructed. Darnielle throws his material against the wall and lets it accumulate into narrative. Toledo, at his best, just bleeds. So when Making a Door Less Open arrives, even the title signals a shift. Something is closing. Something is being sealed off. The masks—first the normal face coverings, then the Trait mask, then the gas mask—aren’t just stagecraft. They’re statements. The question isn’t “what is he hiding?” but “why does he suddenly feel the need to hide at all?” There Must Be More Than Blood sits right in the middle of that tension. You get these images of dislocation—of a life that used to feel rooted and now doesn’t. The delta, the shoreline, the houses stripped away—it doesn’t read like a literal disaster so much as an internal one. The sense of ground disappearing. Of structures—family, identity, whatever “home” used to mean—losing their coherence. He talks about wasting time, but you know that’s not true. He’s one of the most prolific songwriters around. What he’s really describing is a shift in how that time feels from the inside.

And then there’s the second movement—the red-eye flight, the self-recognition that barely qualifies as recognition at all. He sees himself, but only as an outline, a set of lines without substance. That’s the real break from the early work. The old Toledo was hyper-present, almost overwhelmingly so. This Toledo is thinning out, becoming harder even for himself to locate. So what do you do when you can’t see yourself clearly anymore? You disappear further. You become, in a sense, the Invisible Man. That’s what the masks start to feel like—not affectation, but adaptation. A way of dealing with a self that no longer feels stable enough to present directly. And if you follow that thread forward, you get to The Scholars—The Scholars—his most recent record. It’s even more oblique than Door. There are great songs there—Stay With Me (I Don’t Want to Be Alone), Equals—but they’re harder to parse, less immediately accessible. The emotional core is still there, but it’s buried deeper, refracted through more layers.

Part of that may simply be life catching up with him. Toledo dealt with serious health issues in the lead-up to that record—long COVID, histamine intolerance—and the process became more collaborative, less singularly driven. That alone changes the texture of the work. The lone voice becomes one voice among several. The signal diffuses.So There Must Be More Than Blood starts to feel like a hinge point. The moment where the old mode—pure exposure, pure immediacy—begins to give way to something more guarded, more fragmented, more difficult to access. But the core hasn’t disappeared. It’s just harder to reach. And that’s why the song matters. It captures an artist in the act of losing something essential—or at least transforming it into something less direct, less available, maybe even less comforting. Will Toledo is a mysterious guy. Deep, fragile, a little haunted, clearly carrying more than he lets on. He’s dealt with some tough stuff, and you can feel it in the way the work shifts over time. And for anyone still saying “rock is dead”—they can fuck off. There is still The Hold Steady and Car Seat Headrest making records that matter, records that wrestle with something real. You just have to be willing to meet them where they are now, not where they used to be.

21. Stay the Same — Home

22 (t). Killer Parties — The Hold Steady

Everything else is commentary. The band isn’t just a band; Finn isn’t just a frontman. The Hold Steady is a community, a lineage, a shared memory palace built out of long nights, near-misses, inside jokes, loud guitars, and people who actually want to be there. We are the Hold Steady. And Craig baby you are goddamn right, I am the Hold Steady. The Hold Steady is my favorite rock band of all time. I could make the case for a few others—The Velvet Underground, Grateful Dead, The Replacements, Car Seat Headrest—but for my money The Hold Steady most cleanly expresses what rock music is for. Not just sound, not just attitude, but shared experience turned into narrative.

Coming out of Lifter Puller, Finn was already writing in tight, clipped internal rhymes, dense alliteration, and nocturnal fragmentation. But with The Hold Steady the perspective opens up. The chaos is still there, but it’s filtered through memory and reflection. The language becomes more legible without losing its edge. Killer Parties, from the 2003 debut Almost Killed Me, is told from the perspective of someone older, someone who has already lived through the hardcore-to-indie-to-rave-up continuum and come out the other side. He’s been through Minneapolis basements, New York nights, Ybor City mythologies—the so-called party capital of America—and what remains is not nostalgia exactly, but accounting.

What did it cost, and what did it mean? It pairs naturally with Most People Are DJs (“I was a Twin City trash bin / I’d jam it all into my system”) and Soft in the Center (“And I’m just trying to tell the truth, kid / I’m just trying to tell the truth / You can’t get every girl / You get the ones you love the best”). Across these songs, Finn is already moving toward the older register he occupies now: less urgency, more reckoning. Like Faded in the Afghan Whigs canon, Killer Parties has remained a live staple—an encore song, a release valve, a communal shoutback. And its central refrain is exactly what it says it is: killer parties almost killed me.

No metaphor is needed beyond that. Finn has been there and done that. He has lived it, absorbed it, and returned from it with something closer to clarity than regret. And even in this early form, you can already hear the direction of travel: toward the reflective, grounded, older voice that defines him now. A truly great song—and a blueprint for what comes after the chaos stops being infinite.

22 (t). Leave the City -— Jason Molina (Live)

August 2026 New Top 250 Work in Progress:

1. Cape Canaveral — Conor Oberst

2. Leaving LA — Father John Misty 
3. Cruiser — Red House Painters

4t. It’s Never Been a Fair Fight — Craig Finn

4t. Houses on the Hill — Whiskeytown

5. Tulsa Queen — Emmylou Harris
6. Faded — The Afghan Whigs
7. Dreadful — The Violet Burning
8. My Life Is Sweet — Simon Joyner
9. Never Aim to Please — Tommy Stinson
10. The Traitor — Leonard Cohen
11. A Bathtub in the Kitchen — Craig Finn
12. Gorgeous — The Violet Burning
13. Albuquerque — Neil Young (Mark Kozelek Cover)
14. Oh My Sweet Carolina — Ryan Adams
15. (15T) Montreal Rock Band Somewhere — Happyness
16. (15T) Crushed Out — Bad Moves
17. Caribbean Wind — Bob Dylan
18. Center of Asia — Paul Pena 
19. Rocket and a Bomb — Michael Knott
20. There Must Be More Than Blood — Car Seat Headrest
21. Stay the Same —Home
22. Leave the City — Jason Molina (Live)
23. Killer Parties (live 2008) — The Hold Steady
24. Roll Another Number for the Road — Neil Young
25. Between Planets — The Jesus and Mary Chain
26. Jessamine — Craig Finn
27. Catfish John — Jerry Garcia
28. My Life in Art — Mojave 3
29. Red River Shore — Bob Dylan
30. Shuffle it All — Izzy Stradlin
31. Abducted at the Grief Retreat — Wild Pink
32. Three Drinks — Craig Finn
33. Thrasher — Neil Young
34. Faithless Street — Whiskeytown
35. Double — Michael Knott
36. My Life in Art — Mojave 3
37. Julia With Blue Jeans On — Moonface
38. Malibu Love Nest — Luna
39. Lovesick — The Violet Burning
40. No One Changes — Conor Oberst
41. Dulling the Horns (Live) — Wild Pink
42. Trains Across the Sea — The Silver Jews
43. The Man I’ve Always Been — Craig Finn
44. Lisa Says — The Velvet Underground
45. Sugar Mama — Michael Knott
46. Have You Forgotten — Red House Painters
47. SB’s Truck — Happyness
48. Violent Past — Low
49. An Architect’s Eye — The Mendoza Line
50. Ain’t Gonna Suck Itself — Cracker
51. Traveling Light — The Tindersticks
52. I Love My Dad — Sun Kil Moon
53. Blood of Eden — Peter Gabriel
54. Easy / Lucky / Free — Bright Eyes (BOCC Cover)
55. Kill the Action — East River Pipe
56. Ali/Spinks II — Sun Kil Moon
57. Rock n’ Singer — AC/DC (Mark Kozelek Cover)
58. Chinatown — Luna
59. Can’t Hardly Wait — The Replacements
60. Goshen ’97 — Strand of Oaks
61. Tiny Pieces — Bash and Pop
62. Standing on the Moon — Phosphorescent (Grateful Dead Cover)
63. Schizophrenia — Sonic Youth
64. Tougher Than the Rest — (Mendoza Line (Bruce Springsteen Cover)
65. Goodbye — Steve Earle (Emmylou Harris Cover)
66. Nobody But You — Lou Reed and John Cale
67. Driving the Dynamite Truck — Seam (Breaking Circus Cover)
68. Cortez the Killer — Neil Young (Church Cover)
69. Sucking on the Birdshot — Wild Pink
70. Must Have Been the Roses — The Grateful Dead
71. Love Songs on the Radio — Mojave 3
72. Black Cab — Jens Lekman
73. It’s a Long Line (But It Moves Quickly) — The Mendoza Line
74. 31 Candles — The Mendoza Line
75. Shelter Me — Cinderella
76. I Drink — Mary Gauthier
77. Cherry Chapstick — Yo La Tengo
78. Drag Queens and Limousines — Mary Gauthier
79. Against Pollution — The Mountain Goats
80. Jokerman — Bob Dylan
81. Wish You Were Here — Pink Floyd (Sparklehorse Cover)
82. Tired Eyes — Neil Young
83. Death of a Ladies’ Man — Leonard Cohen
84. Look at Miss Ohio — Gillian Welch
85. April the 14th Part II — Gillian Welch
86. Thirty Year Low — The Mendoza Line
87. Black and Brown Blues — Silver Jews
88. I’m Sorry — John Denver (Red House Painters Cover)
89. (T) The Lights of Magdala — Kris Kristofferson (Red House Painters Cover)
90. (T) Car Wash Hair — Mercury Rev (Luna Cover)
91. Suffering Jukebox — Silver Jews
92. Pissed Off 3 AM — Alejandro Escovedo
93. Someone Take the Wheel — The Replacements
94. Teenage Riot — Sonic Youth
95. (T) New Sensations (Live) — Lou Reed
96. Head On — The Jesus and Mary Chain
97. After Your Party — Tanya Donelly
98. This Isn’t It — Giant Drag
99. Shut In — Strand of Oaks
100. Anna Lisa Says — Happyness
101. Song for Dennis Brown — The Mountain Goats
102. Never Say Goodbye — Bob Dylan
103. Snowin’ on Raton — Townes Van Zandt
104. 1979 — Smashing Pumpkins
105. All Rooms A/C Cable Free — The Extra Glenns
106. I Was A Stranger — Bill Callahan
107. An Harangue — The Red Krayola and Art and Language
108. Sunday Morning Comin’ Down — Kris Kristofferson
109. California — Low
110. Green Eyes — Nick Cave
111. Dead Flowers (Live)— The Rolling Stones
112. Star 18 — The Hold Steady 
113. Crime in the Desert — Brian Eno/ John Cale
114. Street Hassle — Lou Reed
115. Pale Green Things — The Mountain Goats 
116. Day Disguise — Hope Sandoval 
117. San Francisco B.C. — Silver Jews 
118. Barstool — Neil Young 
119. Most of the Time — Bob Dylan (Luna Cover)
120. Brownsville Girl— Bob Dylan
121. Two Sons in the Sunset — Pink Floyd
122. What Would the Community Think — Cat Power
123. Sweet Child O’ Mine — Guns N’ Roses 
124. Feed the Tree — Belly
125. Up to Me — Bob Dylan
126. (T) One Man’s Rubbish — The Beautiful South
127. (T) Foreign Object — The Mountain Goats 
128. Hatchet — Low
129. Song to the Siren — This Mortal Coil
130. Kate’s Guitar — Greg Brown
131. Good as Gold — The Beautiful South 
132. Ben’s My Friend — Sun Kil Moon
133. Triumph 73 — The Felice Brothers 
134. Oh Sister — Bob Dylan
135. Awesome Sound— Ween
136. Dr. Rock — Ween
137. Harbourcoat — REM
138. Kavita — Red House Painters
139. Screenwriter’s School — Craig Finn
140. Darken Your Door — Camper Van Beethoven (Also Richmond Version)
141. Different Days — Jason Isabel
142. A Dream — Lou Reed and John Cale
143. Hollywood Lawn — Jenny Lewis
144. A Little Uncanny — Conor Obrest
145. Claim to Fame — Alex Chilton
146. Terrified Eyes — Craig Finn
147. Evelyn Is Not Real — My Morning Jacket
148. Didn’t Know What I Was In For — Better Oblivion Community Center
149. Little Chang, Big City — Seam
150. Teenage Wristband — The Twilight Singers
151. Phone Went West (live at the 9:30 Club)— My Morning Jacket
152. Corpus Christie Bay — Phosphorescent 
153. Guitar Town — Steve Earle
154. (T) Atlantic City — East River Pipe
155. (T) I’m Not (live)— Daddy Issues
156. Welfare State — Slow Dazzle
157. Misunderstood — Wilco
158. The Violet Hour — The Clientele
159. Dallas — Silver Jews
160. Seems So Long Ago, Nancy — Leonard Cohen
161. That Don’t Make it Junk — Leonard Cohen
162. Hard Time — Daniel Johnston 

55. Southern Accents — Tom Petty (Lucinda Williams Cover)
56. First Blood — The Mountain Goats
57. Chameleon — Michael Knott 
58. Tether to Tassel — Michael Knott 
59. Who Knows Where the Time Goes — Nina Simone
60. Pretty in Pink— The Psychedelic Furs 
61. (T) Fall of Saigon — Elliott Murphy
62. (T) Two Places at Once — The Church
63. UFO — Larry Norman
64. Pay for Me — The National
65. Stroke it Noel — Big Star
66. (T) Classic Cars — Conor Oberst 
67. Oh My Soul — Big Star
68. (T) Lofts — Happyness 
69. Summer of the Whore — Shannon McArdle 
70. Elastic Days — J. Mascis
71. Nickel and a Spoon — Alejandro Escavedo 
72. What’s a Simple Man to Do? — Steve Earle
73. Seen the Light — Giant Drag
74. Lyin’ Eyes — The Eagles 
75. Mercedes Benz — Janis Joplin
76. Weighted Down — Skip Spence 
77. Bangkok — Alex Chilton 
78. (T) Out There — Dinosaur Jr. 
79. Feel the Pain — Dinosaur Jr. 
80. (T) Cherry Bomb — The Runaways
81. (T) Personality Crisis — New York Dolls
82. JM— Strand of Oaks
83. The Likely Nominee— The Mendoza Line
84. The Bear — My Morning Jacket 
85. Hula Hula Boys — Warren Zevon 
86. Tennessee — The Silver Jews
87. Red Right Hand — Nick Cave
88. Buckets of Rain — Bob Dylan
89. Jim Jones — Bob Dylan
90. Tiny Tears — Tindersticks 
91. Kangaroo — This Mortal Coil
92. Sabotage — Papa M
93. (T) In Spite of Me — Morphine 
94. (T) See You at the Movies— J. Mascis
95. Blow Him Apart — The Felice Brothers 
96. Crime In the City — Neil Young
97. She’s Lost Control — Joy Division 
98. The Myth of Fingerprints— Paul Simon 
99. Keep On Rockin’ In the Free World — Neil Young
100. The Boxer — Simon and Garfunkeltzz a 
101. Shelter from the Storm — Bob Dylan
102. Winter Games — Superchunk
103. Top Floor Bottom Buzzer — Morphine
104. Richard Ramirez Died Today of Natural Causes — Sun Kil Moon
105. Scum — Nick Cave 
106. Buffalo Ballet — John Cale 
107. Sidewalk — Superchunk 
108. Storms — Fleetwood Mac (Camper Van Beethoven Cover)
109. Heaven Sitting Down — Phosphorescent 
110. Desperadoes Under The Eaves — Warren Zevon 
111. Frankie’s Gun — The Felice Brothers 
112. Slack Mothefucker — Superchunk 
113. Teenage Kicks — The Undertones
114. FOH — Superchunk 
115. The Alphonse Mambo — The Mountain Goats
116. The Church of the Holy Spook — Shane McGowan
117. I Fought the Law — The Clash
118. No Time to Cry — Iris DeMent
119. Tangled Up in Blue — Bob Dylan
120. Terror in the Canyons — Phosphorescent
121. I Don’t Wanna Get Over You — The Magnetic Fields
122. Goddamn Lonely Love — The Drive By Truckers
123. Train — Michael Knott 
124. Days of Our Years — The Felice Brothers 
125. Rocks Off — The Rolling Stones
126. Achin’ to Be — The Replacements 
127. Sell the House — The Felice Brothers 
128. (T) Death or Glory — The Clash 
129. (T) Sultans of Swing — Dire Sraits 
130. Bodys — Car Seat Headrest 
131. All the Wine — The National
132. Come In From the Cold — Joni Mitchell
133. I Walk a Thin Line — (Fleetwood Mac Cover)
134. Fill in the Blank — Car Seat Headrest
135. Out For the Killing — Elliott Murphy
136. Easy’s     CfGetting Harder Every Day — Iris DeMent
137. Anything Can Happen — Bash and Pop
138. Newmyer’s Roof — Craig Finn
139. Charley’s Girl — Lou Reed
140. The Man in Me — Bob Dylan
141. Going to Town — The Afghan Whigs
142. My Life Is Wrong — East River Pipe
143. Tangletown — Craig Finn
144. Lord Kill the Pain — Red House Painters 
145. (T) Silhouette Town — East River Pipe
146. (T) Next of Kin — Conor Obrest
147. Gold Mine Gutted — Conor Obrest 
148. God in Chicago — Craig Finn 
149. Mistakes Were Made — The Mendoza Line
150. I Hate Rock n’ Roll — The Jesus and Mary Chain
151. Shark Smile — Big Thief
152. Another Day — This Mortal Coil (Roy Harper Cover)
153. Yesterday — Mark Sandman
154. Glasgow Eyes — The Jesus and Mary Chain 
155. The Stallion I-V — Ween
156. Foreign Hotel Garden — Papa M
157. Local Boy Makes Good — Papa M
158. Duty Free — Cracker 
159. 40 Miles — East River Pipe
160. Mutineer — Warren Zevon
161. Five Green Queens and Jean — Shane McGowan
162. I Love Rock n’ Roll — The Jesus and Mary Chain
163. Stop Whaling — Happyness 
164. Tiny Dancer — Elton John 
165. Teenage Kicks — The Undertones
166. Hotel California — The Eagles 
167. Take It Easy — The Eagles 
168. Going to California — Led Zeppelin 
169. Casper the Friendly Ghost — Daniel Johnston 
170. You Can Call Me Al — Paul Simon
171. Red Rain — Peter Gabriel 
172. Float On — Modest Mouse 
173. Undress — The Felice Brothers 
174. Ocean Man — Ween
175. Camp Pendleton — Camper Van Beethoven 
176. Skyway — The Replacements 
177. Nothing Compares to You — Sinead O’Conner
178. One More of Coffee — Bob Dylan
179. Lawyers Guns and Money— Warren Zevon 
180. Rexroth’s Daughter— Greg Brown
181. City Sickness — The Tindersticks 
182. Black Diamond Bay — Bob Dylan
183. Gustavo— Sun Kil Moon 
184. Lily Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts — Bob Dylan
185. Aspect of an Old Maid — The Mendoza Line
186. It Was Like That When We Got There — Camper Van Beethoven 
187. Mr. Bad Example — Warren Zevon 
188. Song for Zula — Phosphorescent 
189. Rebel Rebel — David Bowie
190. A New England — Phosphorescent 
191. On the Rocks — Bash and Pop
192. Out on the Weekend — Neil Young
193. Unknown Legend — Neil Young
194. Sweet Jane — Velvet Underground
195. Don’t Go Back to Rockville — REM
196. Honky Tonk Woman — The Rolling Stones
197. Moon Radio — The Violet Burning
198. Waiting for My Man  — The Velvet Underground 
199. Lost in the Supermarket — The Clash
200. King Rides By — Cat Power
201. Speed Trap Town — Jason Isabel
202. Most People Are DJs — The Hold Steady
203. Berlin Kitty — The Violet Burning
204. (T) Outta My System — My Morning Jacket
205. (T) Jonah — Wussy
206. These Three Days — Lucinda Williams
207. Soft in the Center — The Hold Steady
208. Lonesome L.A. Cowboy — Peter Rowan
209. Sugercube— Yo La Tengo
210. (T) The Buff and the Flex Result — Lifter Puller
211. (T) Language City — Wolf Parade
212. On the Beach — Neil Young
213. Yesterday — Mark Sandman 
214. Million Dollar Bill— Dawes (Conor Obrest Cover)
215. The Boom Boom Lounge — Michael Knott
216. Dylan Thomas — Better Oblivion Community Center
217. The Flames Are Coming Back — East River Pipe
218. This Year — The Mountain Goats
219. Slapped Actress — The Hold Steady
220. Eye of Fatima — Camper Van Beethoven
221. I’ll Be Your Handbag— Shane McGowan
222. Orange Crush — REM
223. Copperhead Road — Steve Earle
224. (T) Small Town Napoleons — The Mendoza Line  
225. (T) Toy Automatic — The Afghan Whigs
226. Mission Veajo — Lifter Puller
227. Big Day Coming (Acoustic and Electric) Yo La Tengo
228. Guts — John Cale 
229. From the Right Angle — Dawes
230. All Apologies — Sinead O’ Conner (Nirvana Cover)
231. Song for Whoever — The Beautiful South 
232. What’s Going On — Marvin Gaye 
233. From a Window Seat — Dawes
234. Seven Languages — Camper Van Beethoven 
235. Rain Street — Shane McGowan
236. Detroit Has a Skyline — Superchunk 
237. Ocean Man – Ween
238. Gardening at Night — REM
239. Always Crashing in the Same Car — David Bowie
240. Watching the Wheels — John Lennon
241. Jane — The Aunt Bettys 
242. Working Class Hero — John Lennon
243. The Week of Living Dangerously — Steve Earle
244. Michigan — Red House Painters 
245. Berlitz — Seam
246. Jesus — The Aunt Bettys
247. Police and Thieves — Junior Murvin (Clash cover)
248. Shine a Light — Rolling Stones 
249. Letter to Eloise — The Cure
250. Kevin is Gay — Giant Drag
251. Rock n’ Roll — Velvet Underground
252. (T) Just Like the Tom Thumb Blues — Bob Dylan
253. (T) Halloween Parade — Lou Reed
254. (T) I’m Not (live) — Daddy Issues
255. Esther — The Hold Steady
256. Paul is Dead — Yo La Tengo
257. Honkey’s Ladder — The Afghan Whigs 
258. We Shall Live Again — The Felice Brothers 
259. Plymouth — Strand of Oaks
260. Suzy Lighting— Warren Zevon
261. Rented Rooms — Tindersticks 
262. The Rockaways — Conor Oberst
263. End of the Line — The Traveling Wilburys 
264. Shooting Star — Bob Dylan
265. Spinners — The Hold Steady
266. Wonderful Life — The Felice Brothers 
267. Close to Me— The Cure
268. Girl From Oregon Hill — David Lowrey
269. Everybody Get a Fucking Day Job— David Lowrey
270. Where’d the Cheese Go— Ween
271. The Sick Bed of Culcahian— The Pogues 
272. An Unguarded Moment  — The Church 
273. Come Dancing — The Kinks
274. Carmelita — Warren Zevon 
275. Sound and Vision — David Bowie
276. Everybody’s Talkin’ — Harry Neilson 
277. Madame George — Van Morrison 
278. You Shook Me All Night Long — AC/DC 
279. Aaron’s Getting Poopy — Michael Knott 
280. Raspberry Beret — Prince
281. Sixers — The Hold Steady  
282. Gotta Get Drunk — Phosphorescent 
283. 36D — The Beautiful South
284. Clampdown — The Clash
285. Lay Lady Lay — Bob Dylan  
286. Thunder Road —Bruce Springsteen 
287. Shattered — The Rolling Stones 
288. Jan the Weatherman — Michael Knott
289. The Way They Murdered Me — East River Pipe
290. Sequestered In Memphis — The Hold Steady
291. The Mermaid Parade — Phosphorescent 
292. Star Star — The Rolling Stones 
293. Once Upon a Time in the West – Dire Straits 
294. Requiem for Dying Mothers Part I and II — Stars of the Lid 
295. Leaving Haringey — The Clientele
296. Sweet Virginia — Rolling Stones 
297. I Was So Bad — The Red Crayola 
298. How Do You Sleep — John Lennon
299. Pass the Wine — John Lennon 
300. Just for You — The Church
301. Hanky Panky Nohow — John Cale
302. She Came In Through the Bathroom Window — The Beatles
303. Jealous Guy — John Lennon 
304. Fairytale of New York— The Pogues 
305. Bluebird of Happiness — Mojave 3
306. Available — The National
307. The Legend of Chavo Guerrero — The Mountain Goats 
308. Japanese to English — The Red House Painters 
309. Anybody Else — Bash and Pop
310. Sugar for the Pill — Slowdive
311. Headed for the Door — Moonface
312. Slow Slow — The National 
313. Sarah — Mojave 3
314. Jacking the Ball — The Sea and Cake
315. Daysleeper — REM
316. Alex Chilton — The Replacements
317. The Fall of the High School Running Back — The Mountain Goats
318. Rafael — Seam
319. I Met the Stones — Dinosaur Jr. 
320. Stuck Between Stations — The Hold Steady
321. Holidays in the Sun — The Sex Pistols 
322. Friday I’m In Love — The Cure
323. Bad Doctor — The Mountain Goats 
324. Every Rose Has It’s Thorn — Poison
325. Here’s to Your Fuck — The Gits
326. Push the Lil’ Daisies — Ween
327. Career Opportunities — The Clash 
328. Ninety Miles and Hour (Down a Dead End Street) — Bob Dylan
329. I Live in LA — Camper Van Beethoven 
330. Ballad of John and Yoko — The Beatles 
331. The Last Days of Our Acquaintance — Sinead O’Conner
332. Back in the USSR— The Beatles 
333. Bouncing Round the Room — Phish 
334. Early Man — Mark Sandman
335. God Save the Queen — The Sex Pistols 
336. Your Latest Trick — Dire Straits 
337. Mistaken for Strangers — The National 
338. Jet Plane — The Popsavers
339. Come Together — The Beatles 
340. Caught Beneath Your Heel — Mojave 3
341. Like a Rolling Stone — Bob Dylan
342. Teary Eyes Bloody Lips — Moonface
343. Oh La La — John Cale
344. Talent Show — The Replacements 
345. Autobiography — John Cale
346. Whole Wide World — Wreckless Eric
347. (T) The Amarillo Kid — Craig Finn
348. Diamond Joe — Bob Dylan
349. Watch Yo Screw — DJ Screw 
350. Inferno — The Felice Brothers 
351. Janie Jones — The Clash
352. (T) Suspicious Minds —Elvis Presley (My Morning Jacket Cover)
353. Barnaby Hardly Working — Yo La Tengo
354. Answering Machine — The Replacements
355. Unsatisfied — The Replacements 
356. Nice Nice — Lifter Puller
357. (T) I Wanna Be Sedated —The Ramones 
358. (T) Spaced Cowboy — Sly and the Family Stone
359. Hard Times — Bob Dylan
360. Artificial Flowers — The Beautiful South 
361. Ugly Flower Pretty Vase — Moonface
362. Dungtitled in a Major — Stars of the Lid
363. Thursday — Morphine
364. Bastards of Young — The Replacements
365. Radio Song — The Felice Brothers  
366. One In a Million — Guns N’ Roses
367. Sailin’ da South — DJ Screw 
368. Friends in Low Places — Garth Brooks
369. Carry Bag Man — The Fall
370. Cardinal Song — The National 
371. Girl from Ipanema — Astrud Gilberto 
372. Where is the Love — Mojave 3 
373. No Divorce — The Mountain Goats 
374. Countess From Hong Kong — Velvet Underground
375. Mon Desir — The Violet Burning
376. Low Budget — The Kinks 
377. TB Sheets — Van Morrison
378. Rocket Man — Elton John (My Morning Jacket)
379. November Rain — Guns N’ Roses
380. Beat on the Brat — The Ramones
381. Washington Bullets — The Clash
382. Man Without Ties — Paul Westerberg
383. Brown Eyed Girl — Van Morrison 
384. Brown Eyed Handsome Man — Chuck Berry
385. Love’s Gonna Get’cha (Material Love) — KRS One
386. Band on the Run — Paul McCartney
387. The Trouble With Classicists— Lou Reed and John Cale
388. Rape Me — Nirvana
389. Froggie Went a Courting
390. Black Boys on Mopeds — Sinead O’Conner
391. Tweeter and the Monkey Man — The Traveling Wilburys 
392. Handle Me With Care — The Traveling Wilburys 
393. Welcome to the Terradome — Public Enemy 

Pending a Listen: 

The Magnificent Seven — The Clash 

Marbles — Tindersticks 

Raindrops — Tindersticks

Little Blue — The Beautiful South 

Radio Song — The Felice Brothers 

===== =====

x. Rock n Roll Singer— Mark Kozelek (AC/DC Cover).

The original Rock ’n’ Roll Singer is by AC/DC—a raw, early cut from T.N.T. (1975). It’s already got the skeleton of something great: the ambition, the defiance, the simple declaration of identity. But it’s also messy in that early AC/DC way—loose production, Bon Scott’s sardonic asides cutting across the sincerity, a kind of pub-rock sarcasm that slightly diffuses the emotional core instead of locking it in.

Kozelek hears it differently. And more importantly, he means it differently. Across multiple incarnations—solo, Red House Painters, and Sun Kil Moon—he’s returned to this song like it’s a personal doctrine. It’s not a cover so much as a repeated self-interrogation. The acoustic version strips everything down to confession; the Sun Kil Moon electric version adds weight and repetition; but it’s the live performance at The Chapel in San Francisco (Aug 19, 2017, on YouTube) that feels definitive. Electric guitar, but unpolished. Less mannered than the studio SKM version. More immediate. More exposed. And Kozelek just inhabits it.

The lyric isn’t complicated: working-class childhood, parental expectation, school, rebellion, long hair, refusal to conform. It’s the classic origin myth of rock music itself. But in Kozelek’s hands it becomes something more existential. Not just “I want to be a rock singer,” but this is the only coherent identity available to me that feels real. That chorus—repeated, rising, almost mantra-like—isn’t just aspiration. It’s fixation. He pushes it harder each time, voice tightening, almost ecstatic. There’s a strange joy in it, but also something like compulsion. This is not a person imagining a career. This is a person locking onto a destiny.

And then the darker undercurrent: the devil-in-the-blood logic of ambition. The sense that the desire itself has a cost baked into it. Kozelek doesn’t play that as metaphorical flourish; he plays it as recognition. If you want this badly enough, you don’t just chase it—you surrender something to it. That’s why it works as his thesis statement. Because Kozelek’s entire career is that tension stretched over decades. Early Red House Painters records gave him Have You Forgotten and Cruiser—songs of melodic melancholy and emotional clarity. Then the Sun Kil Moon era brings the breakthrough again with Benji (2014), an album that suddenly re-centers him in the conversation. “Ben’s My Friend” in particular catches that strange inversion of time and status—his connection to Ben Gibbard now reframed through shifting fame and distance, with that brutal line about the thin line between backstage access and feeling like an impostor in your own life.

From there, things expand—and fragment. The later Sun Kil Moon output becomes looser, more digressive: breakfast details, cats, long spoken passages, emotional drift that sometimes feels like composition and sometimes feels like overflow. The public persona starts to wobble. He writes songs like War on Drugs Can Suck My Cock after disputes over live volume at festivals. A collaboration with Jesuturns into extended monologue rather than song structure. He comments on audience demographics, once saying he used to play for “cute chicks” and now plays for “guys in tennis shoes.”

The self-mythology becomes unstable—at times self aggrandizing, at times self-undercutting, often both in the same breath. Then there are the controversies, the accusations that circulate without ever fully resolving into clean narrative closure. Combined with the relentless release schedule—multiple records a year, nearly impossible to track in full—it creates a figure who is always present and slightly out of phase with how he is being received. And yet. And yet he still lands inside my personal canon. Because at his core, Kozelek keeps returning to that original statement: I wanted to be a rock ’n’ roll singer, and I became one. Everything else—digression, controversy, excess, fatigue—is built on top of that irreducible core.

My great friend Ian (who thinks I’m nuts for still following him, despite also loving Red House Painters) isn’t alone in that reaction. Kozelek divides listeners precisely because he refuses to stabilize into a single, manageable artistic identity. But for me Singer remains clean. Not in execution, but in intent. A mantra. A declaration. A life chosen and lived, even when it gets strange. And that’s why it sits so high for me: not because it’s simple, but because it’s absolute.

x. Malibu Love Nest — Luna.

The simplest song in the top 20 and also the silkiest. First things first: Sean Eden, Luna’s long-time guitarist, is an absolute genius. His playing sits in that rare tier—alongside people like Mick Taylor or Mark Knopfler—where the instrument stops sounding like accompaniment and starts sounding like commentary. He doesn’t decorate the song; he inhabits it.

And by all accounts, Dean had to work for that role. In Dean Wareham’s memoir Black Postcards, there’s that wonderfully deadpan passage about Bryce reorganizing Sean’s process:

“Sean is a brilliant guitarist… but he is one of these people who equates the music-making process with a great deal of pain.”

That line captures something essential about Luna: the tension between ease and effort. The music feels effortless, but it absolutely isn’t. Once Eden joins the band, everything lifts. Luna becomes something more refined, more cinematic, more self-aware without losing its cool distance. Malibu Love Nest—from Rendezvous, which for my money is their best record (though Penthouse is right there)—is the clearest expression of that shift. It’s also my favorite Luna song by some distance, ahead of Chinatown, Tiger Lily, and Slash Your Tires.

On the surface, the song is almost disarmingly simple. Romantic imagery, luxury signifiers, travel, repetition of place-name refrain. A kind of dream-pop postcard written in real time. But Wareham is doing something subtler: he’s writing the fantasy while simultaneously showing you its constructedness.

The lyric moves through diamonds, bathrooms, planes, buses, trains, Italian magazines, streets, beaches—all the surfaces of a life that looks expensive and weightless from the outside. But the repetition of writing a name in all these places gives it away. This isn’t possession. It’s inscription. It’s someone trying to leave evidence inside a world that may not actually be theirs.

And that’s where Britta Phillips comes in—not just as bassist, but as tonal shift. Her presence gives the song its low-end pulse, that understated, sultry movement that turns the whole thing from detached dream into something bodily. Luna stops being just a guitar band and becomes something more fluid, more intimate, more ambiguous.

There’s also that Black Postcards anecdote about Wareham in therapy after his divorce, where he’s asked whether he’d prefer $200 or $150 per session and immediately says $150. It’s funny, but also perfectly revealing: the instinct toward practicality inside a life that otherwise drifts toward aesthetic distance. That’s Luna in miniature—romance always checked by cost, beauty always adjacent to accounting.

And then the final shift: “You will call me Robespierre…” Suddenly the dream cracks open into history, revolution, collapse, irony. The romantic fantasy is no longer just private—it’s unstable, politicized, slightly unmoored. The air changes.

That’s what makes Malibu Love Nest work. It’s not just a soft-focus love song or a beachside reverie. It’s a controlled drift between aspiration and awareness—between the life being imagined and the life quietly acknowledging it might never quite arrive. Silk on the surface. Restlessness underneath. A perfect Luna move.

x. Red River Shore — Bob Dylan.

I first heard Red River Shore the same way I heard a lot of Dylan that mattered to me—by accident, or what felt like accident at the time, buried in the sprawl of one of his Bootleg records. It didn’t announce itself. It just was, sitting there, waiting, and then suddenly it wasn’t just another outtake—it was the thing I couldn’t shake.

This is Dylan at his most haunted and most restrained. No overproduction, no grand gestures, no myth-making machinery humming in the background. Just a voice, a melody, and a memory that refuses to settle. If something like Street-Legal feels overstuffed and restless, and even the later Time Out of Mind leans into atmosphere as a kind of emotional amplifier, Red River Shore strips all of that away. It’s clean, but not simple. Bare, but not empty. The song circles around a figure—maybe a woman, maybe an idea, maybe a version of the self that no longer exists—and it never quite resolves what that figure is. That ambiguity is the whole point. Dylan doesn’t give you a stable object to hold onto; he gives you the feeling of reaching for something that keeps receding.

The “shore” itself feels less like a place and more like a threshold, somewhere between memory and myth, where the past is always just out of reach but never fully gone. And then there’s that extraordinary turn in the middle of the song, where he brings in the story of a man from long ago who could raise the dead—a clear echo of Jesus, or at least of the idea of miraculous restoration. Dylan had already passed through his overtly Christian phase by the time this surfaced, but what’s striking is how the language of that period never really leaves him. It just changes form. Here, it’s not testimony. It’s question. If that kind of power once existed—if something lost could be brought back—what does it mean that it doesn’t seem to happen anymore? That question lands hardest when he turns back inward, toward his own invisibility. There’s a line of thought that runs through the song: maybe nobody ever saw him at all, except for that one figure from the shore.

It’s devastating in its quietness. Not anger, not even sorrow exactly—just the possibility that a life can pass largely unrecognized, that meaning can hinge on a single encounter that may or may not have been real in the first place. What’s remarkable is how controlled the longing is. Dylan has written plenty of songs that ache, that burn, that lash out, but this one doesn’t do any of that. It waits. It moves at the pace of recollection, not desire. There’s a sense that whatever happened on that shore is no longer accessible in any direct way, and yet it exerts a gravitational pull on everything that comes after. The narrator isn’t trying to get back there—he knows he can’t. He’s trying to understand why it still matters.

And like the best Dylan songs, it resists interpretation even as it invites it. Is this about a lost love? A spiritual dislocation? A life not lived? Yes, and no. It holds all of those possibilities without collapsing into any one of them. It’s a song about memory as an unstable medium—how it distorts, preserves, elevates, and traps all at once. There’s a quietness to the performance that makes it feel almost private, like something not meant for a wide audience. That’s part of why it lands so hard. It doesn’t feel like a statement; it feels like a confession overheard, or maybe even a thought that slipped out before it could be edited.

Dylan has written hundreds of great songs across more phases than most artists could survive, but Red River Shore sits in a category of its own. It doesn’t rely on his persona, his legend, or even his voice at its most forceful. It relies on something deeper: his ability to inhabit uncertainty without trying to resolve it. That’s why it stays with you. Not because it explains anything, but because it refuses to.

x. Every Grain of Sand — Bob Dylan

I first heard Every Grain of Sand at 6:30 in the morning on AM radio when Bootleg Series I–III dropped in 1991, and I rushed out to buy the box set—my first ever CD purchase. The song is perfect. It summarizes Dylan’s restless, intense, questioning of his faith and suggests both belief and doubt in a truly majestic way.

To get to a song like this, Dylan had to pass through a dozen different selves. The early pure folk troubadour, the protest voice of a generation, the electric poet of love and surrealism, the mid-period wanderer—all of it accumulates here. By the time he reaches the so-called Christian era, he’s already lived several artistic lives. You can hear the turbulence of that transition in records like Street-Legal, with its overproduction and relative lyrical sprawl, before the much cleaner, more direct Slow Train Coming sharpens the message into something more doctrinal, more certain. And yet Every Grain of Sand doesn’t sound certain at all. That’s what makes it extraordinary.

Even coming out of a period of apparent conversion—shaped, at least in part, by the orbit of his gospel-era collaborators and the intensity of that moment—it refuses to settle into simple testimony. It doesn’t preach. It wavers. It searches. The voice in the song is not anchored; it’s oscillating, moving between conviction and isolation, presence and absence.That tension is everything. Dylan is not resolving faith here—he’s inhabiting it, in all its instability. The sense that there might be something there, and the equally powerful sense that there might not be, coexist without canceling each other out. The song holds both, and in doing so, it becomes larger than any one phase or identity he’s ever occupied. Unbelievable.

The bootleg version—with the faint, accidental intrusion of a barking dog in the background—is far prettier and more soulful than the also great album version. It feels less finished, more human, more exposed—closer to whatever fragile truth the song is reaching toward. It’s x on the list, but one in my soul.

x. Easy / Lucky / Free — Bright Eyes.

I love Bright Eyes, but I love Conor Oberst solo even more—Cape Canaveral sits higher for me—but Easy / Lucky / Freeis a killer. It’s one of those songs that feels light on the surface—almost buoyant—but carries a depth that sneaks up on you. That’s a rare trick, and Oberst pulls it off without seeming to try. The song moves with an ease that belies how much is actually going on underneath. There’s reflection, acceptance, a kind of cautious optimism that never tips into naïveté. It feels like someone taking stock of a life that’s been messy, uncertain, sometimes self-destructive, and deciding—quietly—that it’s still worth something. Not in a grand, declarative way, but in a lived-in, almost offhand recognition.

Part of what makes the song endure is how open it is. It doesn’t force a meaning; it leaves space for you to step into it. That’s something Oberst has gotten better and better at over time. The earlier Bright Eyes records—I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, for instance—are incredible, but they’re more immediate, more raw in their expression. By the time you get to Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, which I think is the best Bright Eyes record, the songwriting has deepened. There’s more control, more subtlety, more willingness to let a song breathe. Easy / Lucky / Free sits right in that evolution. It’s not trying to overwhelm you; it’s trying to stay with you. And it does There’s also a great conversation around the song in its afterlife.

The Dawes cover is marvelous—faithful but expanded, bringing a different kind of warmth and clarity to it. And then there’s the reciprocal moment: Oberst covering Million Dollar Bill, Dawes’ best song, on their collaboration. It’s a perfect exchange—two artists who clearly hear each other, trading songs and making them their own. Oberst is my number five artist of all time, and it’s songs like this that make that ranking feel inevitable. The songwriting has only gotten deeper with time, more assured without losing that early vulnerability. And even though Cape might sit higher, Easy / Lucky / Free is right there, doing something just as difficult in a completely different register. So, so good.

x. Double — Michael Knott

This song sits as part of a remarkable one-two punch in Knott’s catalog—Double at 14 and Rocket at 15. Rocket is the better-known, more frequently covered song, the one that tends to travel. But Double might actually be the deeper cut, the one that does more with less and lingers longer once it’s over. On its face, the song is almost disarmingly simple: a guy at a bar knocks over another guy’s drink at the pool table, offers to replace it, and the other guy asks for a double instead. The narrator digs out four bucks—his last—and buys it.

That’s the whole setup. It’s small, almost nothing. A minor act of compensation in a place where those transactions happen all the time. But Knott is never just writing the surface story. What unfolds underneath is something much heavier, something that shifts the song from anecdote to diagnosis. The bar becomes a threshold space—where the choices you make, even small ones, echo into the life waiting for you at home. The song moves forward and suddenly you’re not at the pool table anymore; you’re waking up in a house with responsibilities you can barely face. A child needs you. Your partner is trying to hold things together. There’s church, obligation, the faint outline of a life that’s supposed to be stable and meaningful, and the overwhelming sense that you are not meeting it.

And then Knott does something devastating: he reframes the entire situation through another failing marriage—the preacher, the supposed moral center, the guiding light for years, whose own life is unraveling. The implication lands hard and quietly: if even that doesn’t hold, what chance does anything else have? The song becomes about marriage—not in the sentimental or idealized sense, but in the lived reality of it. Fatigue, compromise, small resentments, moments of grace that don’t quite offset the weight of everything else. The double at the bar starts to feel like more than a drink—it’s a decision, a coping mechanism, a tiny tilt in a direction that’s already dangerous.

Knott’s work has always carried that edge of autobiography, that sense that he’s not writing about struggle so much as from within it. His battles with alcohol were real, long-standing, and central to both his life and his art—something he never fully resolved, only wrestled with in public through his songs. But while that struggle shaped him, it is not officially cited as the cause of his death, which remains undisclosed.  What makes Double so powerful is how much it trusts the listener. It doesn’t explain itself. It doesn’t moralize. It presents a series of moments—bar, home, church—and lets you connect them, lets you feel the throughline without being told what it is. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. That’s why it might be Knott’s best song, even if Rocket gets the attention. Double doesn’t announce itself. It just sits there, quietly devastating, doing its work long after the song is over.

x. Thrasher — Neil Young.

There are so many great Neil Young songs that could go up here—On the Beach, Roll Another Number for the Road, Albuquerque, Cortez the Killer, Powderfinger. But it’s Thrasher that makes the list. This is a highly allusive, poetic, and suggestive song—TV, the Grand Canyon, diamonds—but it really feels like it’s about the aftermath of the 60s: its disillusionment, its lost promise, the slow realization that whatever was supposed to change didn’t quite change the way anyone thought it would. The idealism curdles, or maybe just hardens. What once felt fluid starts to set.

“They were lost in rock formations / they became park bench formations”—to me, that still reads as a shot across the bow at Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Young keeps moving, keeps shedding skins, while the others settle, calcify, become part of the landscape they once tried to reshape. But the line opens up beyond that. “Rock formations” suggests something vast, natural, even awe-inspiring—people absorbed into something larger than themselves. “Park bench formations” is smaller, static, almost resigned—people sitting still, watching instead of acting, becoming fixtures rather than forces. That shift—from movement to stasis, from formation to being formed—feels like the real subject of the song. Not just what happened to CSNY, but what happened to a whole generation that thought it was going to keep moving forever. And then there’s the title.

What the hell is a “Thrasher,” anyway? I mean a thresher is a machine that separates grain from chaff. Something that strips away the unnecessary to get at what’s essential. But a Thrasher? In any case, the song has that quality—it cuts, it reduces, it leaves you with something bare and slightly unsettling. It’s not nostalgic. It’s diagnostic. Young only played it live once, flubbed some lines, and never went back to it. That almost adds to the mystique. It feels like a song that wasn’t meant to be repeated too often, like it captured something too specific, too transitional, to comfortably revisit. The song is delivered in Young’s patented high-pitched voice, with a finely tuned acoustic guitar that gives it a kind of fragile clarity.

It’s a beautiful song and my favorite on a long, long list of great ones.

x. April the 14th Part II— Gillian Welch

I first heard April the 14th, Part II the way a lot of the best music enters your life—over the radio, half by accident, but not really. Conor Oberst had cited it as one of his favorites, and that was enough to lean in, but the song itself did the rest. It didn’t ask for attention; it quietly demanded it. Welch’s partnership with David Rawlings is one of the great creative pairings in American music—two artists so attuned to each other that the line between writer and interpreter almost disappears. Across an extraordinary catalog, they’ve built a sound that feels both ancient and immediate, rooted in tradition but never derivative. April the 14th, Part II sits right at the center of that achievement.

The song takes its title—and its loose conceptual grounding—from the date of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, but it doesn’t approach history in a straightforward way. Instead, it fractures it, reframes it, turns it into something lived-in and contemporary. The past isn’t something to be preserved behind glass; it’s something that leaks into the present, reshaping it in ways that aren’t always obvious. Lincoln is there, but so are highways, bars, long drives, and the peculiar loneliness of being in motion for too long. That’s where Welch’s genius shows most clearly. She understands the continuity between those worlds—the mythic American past and the far less romantic present of touring musicians, late nights, and empty miles. When she drops a line about a girl passed out in the backseat, it doesn’t feel like an aside. It feels like evidence. She knows the road—not the idea of it, not the mythology, but the actual, grinding, disorienting reality of it. The song carries that knowledge without ever turning didactic.

There’s also something deeply American in how she holds all of this together. Not patriotic, not sentimental, but recognizably American in its contradictions—history and amnesia, ambition and exhaustion, beauty and wreckage. In that sense, she stands in a clear lineage with artists like Townes Van Zandt and Emmylou Harris, inheriting their sense of narrative, their attention to emotional truth, and their ability to let a song breathe without forcing it toward resolution. And yet she never feels like an imitator. The voice, the phrasing, the perspective—it’s all distinctly her own. A true American original. April the 14th, Part II doesn’t resolve its tensions. It lets them sit. History and the present, myth and reality, movement and stasis—they all coexist without collapsing into something neat. That’s what gives the song its weight. It’s not trying to tell you what America is. It’s showing you what it feels like to live inside it. And once you hear it, you don’t forget it.