What makes a song great? Is it the beat? The vocals? The rhythm? Maybe it’s a particular drum or guitar solo. For me, it’s a combination of all those things and more. Like movies, a great song becomes part of your identity. You carry it with you even when you’re not listening to it. Continue reading “Top 50 Favourite Songs: Aaron Aradillas” →

I discovered how many songs I love, and how hard it is to narrow it down to just 50. Looking through themed discs I had created over the years for a series of music-sharing meetups with a couple of friends, I came up with an initial list of about 250. Trimming to 50 seemed impossible at first. The first cut got me to around 100 must-haves. I then decided to be ruthless; this is what I came up with, but I would definitely be unhappy if these were the only 50 songs I could listen to ever again. Continue reading “Top 50 Favourite Songs: Paul Woods” →

My friend Isabel Cole explained to me that in horoscope-speak your “moon” is the secret Spotify playlist that you’d make to soundtrack your inner life. She also reminded me that astrology is fake, which is why it’s good—it’s like an improvisational prompt with arbitrary parameters to ensure it’s not just an act of confirmation bias. Continue reading “Top 50 Favourite Songs: David Cooper Moore” →

Been reading everybody’s lists. Obviously a lot of you people are a lot younger than me. Lucky you in some regards. But apparently you missed some really great music. I come from the Classic Rock era. Some of this stuff I bought 6-7 times—45s, albums, 8-tracks, cassettes, then CDs, box sets, re-masters. Record company execs had nerve getting upset when I could download stuff for free from Napster. I was one of those record store geeks from High Fidelity. Continue reading “Top 50 Favourite Songs: Jim Esposito” →

I could have done another fifty, but I’m sure everybody says that. These aren’t in order of preference as much as the order I remembered them; I did a similar list when I turned 50 so this cannibalizes that a bit. As my friend Chris Buck said about his list, the period when I really, intensely connected to music lasted roughly from the ‘70s till maybe the turn of the millennium. Continue reading “Top 50 Favourite Songs: Rick McGinnis” →

This is not a very Rock Critic list of Favourite Songs. No Dylan, Stones, Joni, Clash, Prince, Husker Du/Sonic Youth, Beefheart, Bowie or Bubble Puppy (or even my friends Skinny Puppy). No Puppies. But on reflection I always thought my role was more of an editor/organizer than a cutting edge music scribe, even though NME / Sounds / CREEM / Trouser Press got me into the idea of thinking I could be in any way part of the magical music scene. Continue reading “Top 50 Favourite Songs: Dave “Rave” MacIntosh” →

I thought of numerous ways to attack this. One included a single track from every genre or sub- genre I could think of. Another was three tracks from every four year period to sort of evenly cover 1955-2021. Tried to be eclectic. Thought of including jazz and classical. But it just all got too hard (at least for now), and in the end decided to go for (mostly) favourite tracks. And 50 nowhere near does it. Chronological order follows: Continue reading “Top 50 Favourite Songs: Mark Fichera” →

So hard to choose! I am a bit sheepish that there are so few songs from the current century, but these are the ones that magically alter my mood and my heartbeat. Is it true that songwriting was that much more magnificent when I was young, or is it just because I was discovering new sounds and everything felt more exciting as opposed to my jaded ears now hearing sounds that get emptier each time they cycle back around? There are exceptions, of course. Continue reading “Top 50 Favourite Songs: Mary Dickie” →

These “Best Music” lists are off-putting, whether they’re from Rolling Stone (that still feels like a boomer relic) or Pitchfork (that more closely aligns with my taste), or any other institution. But they’re damn fun to make, so here is mine.

I was born in 1964 in Canada, then moved to New York in 1990. Continue reading “Top 50 Favourite Songs: Chris Buck” →

So, I live in Los Angeles, which means I spend an inordinate amount of time in the car.

So my favorite songs are really my “favorite songs to listen to while I’m driving my car…dangerously fast,” because I used to drive an ambulance, and still have a weird addiction to driving too fast while playing good music real loud (which we did in the ambulance while the lights and sirens were going…what, you thought we just listened to the siren? That’d be crazy). Continue reading “Top 50 Favourite Songs: Lou Noble” →

Making this list was too much like an evening spent looking at the mirror. B-but I really do like and listen to and remember a lot of other kinds of music, honest! Most of it I get better in the context of an album, however uneven, as I imagine making a mix, a playlist, and now I see that habit in the segmentation and subsets of this list. Continue reading “Top 50 Favourite Songs: Don Allred” →

Rolling Stone’s latest list was an update on their 500 Greatest Songs Ever (last published in 2004). As I did with their 2020 all-time albums update, I’ve decided to list my own favorite songs. While I wasn’t a voter, those who did all received a ballot with instructions to rank their favorite songs from 1-50. Unlike that ballot, I’ve left mine unranked. Thirty-two of my picks made the Top 500. Continue reading “Top 50 Favourite Songs: Tom Lane” →

I looked it up and the Rolling Stone greatest song list top ten had four songs by Black artists on their 2010 list; now, six songs, including the top three spots (and, coming out of nowhere, “Fight the Power” at 2), on the 2021 list. I remain at four. But I applaud their wokeness. Continue reading “Top 50 Favourite Songs: Jack Thompson” →