My Ultimate Playist

This is the unobvious version of my faves: No “Jumping Jack Flash. No “Like a Rolling Stone.” No “Born to Run.” Not even “Hard Day’s Night.” Instead:

17. “Old Brown Shoe,” The Beatles. A George song, a seeming throwaway but catchy as catchy can…be.

16. “Sweet Old World,” Emmylou Harris (Lucinda Williams song). The argument for staying alive seems inarguable. Here it is also beautiful.

15.  “Brilliant Disguise,” Bruce Springsteen. Maybe not precisely the adult, psychological, when-you-said-this-did-you-mean-to-imply-that…? dissection of a relationship pop music mostly has lacked: The song does have recourse, at one point, to a gypsy fortune-teller. But the insistent carny music combined with Bruce’s paranoid musings have perhaps altered, for some, the experience of looking into a love-object’s eyes.

14. “Birds of a Feather,” Billie Eillish. One occasionally tries to keep up just a bit. One rarely is this well rewarded for one’s efforts. And hey, you can now say, “You’re so full of shit,” in a love song.

13. “Jokerman,” Bob Dylan. Cannot say I have any idea what point the great poet is making here. Is he being self-critical? Bob Neuwirth-critical? But this song, though it seems to be heaping scorn, always lifts me up: onto that “milk-white steed,” “one step ahead of the persecutor within.” Fine place to spend six minutes…and maybe another six minutes directly after that…and then six more minutes.

12.  “Dancing in the Starlight,” Mick Jagger. Jagger’s solo records are consistently good and consistently underrated. This widely unknown song is ecstasy producing for me and for members of my family of all ages.

11. “Strange Currencies,” REM. They swing and miss a lot, but when they get hold of one . . . . All the ache and ecstacy of love with none of the cliches. A 1990s love song that probably could not have been written in earlier decades, even by Cole Porter.

10. “Crash Into Me,” Dave Mathews Band. What an original, non-syrupy and dynamic metaphor for sex, for love.

9. “Do You Believe in Magic,” The Lovin’ Spoonful. John Sebastian was inhabited by music, a music which was, in turn, inhabited by magic, at a time when we were all more habitable.

8. “Someday Soon,” Judy Collins (Ian Tyson song). Perhaps you have to have been a kid when half of the most watched shows on American TV were about cowboys. But I hear it and I feel . . . young!

7. “Counting,” Marianne Faithful (written by Bob Lind). Singing, pre-heroin addiction, of “unspoken musical joys” and someone being “mine till the time when the dawn will awake me/The morning will shake me/the highway will take me.”

6.  “A Thousand Kisses Deep,” Leonard Cohen. Among the most powerful growing older verses I know: “The ponies run, the girls are young/The odds are there to beat/You win a while, and then it's done/Your little winning streak.”

5.  “She Moves On,” Paul Simon. Well, if you’re looking for material on the high highs and low lows of love, it would be hard to top a long relationship with Carrie Fisher, which even included, in Simon’s case, a brief period in which they were married. This song does that relationship—and elusive love—justice.

4. What Does It Take,” Junior Walker and the All Stars. His sax solo is proof that music can be, at once, ethereal and earthy, transcendent and sad.

3.  “Cover Me Up,” Jason Isbell. Romantic, sexual love at its most insistent: “Girl leave your boots by the bed/We ain't leavin' this room.” Most definitely consensual sexual love—I should add.

2.  “Nothing Compares 2U,” Sinead O’Connor’s live version (Prince song). This woman disappears into this song. And the song disappears into this woman. Surely a great love song. Surely one of the greatest rock performances ever.

1.  “I’m Moving On,” The Rolling Stones’ live version (Hank Snow song). Hank Snow’s original from 1950 is honky-tonk, even breezy, but does include that clever complaint: “You’re flying too high for my little sky.” The Stones must have studied up on Ray Charles’ version from 1959 which adds considerable weight and emotion, but not as much as they—while all in their 20s—would give the song. And few performances ever can match its drive.