I’ve decided to ask my clients to give me a group of songs that have meant something to them in their lives. I will put together a playlist on Spotify and and embed it in the article. Along with the song titles, I have asked them to write a paragraph or so about each track and explain why they picked it, what it meant to their life and/ or where it fit into the timeline of their lives. I really think this will be an interesting look into the lives of some of my favorite songwriters as music fans, because that is where we all started out. Enjoy and share.
East Nashville based artist, Ben de la Cour released The High Cost of Living Strange in 2018. Here is his playlist and his explanations of why he chose them.
“Nothing” – Townes Van Zandt
This wasn’t the first Townes song I heard – that would’ve been “Pancho and Lefty.” And it’s not the greatest song Townes ever wrote – that would also most likely be “Pancho and Lefty.” But it’s his truest attempt to reconnoiter the abyss that lies between people, that lies between a person and their true self. A snapshot of pure hell. “Sorrow and solitude, These are the precious things, And the only words That are worth remembering”
“Angel of Death” – Slayer
My first taste of real metal. I was probably eleven and I was hooked from the first note. By the time Tom Araya’s terrifying and throat shredding scream came in my whole world had fallen apart. All I’d heard up to that point immediately became irrelevant drivel. It had everything you could ever want – Lombardo’s perfectly syncopated but still swinging rhythms, Kerry and Jeff’s maniacal guitar interplay and blood-splattered Jackson Pollock solos, and Tom Araya’s surprisingly nimble bass lines underpinning his gleeful recounting of holocaust atrocities. This was thrash metal by ghouls, for ghouls.
“Another Girl, Another Planet” – The Only Ones
One of the greatest songs in punk rock history that almost nobody knows about. Jon Dee Graham got me into these guys on a drive back to New Orleans after a show at the Red Dragon in Baton Rouge. Great players, great song, phenomenal recording. It’s so catchy and delivered with perfect pure born-to-lose junkie attitude. When the band kicks in and that (improvised) solo takes off. Man. You’re in for a fucking ride!! Supposedly the band has mentioned several times on record that this really is a love song, but… we all know it’s about drugs. They’re all about drugs. I know I am.
“From Her to Eternity” – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
The manic, obsessive desire to posses someone at all costs is something we have all felt at one point or another. Nick Cave takes this a step further. Shrieking like a deranged chimp over a snaking baseline and hilariously unsettling piano motif, he becomes so acutely obsessed with both the object and nature of his desire that his thoughts turn to murder.“I know that to possess her, Is therefore not to desire her And then that little girl, Will just have to go!”
“Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye” – Leonard Cohen
Just so painfully painfully beautiful. Heartfelt and graceful without being sentimental. Perfectly crafted without a hint of scaffolding. He was the master. We’ll never see another like him that’s for sure.
“Desperados Under the Eaves” – Warren Zevon
The most perfect song ever written, and one that still makes me cry to this day. I discovered Zevon while I was living in LA, and nobody I’d heard before or since has come close to capturing the true soul of that beautiful glowing sea jewel of putrid opulence. I probably learned more about songwriting from this one album than every other album by every other songwriter combined. Ok, that’s a fucking lie.This song also contains the greatest couplet in recorded history. “And if California slides into the ocean, Like the mystics and statistics say it will,I predict this hotel will be standing / until I pay my bill” HAH!
“Last Dayz” – Onyx
Even though I grew up in Brooklyn I was never as into hip hop as a lot of my friends were. That changed when I heard Onyx. This was straight up ghoul city! Were they the greatest rappers? No. But will “All We Got Iz Us” go down as one of the greatest albums of hip hop’s greatest decade? Also no. That doesn’t matter. I loved it, and their sound perfectly captured the suicidal desperation, poverty and self loathing of grimy 90s New York street life in a way that made it the ideal gateway drug for a fifteen year old hesher like me.
“Anything That Lasts” – Becky Warren
Becky Warren is one of my favorite songwriters in Nashville. Or anywhere. We met at the Douglas Corner open mic when I first got to town – I was feeling depressed, sorry for myself and having a hard time understanding why the Nashville establishment weren’t already genuflecting en-masse before my staggering talent and undeniable genius. I’d been there almost a year for chrissakes! The minute I hear Becky sing I knew that this was what I’d come to Nashville to find. Such a beautiful and desperate song, delivered with so much humanity and grace. That’s Becky all over. She’s the best.
“Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues” – Skip James
“You know that people, They are driftin’ from door to door, But they can’t find no heaven, I don’t care where they go” Holy shit is this some spooky fucking music. Nobody sang sadder than Skip James, and nobody looked sadder doing it. I love Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters as much as the next guy, but there was always something off-putting about most electric blues to me. Maybe it’s all the years of watching awful middle aged white men like Eric Clapton ham-fistedly freebasing their own little rocks of triple platinum soul out of cocaine, cheap wine, paternalistic racism and self aggrandizing. I don’t know.But to me, Skip James and the rest of the delta blues artists like Charley Patton, Mississippi John Hurt, Son House and Robert Johnson were on a whole different planet. Somewhere none of us are ever going to be able to get to. For which, if you are even vaguely familiar with the atrocities of the Jim Crow South or have ever looked closely at any of those of photos of Skip, deep into his eyes, you should consider yourself lucky. I have an old Robert Crumb drawing of Skip taped to the top of my guitar. When I’m playing the Omaha VFW Hall at 3pm on a Wednesday, I look down at him and feel a little better.
“Boris” – The Melvins
I love the Melvins. The only band tattoo I have on my body that wasn’t from a band I played in is a Melvins tattoo. This is the heaviest song ever recorded, by the heaviest band ever to exist. They invented sludge metal. You try playing that slowly! it’s a lot harder than one would think. Dale Crover is a living monument of worship to heavy-handed drummer boys the world over. King Buzzo is god. And they were dead serious. And they were not. Who could tell? Were you in on the joke? Was there a joke at all? It didn’t matter. It was the FUCKING MELVINS.I also learned a lot of valuable lessons from these guys about crowd interaction and audience participation, which I used to great effect with my old metal band (because everyone hated us) and with my later solo career (because I hate everyone). People generally think of working the crowd as something of an inclusive, Kumbaya-style positivity circle jerk, but the Melvins turned the act of antagonizing, baiting, and befuddling the crowd into high art.
“Personality Crisis” – New York Dolls
The greatest American rock’n’roll band of all time. But only for one album.
“All Along the Watchtower” – Jimi Hendrix “
The first time I heard this song is probably my earliest childhood memory. I must have been around five years old and I distinctly remember my mom coming over to me while I was sat at the living room table and telling me she had something to show me. I remember her opening the CD player in our old Panasonic and sliding the shiny disc in. I remember the electronic death rattle our old hi-fi system always made before kicking into hyperdrive. I remember a few seconds of silence. Then my whole world exploded into technicolor. Nothing was ever the same. “Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late”: Dylan may have been the better songwriter, but Dylan never did ANYTHING like this. Jimi took his song and made it something that could never be bound by the poor vocabulary of words and music. Jimi was an American Alien and a fucking genius.
“Down to the Waterline” – Dire Straits
As a kid I found this song to be just unbearably sad and nostalgic. I think I’ve always been a huge sucker for nostalgia, even from an early age. Most songwriters probably are. Mark Knopfler is one of my all time favorite guitarists, and his chicken picked lead run at the end of the end of the solo on this one is incredible. It’s funny, even though they’re English there was always something so New York about Dire Straits, at least in my mind, in a late night, down at the docks, Hubert Selby Jr kind of way.
“Bat Chain Puller” – Captain Beefheart
It’s impossible to choose a favorite song by someone with such a mercurial, varied and straight up batshit insane catalog. But this one, my favorite song from my favorite album, is great. So great in fact that we named our tour van The Batchain in its honor. Beefheart was closer to and had a deeper understanding of the blues than most of his so-called contemporaries, and despite all his Dadaist leanings he always came back to it. Like the Melvins, his music gave me a whole new framework of understanding of what music could be and how it could be made – from locking his (mostly teenage) band in a shack for weeks with no food and dosed to the gills on LSD to throwing an ashtray against a wall, turning to his guitarist and telling him “that’s the solo! Learn it”. A beautiful monster