Not all of these songs are great, but all of them are perfect pop songs. Also, most of them are great.
Don Dixon -- "Giving Up the Ghost"
Judybats -- "Daylight"
Jennifer Trynin -- "One Year Down"
Richard Thompson -- "Keep Your Distance"
Tom Waits -- "Downtown Train"
Steel Pulse -- "Babylon Makes the Rules"
Aztec Camera -- "Oblivious"
Barenaked Ladies -- "Life in a Nutshell"
Blasters -- "Marie, Marie"
Kirsty MacColl -- "My Affair"
Elvis Costello -- "King Horse"
Marshall Crenshaw -- "Someday, Some Way"
Crowded House -- "Distant Sun"
Echo & the Bunnymen -- "Bring On the Dancing Horses"
Tanya Donnelly -- "The Bright Light"/"Landspeed Record"*
John Hiatt -- "Lipstick Sunset"
Dan Penn -- "The Dark End of the Street"
The Jam -- "Eton Rifles"
Freedy Johnston -- "I'm Not Hypnotized"
Pere Ubu -- "Waiting for Mary"
Eddi Reader -- "The Right Place"
REM -- "Fall On Me"
The Sundays -- "My Finest Hour"
The Cars -- "You Might Think"
* I'm counting these as one because they're equally perfect and they're right next to each other on the same album.
4 comments:
OK, I'll bite... What makes a pop song perfect? Is there some kind of X/Y spectrum ala J. Evans Pritchard (you know the one that a young Ethan Hawke would object to) or is it something more soulful?
Every ranking needs a criteria.
-Nathan
I can go with REM but there are so many of their songs that fall into near perfection. How about "Losing my Religion"? Barenaked Ladies don't really have anything that can top "Brian Wilson", IMHO. But then, that's the song my husband likes to blast when he's cleaning house.
The Cars are always worth re-discovering ("...let them brush your rock-n-roll hair..."). Since viewing them on YouTube, I favor the Ray Campi / Ronnie Mack version of "Marie, Marie." To me, it's all in the hair -- and the shirt.
Wasn't it Joyce Kilmer who said 'but only God can make a perfect pop song'?
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