Today’s the day that WXPN radio, the fine public radio station out of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, begins its annual year-end countdown of songs as determined by a vote of listeners.
This year, it’s the 885 greatest songs of the 21st century. (Why 885 songs? WXPN is 88.5 FM.)
Stream it here and see which songs have made the countdown.
We were asked to rank our top 10 songs, with 1 the best, 2 second-best and so on.
Went through all my LPs and … uhhh … having been a 20th Century Boy (cue T. Rex from 1973), I’m definitely a 20th Century Man (cue the Kinks from 1971). Just a wee bit of my collection is from 2000 or later, and a bunch of those are compilations of older music.
Picking the greatest songs of the 21st century is not exactly in my wheelhouse. My list definitely skews toward 20th-century artists going strong in the 21st century. Yours will be different. Mine is highly subjective, 10 songs I like, not the 10 greatest songs of the 21st century.
10. “Crush,” Sleigh Bells, from “Reign of Terror,” 2012. Friends have tipped me to a lot of the music I’ve enjoyed over the years. Glick is one such friend. This is one such song. He shared it on Facebook in 2012, saying: “Okay. Am I too old to have this primal desire to crank the Sleigh Bells’ ‘Crush’ full-blast on my stereo?” No, sir, you are not, then or now.
9. “Gwan,” the Suffers, from “The Suffers,” 2016. This might have been THE song of the summer for me in 2015. This scorching 10-piece soul/R&B group from Houston played to a tiny audience of about 100 at a theater in downtown Green Bay that June. We rarely see anyone that cool.
8. “Beautiful World,” Colin Hay, from “Man @ Work,” 2003. A good memory of one of the first songs my son — then in grade school — loved hearing. I met Colin Hay after a show in Green Bay in 2005, and I told him that. He raised an eyebrow and nodded. This is the alternate mix of a song from his 2000 LP, “Going Somewhere.” I prefer this version.
7. “Secret Rendezvous,” Chocolate Watchband, from “This Is My Voice,” 2018. What good are top-10 lists if you can’t hype your friends’ songs? My friend Derek See plays guitar on this most crunchy cut. (A coolest song in the world on Little Steven’s Underground Garage Sirius/XM channel in early 2019, for those who care about that.) Derek is making new music, too. He and Miranda Thompson are Meadow Gallery. Their dreamy new holiday song is “Will You Still Believe In Me?” It’s a cover of a 1968 song originally recorded by The Christmas Spirit, an L.A. supergroup that featured Linda Ronstadt and Gram Parsons.
6. “Ain’t It A Sin,” Charles Bradley, from “Changes,” 2016. It was 16 years ago this week — the first week of December 2008 — that we saw Charles Bradley perform at the Barrymore Theatre in our old Madison, Wisconsin, neighborhood. Bitter cold outside, scorching inside that night. At that time, he’d released only singles. We heard “The World (Is Going Up In Flames),” a 2007 Daptone Records single done in a fierce, passionate, wrung-out style. The more polished but no less fierce, passionate and wrung-out “Ain’t It A Sin” was yet to come.
5. “Some Humans Ain’t Human,” John Prine, from “Fair & Square,” 2005. Written about George W. Bush and his gang. It rings true for Trump and his gang.
“Some humans ain’t human/Some people ain’t kind/They lie through their teeth/With their head up their behind/You open up their hearts/And here’s what you’ll find/Some humans ain’t human/Some people ain’t kind
4. “Burning Hell,” Tom Jones, from “Praise and Blame,” 2010. A friend tipped me to this one, too. A John Lee Hooker cover on which you can feel the flames. Meat knew the good stuff. I miss him. Gone seven years now.
3. “Keep Me In Your Heart,” Warren Zevon, from “The Wind,” 2003. I miss Warren Zevon, too. Gone 21 years now, and you gotta wonder what he’d have thought about many of those years. The poignancy of this song grows more intense with every passing year. Enjoy every sandwich.
2. “100 Days, 100 Nights,” Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, from “100 Days, 100 Nights,” 2007. Sharon Jones had to be way up high on this list. Even though she was late to the party — she was 46 when her first LP was released in 2002 — she became one of the great performers of the 21st century over the next 14 years, the rest of her much-too-short life. We saw her perform three times, in New York’s Battery Park in 2007, at that Madison show with Charles Bradley opening in 2008, and in Milwaukee in 2014. I miss Sharon Jones, too.
(Last year’s WXPN year-end countdown was the 885 greatest songs by women. I gave that a go, too. But I left Sharon Jones out of my top 10. My bad. Just one Gladys Knight song would have sufficed, but I went with “Friendship Train” and “The Nitty Gritty.”)
1. “Please Read the Letter,” Robert Plant and Alison Krause, from “Raising Sand,” 2007. An exquisite performance, as are all their duets. Brilliantly paired. It’s a cover of a song Plant wrote with Jimmy Page (and bandmates Charlie Jones and Michael Lee) when they recorded as Page and Plant in 1998. Their second LP, “Raise the Roof,” was most unexpected when it arrived in 2021 — 14 years after the first LP — but well worth the wait.
Here are my next 10 songs, the ones that didn’t make the cut, in no particular order beyond chronological.
“My Shit’s Fucked Up,” Warren Zevon, from “Life’ll Kill Ya,” 2000.
“Lady Marmalade,” Christina Aguilera, Lil’ Kim, Mya and P!nk, from “Moulin Rouge, Music from Baz Luhrmann’s Film,” 2001. (The Labelle original is on my top-10 list from last year.)
“Whipped Cream,” Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass featuring Ozomatli (Anthony Marinelli remix), from “Whipped Cream & Other Delights Re-whipped,” 2006.
“Eyes on the Prize,” Mavis Staples, from “We’ll Never Turn Back,” 2007.
“The Guitar,” Guy Clark, from “Somedays The Song Writes You,” 2009.
“Skyfall,” Adele, from the “Skyfall” single, 2012.
“Me & Magdalena,” the Monkees, from “Good Times!” 2016.
“Hard On Everyone,” Kathleen Edwards, from “Total Freedom,” 2020.
“Can’t Stop the Rain,” Neal Francis, from “In Plain Sight,” 2021.
“Rock On (Over and Over),” Lemon Twigs, from “A Dream Is All We Know,” 2024.
Since I put this list together last month, I’d have to add new songs by Lady Blackbird (“Like A Woman” from the “Slang Spirituals” LP) and Father John Misty (“She Cleans Up” and “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All” from the “Mahashmashana” LP).