Monthly Archives: August 2011

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Song of the Day #1,146: ‘Snow Angel’ – Ron Sexsmith

Best Songwriters – #8 – Ron Sexsmith

Ron Sexsmith’s presence here won’t come as a surprise to any of you who’ve watched me lavish praise on him over the course of ten Ron Sexsmith Weekends. In fact, the bigger surprise might be that he isn’t higher on the list.

Sexsmith is perhaps the finest melody-writer working in the business today. He doesn’t go in crazy new directions on each album; he doesn’t create cinematic landscapes through innovative production techniques; he doesn’t play fast and loose with shifting time signatures. He simply writes — with amazing consistency — some of the most sublime melodies I’ve ever heard.

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Song of the Day #1,145: ‘Ghost World’ – Aimee Mann

Best Songwriters – #9 – Aimee Mann

Aimee Mann is the artist on this list who earns the “most improved” designation. If you’d told me that the Mann of ‘Til Tuesday and her first solo album would grow into one of the most assured, mature and emotionally effective songwriters I know, I would have been highly skeptical.

But around the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, largely inspired by Mann’s music, her albums took a turn toward the sublime. Her Bachelor No. 2, which featured several of those Magnolia tracks, was confident, dramatic and stylistically diverse — a statement record by a woman nobody expected to make a statement.

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Song of the Day #1,144: ‘Summer, Highland Falls’ – Billy Joel

Best Songwriters – #10 – Billy Joel

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a comment saying that I don’t consider Brad Paisley or Taylor Swift among my “top tier” of songwriters. So of course the question that immediately jumped into my mind was, “Who is in my top tier of songwriters?”

The next two weeks will be dedicated to answering that question.

First, a few ground rules.

I’m restricting this list to solo artists. No Lennon/McCartney or Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe band collaborations here. No Counting Crows, Belle & Sebastian or The Smiths.

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Song of the Day #1,143: ‘Everybody’s Here’ – Brad Paisley

American Saturday Night is so chock full of good songs that I could dedicate the next four weekends to it and not hit all of the highlights.

I could pair up the jack-rabbit guitar workout of the hilarious ‘Catch All the Fish’ with the delicate ballad ‘Anything Like Me,’ in which Paisley imagines all the trouble his young son will get into over the years if he takes after his old man.

Certainly I should find room to highlight ‘The Pants,’ in which Paisley exposes macho chauvinists the world over as the helpless babies they really are. Or the title song, a celebration of our melting pot, with its wonderful audience shout-along moment (“Little Italy, Chinatown, sittin’ there side by side… live from New York, IT’S SATURDAY NIGHT!”) that makes you think every time you hear it how great Paisley must be in concert.

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Song of the Day #1,142: ‘She’s Her Own Woman’ – Brad Paisley

Brad Paisley followed his instrumental album, Play, with the finest release of his career (to date), 2009’s American Saturday Night. This is the album that originally brought Paisley to my attention.

After seeing both Time magazine and Slate.com rank American Saturday Night as the best album of the year — of any genre — I figured I had to give it a try. I was hooked instantly.

As the theory goes, the album that introduces you to a favorite artist tends to be your favorite of his albums. That’s certainly the case here, and there is no better introduction to Brad Paisley than American Saturday Night.

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