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Song of the Day #597: ‘Better Than This’ – Keane

I have a small pile of CDs from the past year or so that I’ve never gotten around to reviewing. I even have draft posts sitting in the admin of the blog ready to go, but they’re sitting empty. I find it difficult to review albums, especially when I don’t feel strongly one way or the other and the artists aren’t in my stable of favorites. How many ways can you say “this is a pretty good album by a pretty good band?”

So I’m finally accepting that I’m never going to give these albums proper reviews but rather than ignore them entirely I’m going to pick a song from each to highlight the rest of this week as Songs of the Day.

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Song of the Day #596: ‘She’s Everything’ – Brad Paisley

Today is my wedding anniversary… lucky number thirteen. I’ve now spent more than a third of my life married and just about half of my life with this wonderful woman. And those percentages will keep on creeping up. The way time is flying these days, I know 15 and 20 will be upon us in a blink.

And that prospect absolutely thrills me. I’m baffled by those men (and women) who fear commitment and view marriage as a restricting thing. On the contrary, I find it perfectly liberating. It’s a powerful and freeing thing to completely be yourself with another person, for better or worse. I suppose some people are able to do that with just anybody, but for me it doesn’t come easy.

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Song of the Day #595: ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ – Bob Dylan

I deliberately avoided mentioning ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ in my write-up of Highway 61 Revisited yesterday because I didn’t want to steal the thunder from today’s post. That’s a bit like writing about Michaelangelo works displayed in Florence without mentioning the David.

For all of the many genres and musical styles Dylan has explored, all of the topics he’s covered, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ remains in many ways the quintessential Dylan song. It was voted as the #1 song of all-time in a Rolling Stone survey of musicians and critics published in 2004. And whether or not you share that opinion, it’s impossible to deny that it’s one of the few songs that unquestionably deserves to be in the running.

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Song of the Day #594: ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’ – Bob Dylan

In late August of 1965, five months after the release of Bringing It All Back Home, Bob Dylan unleashed Highway 61 Revisited upon the world. Let me repeat that… five months after Bringing It All Back Home. Two of the finest albums not just in this man’s discography but in all of recorded musical history were released within a half year of each other.

That’s like if Steven Spielberg has released Jaws in July and Raiders of the Lost Ark in December. It almost doesn’t seem fair (and it gets even crazier, as I’ll point out next week).

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Song of the Day #593: ‘Clutch’ – Shea Seger

Here’s one for the “where are they now?” file. Of course, nobody really knew where Shea Seger was then either. Then would be 2001, when she released her first (and only) album, The May Street Project.

Seger is an interesting mix of a Norah Jones-style balladeer and a hip-hop sensibility. She strikes me as a more accessible version of Ani DiFranco or Tori Amos, which if you think about it is a really great thing to be. I don’t know if I can think of anybody recording today who fits that niche. The May Street Project was well-received critically and Seger had a minor hit with today’s SOTD.

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