Category Archives: random weekends

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Song of the Day #3,172: ‘Gimme Some Truth’ – John Lennon

john_lennon_imagineJohn Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ (the song) is such a classic that it’s easy to overlook how great Imagine (the album) is, too.

In addition to the iconic title song, you have ‘Jealous Guy,’ ‘Oh Yoko,’ ‘Crippled Inside’ as well as the lesser-known ‘It’s So Hard,’ ‘I Don’t Want to Be a Soldier,’ ‘Oh My Love,’ ‘How?’ and ‘How Do You Sleep?’ That last one is a scathing takedown of Paul McCartney (“those freaks was right when they said you was dead”), which Genius.com calls one of the “first diss tracks” in pop music.

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Song of the Day #3,166: ‘A Song To Sing’ – Hanson

hanson_get_the_girl_backEvery few years I remind my readers that I have a soft spot for the band Hanson, particularly their 2000 album This Time Around. This time, the Random iTunes Fairy did the honors.

Scoff all you want, but if you haven’t listed to this infectious batch of power pop and melodic ballads, do yourself a favor and give it a try. Lead singer Taylor Hanson, in particular, is a true talent. In 2009, he formed the supergroup Tinted Windows with another wickedly good pop songwriter, Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger, and members of Cheap Trick and Smashing Pumpkins.

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Song of the Day #3,165: ‘All Along the Watchtower’ – Bob Dylan

john_wesley_hardingWhen the Random Weekend iTunes Fairy offers up a stone-cold classic by an artist I have covered exhaustively, I assume — after 3,164 Songs of the Day — it will be a repeat.

But somehow, despite spending a full year on Bob Dylan Weekends, I have never posted his version of ‘All Along the Watchtower.’

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Song of the Day #3,159: ‘Love Having You Around’ – Stevie Wonder

stevie_wonder‘Love having You Around’ is the opening track of Stevie Wonder’s 1972 album Music of My Mind, the first Motown album on which he had full creative control. The record marked Wonder’s first extensive use of synthesizers.

As he would on most of his records, Wonder contributed almost every sound on Music On My Mind. On this track, for example, only the trombone work of Art Baron didn’t come from Wonder himself.

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Song of the Day #3,158: ‘So Like a Rose’ – Garbage

beautiful_garbageGarbage has a muscular industrial sound that could be accurately described as hard rock with an electronic flavor. They’re not exactly balladeers.

But the band has a tradition of ending each album with a slow, usually sad, song. On 2001’s Beautiful Garbage, the band’s third album, that song was ‘So Like a Rose.’

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