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Song of the Day #528: ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’ – The Beatles

Usually, as with yesterday’s featured song, The Beatles gave Ringo a song to sing just to throw him a bone. You keep the beat for the rest of us, bloke, so here’s a few minutes in the spotlight.

But a couple of Beatles songs just wouldn’t be the same without Ringo on lead vocals. One is ‘Yellow Submarine,’ a corny trifle that’s perfect for Ringo because he sounds like he really means it… that’s a song aimed at 8-year-olds and it needed to be sung at their level. And I don’t mean that as an insult to Ringo. On the contrary, it’s kind of a gift.

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The Best Movies of the 00’s

This list was even harder to put together than my top albums of the last decade. I see a lot more movies than I buy CDs — an average of about 50-60 per year — and I love enough of them to put together a solid top ten list every year. Even looking at only the top fives, that’s 50 films vying for ten spots.

That said, many of these titles were no-brainers. The most difficult task was narrowing down ten or so titles to fill in the bottom half of this list. As with the album list, I could easily reshuffle the deck and swap out some of those films for these, depending on my mood, but I suppose the fact that I’ve settled on the ten that I did says something.

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Song of the Day #527: ‘Act Naturally’ – The Beatles

It’s interesting that The Beatles have always been considered a true band, with every member as theoretically important as the others. This despite the fact that John and Paul wrote and performed 90% of their songs. Contrast them to The Rolling Stones, where Mick Jagger and Keith Richards share the spotlight and most people probably couldn’t name all the other members of the band. But everybody knows John, Paul, George and Ringo.

Ringo is certainly the main beneficiary of this. He wrote only a couple of the band’s songs and, while he’s certainly a fine and under-appreciated drummer, he’s not really the architect of The Beatles’ sound in any real way. His main contribution was his personality and considering the importance of the band’s image and performance outside the studio, that was no small matter.

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The Best Albums of the 00’s

If you had told me way back when the decade began that at the end of 2009 my top two albums would be by Rihanna and Brad Paisley, I’m sure I would have called you crazy and booted you back into your time machine. My growing fondness for certain pop/R&B and country artists is definitely a development I didn’t see coming and one that has made the last ten years more interesting.

Looking over the ‘best of the decade’ lists in various publications recently, I’m reminded that my tastes fall pretty much dead center between the excessively commercial and the fiercely independent. Nothing on the list below will have anybody scratching her head asking “Where does he find these obscure acts?” But with a couple of exceptions, you’re not going to find any chart-toppers either.

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Song of the Day #526: ‘Volcano’ – Beck

Beck’s most recent album, 2008’s Modern Guilt, was his last required CD to fulfill his contract with Interscope Records. unlike athletes, who usually play their best when they’re in the final year of a contract (to better their chances of cashing in on the next one), musicians often release an album of filler to get free from the corporate reins.

Beck didn’t go so far as to release an album of B-sides or live performances but Modern Guilt does feel muted and lacking in inspiration. Even so, it received mostly positive reviews and holds together well enough as a collection of songs, just not as an album with a vision or purpose.

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