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Song of the Day #6,295: ‘This Old Porch’ – Lyle Lovett

Continuing a countdown of my favorite albums of 1986…

#9 – Lyle Lovett – Lyle Lovett

I was 14 in 1986 and not quite a “music guy” yet. It was a year or two later that I caught the bug and started digging into Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, and other oldies, and then turning my attention to new artists. So my list of favorite 1986 albums is almost entirely made up of records I heard years later.

That’s certainly the case for Lyle Lovett’s self-titled debut. I wasn’t turned on to Lovett until college, when …And His Large Band had come out recently and Joshua Judges Ruth was on the horizon. Those two albums cemented my fandom and sent me back into his catalog.

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Song of the Day #6,294: ‘True Blue’ – Madonna

My last installment of the Decades series came back in April, when I wrote about the albums of 1976. I had a hard time coming up with a list of my personal favorites from that year.

Today I’m jumping ahead a decade, diving into the releases of 1986, and I have the opposite problem. I had a hard time narrowing my list of personal faves down to ten, and my top five are all-time classics.

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Song of the Day #6,293: ‘Money For Nothing’ – Dire Straits

Topping the charts the week of September 28, 1985, was the Dire Straits classic ‘Money For Nothing,’ the second single from their album Brothers in Arms.

The song spent three weeks at #1 and gave the band their only chart-topping hit in either the U.S. or their native UK (where it peaked at #4).

Mark Knopfler got the idea for the song while shopping at a New York City appliance store. He overheard one of the workers commenting on televisions tuned to MTV. Several of the song’s lyrics are the man’s direct quotes.

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Song of the Day #6,292: ‘I’m Sorry’ – John Denver

Throwing back to the week of September 27, 1975, we find John Denver atop the Billboard Hot 100 with ‘I’m Sorry.’

This is one of the six songs I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that topped both the Country chart and the Hot 100 that year. ‘I’m Sorry’ was the last of four chart-topping singles for Denver, all released between 1973 and 1975.

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Song of the Day #6,291: ‘Relationships’ – Haim

My final candidate for this year’s alternate universe Song of the Summer is ‘Relationships,’ the lead single of Haim’s fourth studio album, I Quit.

Haim has never had a song reach the Billboard Hot 100 (with the exception of Taylor Swift’s ‘No Body No Crime,’ on which they featured). So this breezy single had no chance of cracking the actual Song of the Summer chart. It was also released in March, three months before the album dropped, so maybe it’s more a Song of the Spring.

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