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When MCA died of cancer in 2013 and the Beasties were put to bed, it was a very sad time for music fans. In the ensuing years, Ad-Rock and Mike D have put together a truly excellent coffee table book of their career and an even better audiobook where they had friends and famous fans read various stories from the book. Then, in 2019, it was announced the guys would be staging live shows directed by longtime friend Spike Jonze where they recounted in-person various stories from the book and the highs and lows of their career. One of these…

This is the type of article I never knew I wanted to write! This is my actual playlist on my iPod, and it’s something I continually update and revise when new songs come into my head. Having written two books and working on a third and putting together my own dissertation has allowed me more access to music and has given me more to time digest and enjoy everything under the sun. These are the best songs I’ve come across in my 34 years, stuff I never get tired of regardless of how many times I hear them. These runner-ups…

“Big Big Train is the antithesis of an overnight success story.”– BBT Manager Nick Shilton, January 2020 Being a music writer of a certain age means having an established set of tastes and expectations and artists whose work pushes one’s buttons. That history and context makes it that much tougher for anyone to storm the gates of the high-walled keep known as “My Favorite Artists.” Progressive rock collective Big Big Train made it inside those walls in 2009 after first coming to my attention in 2007, a decade and a half into the band’s existence, at a time when I’d…

I tried hard to keep this to 101 songs but found myself unable to cut any more from my shortlist of over 150. Some of these songs mean a great deal to me and some mean nothing other than I just love to hear them. I did employ the rule of one song per artist in an effort to give a broader overview of my tastes – I could easily have filled this list with Dylan, Stones and Beatles songs. I also omitted a lot of more recent songs (from say the last ten years) as I haven’t lived with…

When Duke originally pitched this concept to the Vault Staff, there were so many ideas that were floating around in my head in terms of the best way to approach it.... as an official ranking? Could I have multiple songs from the same artist? Are we talking guilty pleasures, the “best 100,” my personal favorite....IT WAS TOO MUCH!So after consulting the oracles, reading the auspices, visiting multiple fortune tellers, and shaking the Magic 8 Ball, I chose a path. This list is my personal favorite songs for a particular artist.... but I did ramp up the difficulty level and only…

I realized several things while contemplating my favorite songs. First, I’m really getting old. Second, I prefer older music. Third, I am somewhat mainstream, but there are exceptions. Fourth, my tastes have changed with the passage of time.I have approached this article by years beginning with the first record I purchased with my own money. That means nothing before 1964. So here is my 57-year journey of favorite songs.1964Jan & Dean -- “Little Old Lady From Pasadena”The first record I ever bought with my own money, so it has to be on the list.Roy Orbison  -- “Oh, Pretty Woman”The first…

I haven’t written in a long time. Well, that’s not quite true – I churned out a dissertation and co-authored a book (Secrets And Lies In Psychotherapy, for anyone intrigued!). While I’ve been kept away from music writing, I’ve still been as steeped in songs as ever. I’ve found that my music consumption has changed shape a bit over the years: I’ll devour a few albums deeply and obsessively, and then find myself exploring individual songs. So this task was a refreshing one, as I got to comb the depths of my Spotify for what has moved me over the…

A list of favorite songs can never be more than a snapshot of a particular moment in your life. Tomorrow a song that you barely paid attention to before may hit home in a whole new way. The day after that, a song that meant so much may feel trite or overblown or somehow insufficient to the moment you’re now inhabiting. Songs are friends you keep for years, fading in and out of touch, mostly connecting and reconnecting, but sometimes disappearing into memory. This is my list today. Next month it will look different, and six months from now it…

Music tastes change, like everything else in life. As a result, it is almost impossible to pick a list of songs as my all-time favorite. So, for this exercise, I have selected tracks that I find special: either because of a particular artist, album, or because they transport me to certain memories, or because the songs have an endearing quality and they never wear off on me. With that in mind, below are 101 songs that are special to me (in no particular order). The only rule this list adheres to is that no artist/band is repeated. Finally, why “101”?…

I wasn’t going to write this piece. It’s exhausting enough right now (April 3, 2020) just trying to keep up as the world we knew three short weeks ago continues to spin wildly off its orbit, without attempting to grieve on the page for an artist whose work has given me decades of enjoyment, now dead at just 52 of COVID-19. This week has been one gut-punch after another. The trick of art, though—the kind that worms its way into people’s hearts and minds and lives, populating or punctuating moments both significant and insignificant—is that it grants a kind of…