55. "Corduroy" by Pearl Jam

A last blast from peak Pearl Jam before drummer changes and general malaise of success dulled the edge of their song craft. 

I love Matt Cameron as a drummer - for Soundgarden. But for me, a hardened '90s preservationist, the drummer for Pearl Jam will always be Dave Abbruzzese, all philosophical and personality conflicts aside. His drumming on Vs. and Vitology is exemplary for its energy, detailed skill, and creative adaptation to each song. After him, the drummers of Pearl Jam became essentially Eddie Vedder yes-men and play with nothing of the same joy.

Here on "Corduroy," Abbruzzese is more restrained than usual but still provides the energy of the song. The song is inert and uncommitted to start, until that drum build enters, and with one big flam on that excellently poppy snare, the blaring verse is underway. 

The choruses are more modest, with the drums settling into a very basic pattern to support. In later albums, Vedder would take this plainness obsession too far, but here I love the contrast with the explosive verse. 

The vocal is a great one, with unique personality and not just Vedder engaging in Vedder tics. 

The middle interlude is cool. Again the drumming is key to its originality. I like especially the change leading into it. The main guitar pattern gets a lot of milage in different sections but I think hits its best incarnation in the the ending.

54. "Constant Craving" by k.d. lang

The early '90s were a very different time than now. Young teenagers were not expected to have many public opinions, and were not exactly welcomed by most people to condone thoughts and feelings considered outside the mainstream.

I remember the summer "Constant Craving" played constantly on the radio, the summer of 1992. I was a 12 year old North Dakotan, just waking up to the world. And hearing this song, I realized something about myself. It was something I don't think North Dakotan kids were supposed to freely acknowledge. But it was undeniable, suddenly just magically self-evident.

I loved music deeply.

There were songs I loved before that, inklings of a special attraction to the melodies, harmonies, and rhythms that compose songs. This was the first song, however, upon hearing it new, I specifically remember thinking to myself, "This is ingenious music."

It was downright scandalous.

There was so much brilliance to hear. The vocal harmonies of "Constant Craving" are irreplaceable. I was just not prepared for them at the time. They still give me instant goosebumps; I've sung along to them a thousand times. The verse chord progression is so dark and thoughtful, the expansive vocal melody is trademark. The chorus is utterly original and disorientingly passionate. Beneath the harmonic luster, the rhythms are perfect, the economical snare work just exactly right. I love the small drum rolls folded in at great spots. A special shout out to the evocative bass playing throughout. 

What parts of this song are greater: the big moments or the small ones? When we have that breakdown towards the end, where silence is followed by a spellbinding, hushed section - what dramatic confidence. And then for all that full, astounding instrumentation to enter for the ending passage... I can pick one instrument, say, the vibraphone, and just hear it in the mix and know joy. 

It wasn't long after that summer of '92 I started forming the idea that listening to this stuff wasn't enough. I needed to play. 

Thank you, k.d. lang, for speaking to so many and letting us know our feelings were all right. In the very words of this great song, our passionate feelings are transcendent, possibly telltale of a universal love guiding us all.

53. "Communication Breakdown" by Led Zeppelin

I usually try to link to a studio version of each song I post about, because if you've not heard the song before, I want to at least give you one chance. And then maybe you'll want to own a superior audio version at some point. 

I make an effort to avoid linking music videos for songs, just to limit distractions from what the song really is versus what maybe appealing and marketable things are being done on a visual companion to the song to drive sales.

And I usually avoid linking to live performances, just because the studio versions are the fullest experiences of most songs on my list.

For "Communication Breakdown," that last rule breaks down. There is nothing I can tell you about this song without showing you the flailing drum performance of John Bonham live on this video. Throw in an absolutely peak power Robert Plant vocal, and you see the two unvarnished, unschooled talents that propelled Led Zeppelin past any competition.

The music otherwise is pretty simple to understand. The same concept worked again on the next album with "Whole Lotta Love": Find one excellent down-strummed blues riff and pummel the world with it.

52. "Come Undone" by Duran Duran

If you have verse melodies and rhythms as good as this, you are in rarefied air. If you have a chorus that is as complex a sequence as this and still catchy, you are in super-rarefied air. If it turns out that this wasn't the chorus but just a transition with a masterful build to the real chorus - and the real chorus is the payoff of "Come Undone," welcome to Cloudcuckooland.

51. "Come Together" by the Beatles

I explained a while back about the pressure John Lennon was under to produce a song for the first worldwide satellite broadcast, and how, improbably, "All You Need Is Love" just materialized out of the ether for those auspicious purposes.

Well, John wanted to go double or nothing after that. 

A few years later, here comes Timothy Leary - the Timothy Leary - and Mr. Leary is ready to challenge incumbent Ronald Reagan for the office of governor of California. Leary had the Berkley Ph.D, the Harvard teaching cred, the cachet of running extreme psychedelic human experimentation programs that boiled over into disarray and personal grandiosity. So the populist appeal was there.

He just needed a song.

When Leary came to John Lennon for this campaign song, John knew he had his follow up to "All You Need Is Love" served up for him on a countercultural platter. Leary's slogan was "Come together, join the party." John's song would write itself. It would, except it didn't. Not really. He got together a nice little chorus, but there was nothing more to be proud of by the time Leary was imprisoned on drug offenses, ending his campaign.

And this is the natural order of things. Classic songs are not just produced on request, no matter what you think "All You Need Is Love" proved. Regardless of the reputation of the writer, songs are more likely to end up cast out into the heap of false starts than surviving to completion, much less ending up transformational.

But the songwriting persisted. Maybe Leary would get out of prison and ask for it? (He didn't. Leary instead opted to escape and spend the next few years as a fugitive in the care of arms dealers and other luminaries.) Probably that little germ of a chorus that John had was just too cool to give up on.

And when the final recorded Beatles album Abbey Road came out, there it was as the first track, "Come Together." The political aspects are basically gone; the verses are busy with crazy descriptions of maybe one person, maybe four, maybe four personalities in one body. The chorus seems to have the only lyric surviving from the Leary commission.

And what a nice little damned achievement the song turned out to be too. The chorus is short but obviously has its fantastic melody. And I like the verses a lot, that swampy bass line.

The real cool of this song for me is in the instrumental sections, the solo and the ending fade out. The pace is just perfect, the drums and bass putting down a great groove. Just great rock n roll. I love John in the ending, the ideal John, long hair, granny glasses, the white suit, following each "come together" with a sharp "yeah."

Timothy Leary had five wives.