76. "Earthquake Weather" by Beck

My friends on West Coast USA and other seismic zones may be able to confirm this, but apparently "earthquake weather" is a real thing. Not real as in accurate, but an existing pseudoscientific belief shared by many in those regions. There is apparently this notion that a certain type of weather tends to precede earthquakes, either caused by the impeding event or some even have believed directly causing the event. I'd like to know any of your experiences with this concept. It's a bit of regional flavor that compels me.

Is this song about earthquake weather beyond the title? The lyrics are all over the place creating evocative motifs. Do they add up to a whole?

The first verse tends to focus on failings of modernity, and of people looking for a new way of life. The choruses seem to talk about maybe the afterlife being an illusion (and that consequently maybe the world we have is the only heaven we will get). The second verse does allude to the weather and the notion of something ominous coming. Is it an earthquake? Comparing it to a riptide that could rip "us" away suggests a general societal threat that traps us before we realize it. Hmm... What topic could unite the concepts of weather and general societal threat? It's a tricky one.

Lots of call outs to Beck's hometown of LA: Earthquakes, deserts, rip tides. Seeing the world in his backyard.

My single favorite line is the first: "Spaceships can't tame the jungle." Never, ever for get that, you modernists.

The music is just simply some of the coolest music Beck recorded. The ideas build this little ecosystem of sounds - is that sitar being pitch bent all over the place? It's the song's signature sound. Catchy small guitar phrases at key times, fun crowd background noise in the breakdown, funky little organ as a payoff. Excellent melodies. That drum beat is so simple, but man, at that pace, just slow enough to put some space between the quarter notes, every time that snare cracks it just satisfies.

75. "Drain You" by Nirvana

I've said it before: Drum creativity is song creativity. If Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl had decided to live his life as a cowardly number, a spiritual bust, he would have plopped his forgettable ass down on the drum stool and played a rock 4-beat on this song, lending nothing, asking nothing, then called it a night and headed back home for the latest in a lifetime stream of must-see TV. And he would not have embarked on the journey he did. 

Luckily Grohl came to the party lathered up and ready to break this band out of obscurity. His verse beat is a rolling tank of eighth notes alternating between snare and kick and unlocking the great strum pattern and creative chord choices of the guitar. The drums interpret the guitar rather than just act as the metronome.

The short transition out of the verse is another crafty unison of guitar and drum ideas, and the pounding drum fill is so satisfying to play on a tuned-up kit.

The choruses really kick, with Grohl smashing the cymbal and snare down on the quarter notes, the kick drum holding the eighth notes with alternating stresses. The guitars use the heaviness principle of two chords with the root notes at wide intervals. 

The middle section is overproduced on the album recording. Because of this odd digression, Dave Grohl jokingly referred to "Drain You" as Nirvana's "Bohemian Rhapsody." Played live, this section became more about a quiet pulse exploding into aggressive noise, falling off, and exploding again. It is where they really began to explore the expressiveness of pure noise. Before familiarity took over, the final build into the third verse would give me chills.

The vocal melodies for Nirvana were so unique always. Like Grohl on the drums, Kurt Cobain never wanted to sing a phrase that sounded rehashed. He was militantly original. So we have a verse melody that screams through these high notes, jumping intervals, varying its rhythm, and ending on a great resolution downward on a major chord. We have choruses of weird, moany long notes singing about something gross, but hitting an essential, catchy half step that finishes each phrase. It's sharp, pop Nirvana in the verses and weird, indy Nirvana in the choruses. 

My favorite song on the Nevermind album? Hmmm. Just may be.

74. "Don't Worry Be Happy" by Bobby McFerrin

There is the old line that fascism spreads because fascists inevitably compel others to become fascists. That is, the aggression of fascism forces an aggressive response, buttressing the fascists' dreams of instilling worldwide aggression.

Well, there is thankfully a counter truth: Music, being non-material, can draw those who love music toward the realization that happiness is non-material.

This lesson is embodied by the creation of this song.

Bobby McFerrin was not the sage who devised the line, "Don't worry, be happy." The man who did was Meher Baba, one of the prominent spiritual leaders of the early 20th century. He was an Indian national who, among many other things, traveled the world teaching his philosophies, advised Ghandi (unsuccessfully) to give up politics, and took a famous vow of silence at the age of 31 that he adhered to until his dying day.

Instead of dreaming up that line, what happened was: McFerrin found himself in some friends' apartment in San Francisco, noticing a poster on the wall with Meher Baba on it and that famous phrase. He thought it was "a pretty neat philosophy in four words," and off went his mind into a melody brought on by this exposure.

The musical mindset he had and the predisposition to admiring the simple truth (and musicality) of that phrase are not accidentally related. When you love music, when you live especially to produce music, the aggressiveness and conceit erupting from the pursuit of the material tends to seem alien. When you're Bobby McFerrin, freak virtuoso vocalist capable of creating entire compositions with nothing but the sound of the voice you were born with, the material trappings of the world have to seem very non-essential to the equation of life satisfaction. He didn't even have to save up for some dreamy white Stratocaster before he could renounce materialism in the pursuit of the great intangibles of harmonic sound.

In short, Bobby McFerrin didn't recite "Don't worry, be happy" necessarily as a life credo. He just found the phrase stylistically compelling for use in a song. So he wrote the song. It uses this phrase as its refrain, because that was the fun formal possibility this songwriter saw in that phrase. 

And from that germ of an idea, more ideas sprouted and grew. During breakfasts and naps and walks and showers, the song created itself in his head: The sweet happy little theme that introduces the song and reappears in the choruses; the rich harmonies; the reggae rhythms; the development of the lyrics to compliment Meher Baba's phrase, as well as their gentle style of delivery.

Bobby McFerrin would have never just coined a phrase like "Don't worry, be happy" on his own. But his musical passion led him down a road in life that helped him exemplify that phrase, to the point of literalness. You could take it all away from him tomorrow; he would still have his voice and this tune.

73. "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" by Michael Jackson

As a drummer, there is one thing I especially love about funk. That is that, for this music, every instrument is actually percussion. That's the beautiful principle at work in "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough." The most melodic instruments are the strings, and they still hit their staccato, percussive points. The guitars are about the click. The horns are about the punch. The bass and drums are one funk organism. The vocals of the chorus are pure percussion - soon Michael Jackson would be writing songs with almost no lyrics at all, just his own patented sounds, like his mentor James Brown. That is extremely hard to pull off. Notice almost everyone who sings a Michael Jackson song avoids hitting all the rhythmic utterances and grace notes of the original. When I hear someone try to, it's funny.

Incidentally, the long falsetto verse vocals sound Prince-esque. Prince's first album came out the year before this song. Maybe the rivalry was already forming and deriving its mutual benefits.

Michael Jackson departed from pure funk/dance/disco music beginning on the Thriller album, adopting rock elements to give his sound an even wider appeal after the Off the Wall album failed to sell as well as he dreamed. The success of "Beat It" almost assured the rock elements would be pushed to the breaking point on Bad.

I just wish Michael would've had the self depreciation to put all that aggrandizing aggressive stuff away for a spell and just get another funky dance album recorded before all was said and done. Nothing of his later music seems to have gone back to that lightness. And why would he feel like providing the world with escapist fun by then?

Well, there was only one time for the 1970s anyway.

72. "Don't Leave the Light On Baby" by Belle and Sebastian

Belle and Sebastian are a Scottish band who got their start in the mid-1990s recording an album as a project for a college music business program. Normally the program only produced singles for their purposes, but the songs of Stuart Murdoch were so strong that his group was invited to record a full LP.

The raving critical praise of that debut album catapulted Murdoch and his big ensemble into worldwide independent music notoriety. Their music went from a school project to a legitimate career overnight. They've never attained stratospheric financial success, but their reputation continues to be massive.

What seems so unlikely quickly makes all kinds of sense when you hear songs like "Don't Leave the Light On Baby," a mournful, soulful, memorable tune. 

The full instrumental diversity of the band gets displayed, with signature parts for keyboard, strings, trumpet, percussion, groovy bass, and the strange singing of Stuart Murdoch.

It's a rainy day song for me, or the song for a late night drive. It's perfect for some place cooler than where you're at now. Listen to it now, but try it again someplace better.