201. "Maybe I'm Amazed" by Paul McCartney

Every instrument performed by Paul. Why am I impressed by that? I can do that. Still, I'm impressed by that.

Probably I'm pre-disposed to awe by the stratospheric singing and the care in the melody at every turn. I'd bet. 

It's quite a love song. Above all, Paul seemed to seek a partner with the talent of comforting. Or maybe he didn't seek that quality but was very glad to meet it as his band the Beatles imploded in the late '60s. This song is a thank you to his wife for helping him through that time. 

Linda McCartney, a skilled photographer with a long list of credits and music business connections from before she ever knew Paul (including a deep friendship to Jimi Hendrix), seems to have taken the skills of perception and sympathy that made her a poet with a camera and rolled them into her relationships too. 

We can help each other. We don't have to be islanded, empowered free agents of unstoppable individual momentum. Selfless concern will not always be exploited.

Sometimes you just give someone voice to sing back to you.

200. "Mary Jane's Last Dance" by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Can we stop a moment and consider the voice of Tom Petty? I think people just hear him, say "Tom Petty," and move on, like they're seeing the Big Dipper - a miracle of all the physics that hold our stars in the firmament - for the thousandth time.

The voice of Tom Petty is thin and whispy, rarely hitting anything above a coo. Through his career phases, you can hear singing inflections indebted to Dylan and Reed, but there is a completely unique drowsy calm even in his peppy numbers like "American Girl." It sounds like his thin, straight blonde hair looks. It is the damndest strange voice.

We would not be the same without the odd little thing.

Just as irreplaceable to me, however, is the master songwriting class Tom Petty puts on using, over and over, the most basic guitar chord sets possible. The a-minor, G, D, a-minor combo is one of the chord progressions simply part of the ether - nearly as elemental and old as the Big Dipper itself. But when those chords are struck in this song, it is instantly recognizable as "Mary Jane's Last Dance" and only "Mary Jane's Last Dance." It's the style of the mutes and hammer-ons; it's the perfect fuzz on the instrument; it's the slow but sweet tempo.

The chorus is even simpler. E-minor, A is the core. But you add the morbid vocal harmonies in that song, singing that dour refrain; you make that simple two-chord base yours as you please. Then, as the voices extinguish, you add some great escalating arpeggiations to really sell the thing. I delight in how the vocal melody gives space for instrumental response. I taste mana in the uplifting glory of resolving on an A-major when the famous verses start so strongly on a-minor. 

A morticianary harmonica for the win.

Play it in the moonlight.

199. "Man of Constant Sorrow" by The Soggy Bottom Boys

I know the Soggy Bottom Boys are entirely fictional. They still performed this song. That's final.

The film O Brother Where Art Thou is one of the most visionary films ever created, steeped in myth, history, allegory, symbolism, metaphor, irony, symmetry, dry humor, and MUSIC!!!!!!

The lynchpin of this film is when the pack of Depression-era escaped-con "heroes" of the story take a brief, inexplicable detour in the middle of the action to record a song for a few bucks in a radio station/recording studio on the side of a dusty road. It is a total aberration in the loose plot of the film, a seeming narrative lark - until the unbeknownst mega-fame that their recording gains serves as the deliverance they could neither expect nor even understand until it was upon them. Humans learn fast and take advantage. The entire hustle of music stardom in a split-second decision of survival.

The song is a beaut. There are tons of roots songs as well written and performed. I simply cannot let this one go for the psychic import it carries in this, one of the most spiritually sustaining narratives I've witnessed out of the mountains of films my eyes have seen. And the vocal is excellently delivered by non-George Clooney, whoever he really was. I'm not in a state to care about researching who really sang. It was George Clooney, leader of the Soggy Bottom Boys.

198. "Manic Depression" by The Jimi Hendrix Experience

Let's say you're trying to write a song that uses blues tonality but isn't per se a blues song; it just takes the scale runs of blues and takes them into some other great direction. Take notes from this song.

"Manic Depression" is not a blues song. But it is a blues song! It's literally about the blues. 

But where the music goes is so heavy and futuristic that you can't just assign it a folk-stye genre like blues. The theory of blues has so many great, elastic possibilities. Jimi Hendrix explored so many of them down at the core of his hurricane noise storm.

Mitch Mitchell is one of my favorite drummers for hyper-involved patterns like he lays down in this song. Extrovert drummers win my heart. I try to be one every odd decade I ever get the sparse chance.

197. "Mailman" by Soundgarden

You may not like heavy music. There's actually a high chance you don't. Most heavy music is disturbing and is not very well done, so what's the incentive? I say it's like kung-fu: most people don't master it and give it a bad name. But those who have become true teachers turn the discipline into a sublime form of oddness, integrity, and hard-earned beauty.

Ah, look! "Mailman."

Slow.

Gnarled in the gears of a diabolical time signature.

Soot-dark.

A message of spite, hostility, defiance.

A vocal like a broken shard of glass in your hand.

A vocal like a goddamned volcano banshee.

A vocal that that also lilts about in full control through those twisted verses, paying off in satisfying falsettos on unshakable major-thirds. Bach used to end dark minor-key passages on last-second majors.

A chorus with, I'll be, a little hook in there. Dark image, sure. But this is singable.

The ending movement takes us into the most thrilling turbulence. The guitars stop muting themselves and simply let the soundscape become saturated with a vehement escalation of intervals. And through this launches an incomprehensibly high Chris Cornell singing finale splitting the heavens, rest his soul.

It is dark - but it is a bewitching, one-of-a-kind flower, tenderly gardened.