302. "The Lemon Song" by Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin were an elite studio band, employing the latest recording processes to assemble some of the all-time greatest sound sculptures.

As a live band, Led Zeppelin were an entirely different, rawer experience. On a stage, committed to their core instruments, before the time when computers could reproduce any studio arrangement live, the true Led Zeppelin was distilled: A dominating force of blues guitar, cartwheeling drums, banshee singing, and grooving, hyper-competent bass playing.

This "pure" Led Zeppelin made surprisingly few appearances on their actual albums. But there is "The Lemon Song."

"The Lemon Song" is Led Zeppelin sitting together in a mobile recording studio, in prime form during their first major concert tour, firing up the reel-to-reel, and bursting forth with essentially a live take for the ages. 

The main blues riff is so sweet, lurking up the chromatic steps, the guitar getting up to those emphatic sevenths. The solo sections are just the most superlative kind of bombast, all three instruments going simultaneous stream-of-consciousness. 

"The Lemon Song" is every member of Led Zeppelin doing their best thing in once place.

But I have to really take my hat off to the bass playing of John Paul Jones. The man keeps firing winner after winner of groovy bass runs unfazed, stone-faced, consistently for over six minutes. He produces continual brilliance within a swarm of drum salvos and guitar mania; he holds it down sick-steady in the middle breakdown. You all can pick your signature John Paul Jones song; "The Lemon Song" will do just fine for me.

Led Zeppelin was a fun band! Music wasn't such a heavy mission to them, at least early on. Inspiration is so light!

301. "The Heart of Rock and Roll" by Huey Lewis and the News

I've heard people deride Huey Lewis and the News as a glorified bar band that blew up in the conservative rock and roll throwback trend of the 1980s. To believe that I think negates the consummate songwriting skill this band had going for a good run during their heyday.

Listen to the instrumental work in "The Heart of Rock and Roll." This is no bar band just slapping their instruments for the gals and guys on a Friday night. There is extreme detail work in the way the guitars, bass, and keyboard dovetail into each other to form its core groove. Huey Lewis's swaggery melody stands out front but fits within the overall composition too. It's so right to have this all set around that heartbeat effect, because the whole band really does work together like a pulmonary system, every hit and accent in its right place.

The song deals with an idea that maybe some music purists were dealing with at the time, during the rise of punk, new wave, hair metal, thrash metal, and all the other new derivations, all threatening to overtake "traditional" rock. Huey Lewis was ever the welcoming moderate, pointing out calmly, affably, that, despite what the new scenes were producing (sadly leaving out Minneapolis), he could easily see that it was all still based on that one truth of all rock and roll: That killer backbeat. The song has such conviction to this idea that they augment the backbeat with a literal heartbeat, associating the key rhythm of rock and roll with one of the most symbolic phenomena of human biology.

That heartbeat sound effect probably makes this more of a novelty song in some people's minds; it's at least a light bit of throwaway humor. But the longer I think about it, the more it leaves maybe a more profound impression than it intended.

Also, can we get some respect for the barry sax solo in this song? It's not an epic long one, but it blows it out, man.

300. "The Fox In the Snow" by Belle and Sebastian

There are not many songs that are equally as beautiful as the central image of their lyrics. Belle and Sebastian achieve this, creating a song that sounds easily as elegant as the image in my mind of a white fox with furtive, yellow eyes darting over banks of melting spring snow.

The phrases in the singing melody take excessively long to reach their end points, darting up and down scales as with soft paws, as if over hills, down through briar patches. I will never know anything quite as beautiful as the descending line, repeated at many different points, but best is toward the end, with the emphatic line "What else would you do?" And this merely sets up the final killer melody, the earnest mantra, "Fox in the snow."

The piano, strings, xylophone, and plucked acoustic guitar cast a completely unique spell.

It's maybe not even as much about a fox as it is the picture of a fox. The song sounds like the manifestation of old paintings on wood with chipped frames that you find in dusty places.

299. "The Fool On the Hill" by The Beatles

"Discard conventional doctrines and be relieved from anxieties.
Approval or flattery, what difference does it make?
Good or evil, what difference does it take?
Just because the people are at awe, you cannot be indifferent?
Ridiculous! Ungrounded!
When everyone is celebrating and joyous,
As if relishing a spiritual triumph,
As if enjoying a victorious feast.
I alone am peaceful! Contemplating the myriad future,
Dazed like a newborn child,
Seizing the moment! Pondering the uncertainties.
When everyone feels lavished,
I alone am hollowed.
I am a fool! Confounded!
When everyone seemed enlightened, I alone am in suspense;
When everyone is watchful, I alone become restful.
Enigmatic! Like the obscure twilight,
Desolate! Like the infinite universe.
When everyone is focused, I alone am playful and trivial.
I alone am different from the common,
I find refuge in the womb of this profound conception."

--Lao Tzu

298. "The Changeling" by The Doors

Nearly ten months ago, I made the executive decision: I would post all songs with titles beginning with "The" in the Ts instead of ignoring the article, as standard alphabetization rules require. The addition of "The" to a title is significant. It is by far the most popular article used in song titles, with reason. It is a statement, a stand, a definition. This is not to mention its importance in bands' names themselves.

It's not "the Changeling." It's "The Changeling."
We don't like "the Doors." We like "The Damned Doors."

So here begins my definitive series of "The" songs, the songs willing to cast a hard spotlight on all manner of themes in stark definition.

"The Changeling"

First of all, this brilliant little song was clearly ripped off by "Funkytown" a decade later. Recognize.

Great, funky tune, with the band cooking and Jim Morrison in a silly little mood. He was so bored with stardom at this point, the last Doors album, why not start off the album with some sarcastic bellows and howls? Generations later, a kid named Julian Casablancas, who idolized the Doors, would make the same kind of careless noise in many of his songs, but "New York City Cops" (also on this list) especially.

Lyrically, there is just one repeated verse, and it emphasizes how little Morrison is tied to any sense of a single identity. He can live uptown; he can live downtown. He can have money; he can have none. None of it affects who he thinks he is, or his freedom in any state to just "leave town." There is no attachment in his life, which is usually something I admire, but it proved to be a tragic flaw. 

The use of the word "The" in the title is ironic, because such a definitive term is paired with the concept of a changeling, which appropriately can have a few definitions. Traditionally, a changeling was (per Wikipedia) "believed to be a fairy child that had been left in place of a human child stolen by the fairies." I've also heard the term referring to a mythical shapeshifter. In either case, the term is the absolute antithesis of definitive order.

In the first sense of the term, it's easy to see how Morrison felt switched at birth, the artistic son of a high-level military man. In the second sense, that of the shapeshifter, he seems to declare how his resistance to definition is exactly what defines him. He may have mixed the two themes also, the superstitious paranoia of the first definition and the idea that paranoia's fear can take infinitely multiple forms. With legal problems making him kind of a social pariah at this point in his career, Morrison might've been attacking pop culture for fearing him to the point that he became pervasive: in the air they breathed, the food they ate. In those Cold War times, it was an impulse for which the populace was well trained. And regardless of point in history, people love a crowd and tend to distrust someone who doesn't choose sides, who refrains from extremes, remains an unknown quantity. It's a multifaceted idea he played with, using efficiently few words, most important of which are the two in the title.

Unfortunately, when he did eventually leave town, he ended up losing himself beyond the plane of mortality. 

It almost would be Grecian myth, if this didn't involve just a real person who could sing and got into the news a lot, whose young body had to be lifted out of stale bathwater.