Playlist 6

[stoutfellow]

Counting down towards the twelfth and last.

• Someone Saved My Life Tonight, Elton John. This may have been the first of his songs to catch my attention.
• Canadian Railroad Trilogy, Gordon Lightfoot. Lightfoot's at his best, to my mind, in his specifically Canadian songs, and this one is marvelously evocative.
• Old Familiar, Kathleen Wilhoite. This one's about as close to sentimentality as Wilhoite gets, a song of sad reminiscence.
• I Remember LA, Celine Dion. Another song of reminiscence, but this one's thunderous and passionate.
• Respect, Aretha Franklin. Or should that be R-E-S-P-E-C-T? Aretha at her sassy best.
• Peace Train, Cat Stevens. Another train-as-salvation song; for some reason, the rapid clap-clap-clap in the chorus pleases me.
• Big Yellow Taxi, Joni Mitchell. "Don't it always seem to go / That you don't know what you've got till it's gone?"
• Castles in the Air, Don McLean. I love the mouth-feel of this one, the tripping alliteration in the middle of the opening lines: "And if she asks you why you can tell her that I told you that I'm tired of castles in the air..."
• I Know A Place, Petula Clark. My second-favorite of her songs. Thematically, it's pretty much the same song as Downtown.
• No Time, the Guess Who. The growling background sets off the lead singer's voice very nicely. The Guess Who used voices as sound (irrespective of content) about as well as any group I know of.