The Earwyrms Canon, Pt. I: Salvo

ISSUE #178

I’m ending the year by tackling the impossible: the 100 best songs ever recorded. Not ranked from #100 to #1, but instead given their own meaningful sequence, a personal structure to reveal itself over the next six weeks. It will be a compass for navigating my sonic perspective. An Official Earwyrms Canon.

Music is tied more to emotion and memory than almost any other art. Therefore, the judgments that go into crowning one hundred songs as “best” will always fall back to how they make me feel. There are many important dimensions to songcraft—structure, instrumentation, poetics, generic innovation—but my consideration of these aspects can never be separated from how each adds to a song’s emotional palette. I listen in terms of shivers and shakes.

Maybe you’re thinking: “That’s a stupid way of saying these are just your favorites.” Okay, wow. One of the ways we can reach objectivity is through rationed deployment of full subjectivity. Our world is an aggregate of the pure imagination of souls—like marriage, the greatest work and reward of art is a shared dedication to honest contribution.

The Earwyrms Canon is not meant to be Sagan’s golden record, launched into space as an ambassador for humanity. This is less of a monument than it is a shoebox full of love notes and polaroids. These songs surprise me, baffle me, move me, change me—in this way, they are again like love. If music were anything less to me, I would never have started writing about it.

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“Garden (Say It Like Dat)” | SZA
2017

The best songs fill you like a meal, giving you a glimpse of the sublime, like a quiet moment of satisfaction in the middle of a perfect day. When I put this on, I am immediately swept into a world with a brighter future. It can single-handedly improve my day—talk about a support system.

“Right Down the Line” | Gerry Rafferty
1978

Some songs grant me the gift of persona—I am who I want to be during “Right Down the Line,” and wherever I stand is Shangri-La. The tone of that guitar glows like skin under streetlights. With it, I have the presence to draw a curtain to the rest of the world, drape myself in the summer breeze until midnight feels as warm as noon.

“Could You Be Loved?” | Bob Marley & the Wailers
1980

A masterpiece has the patience to wait for you. Perfect songs sit for years before calling true attention to themselves, like the unseen design of your favorite armchair. “Could You Be Loved?” was hidden in plain sight—idly heard, never listened to—until the lonesome night I truly needed it. The slinky guitar ticks like a fishing reel, the back-stepping dance of a partner pulling forth my best self, giving me the space to move, to get up, get up, get up now—and the message, that question of how to accept what we’re given, is the spark for the heart’s uprising.

“Bring It On Home to Me” | Sam Cooke
1962

One bucket of my favorite songs is filled with those of naked need, the ones that speak to some shameful dependence. Like characters written to say what we cannot, love songs are a certain prayer for rain—to come put out this burning and wash everything away.

“Since I Left You” | The Avalanches
2000

One of the great openers of all time, “Since I Left You” captures movement and stillness at the same time by spinning strings over its unwavering pulse. My favorite dance songs mirror my swirling thoughts, and the knitted sampling of The Avalanches sounds like gliding from memory to mantra when you’re in the process of losing yourself.

“Ladyfingers” | Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass
1965

There’s a physicality to this recording—you can hear the room as much as the players, like in the echo of that woodblock. The orchestra is one of humanity’s greatest inventions, full of voices who answer each other in tongues we don’t speak but nevertheless understand, magic that follows rules not unlike those of courtship. The composition and Alpert’s performance of “Ladyfingers” reminds me of how closely the players’ hearts must beat together.

“Windowlicker” | Aphex Twin
1999

This is a technological marvel. I have no idea how he made this. There weren’t any slick DAWs back in 1999, no paint-by-numbers software like Fruity Loops. I have no idea what the program that spit out “Windowlicker” would even look like. But here it stands, in all its slithering glory, one of the ugliest beauties ever recorded, one of the scariest songs ever danced to—and once I got over the repulsion settling in at first listen, I found myself lost in the friction of the ending, baffled by everything that just happened to me.

“Once in a Blue Moon” | Mabel Mercer
1958

Notice how this song brings forth the lurching cello on the line, “Only madness under a pale scar.” Some unnamed emotion lies between resignation, understanding, generosity, and despair, but “Once in a Blue Moon” provides the closest definition to it—how every good thing can start to feel like the last when you spend too long thinking about your blessings.

“No One” | Alicia Keys
2007

What gets me every time happens just after the chorus, when Alicia revs the voice on her keyboard into power-generator mode for those arpeggios. That’s the real clincher for “No One” to me. Writing a perfect karaoke song is an art in itself—you have to strike a balance of emotion and range, and you can’t be too esoteric in your poetry. Far from being trite, these words instead take advantage of humanity’s simple core—that we get shaped by every loving gesture, jigsaw pieces cut by those we love.

“Perfect Day” | Lou Reed
1972

I’ve listened to “Perfect Day” on the worst days of my life—even starting in irony, by the time that piano starts to swing through the bridge, I feel what could faintly be described as hope. The songs mirrors the swooning of a perfect day, swaying in 3/4 time like the dizziness of love—seasick on the waves of time.

Next week—more to come.