45. “Life Goes By And I Can’t Keep Up,” Dear Rouge

I’m not a jewellery guy. Well, I used to wear an earring, I’ve got my wedding ring, and back in my university days I thought it was cool to take my broken guitar strings and turn them into “guitar string bracelets.” But not real chains and bracelets.

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44. Oxygène, Jean-Michel Jarre

This post is in honour of my father, who we lost on August 11, so I’m breaking rules. I didn’t listen to this on shuffle and it’s not a song, it’s an entire album. And it’s a weird album. And it’s an album that scared the living daylights out of me as a kid because of the earth-skull album cover you can see above and because the music just creeped me the hell out. It’s also the only album I ever knew my dad to buy or care about in any way.

43. “Cherish,” Kool & the Gang

Do you remember your first crush? Like, your first real crush? I’m not talking about the girl whose pigtails you pulled in kindergarten or the boy you played dress-up with in that surely unsanitary corner of the classroom filled with wigs and hats worn by 25 six-year-olds per day. I’m talking about that first pubescent obsession where you had feelings. Nothing graphic, just whatever heart-bursting emotion a 12-year-old thinks love is. Feeeeeeeelings.

42. “Trademark,” Eric Johnson

I’ll just start off by apologizing to the guitar nerds out there, of which I am indisputably one, for the relative lack of guitar geekery you’ll read here.* Because Eric Johnson is like the god that guitar nerds bow down to. But when I hear this song, I’m not reminded of guitar geekery, I’m reminded of the early ‘90s Toronto Blue Jays.

41. “Little by Little,” Dear Rouge

This is the post this blog was made for. Since I started the blog back in 2010, this is only the second time the perfect song has come up on shuffle at the perfect time (here’s the first). It’s the ultimate in shuffled synergy and it made me feel alive. 

40. “Buffalo Stance,” Neneh Cherry

To absolutely no acclaim, I ran on the St. Elizabeth Catholic Secondary School track team in Grade 11. It was the spring of 1989, just as Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance” was soaring to No. 3 in Canada and the U.S. I was fast, but not legit fast; I was baseball player fast, not track athlete fast.

8 Things Dear Rouge’s Phases Reminds Me Of

My exceedingly well documented Dear Rouge obsession started almost three years ago, after I bought their debut album, Black to Gold. That album brought all kinds of fun things to mind for me, inspiring my post on the Top 10 Things Dear Rouge’s Black to Gold Reminds Me Of. Not surprisingly, I love their new album, Phases, and it’s got my mind racing again. So here we go…

39. “Waiting for You,” Minor Alps

I didn’t realize how much I loved his song until it popped up on shuffle today. The second the repeating eighth-note guitar pattern, which never lets up throughout the song, struck my ears, I actually felt tears of joy well up in my eyes. It was a completely unexpected reaction.

38. “Symphony No. 9, ‘From the New World,’” Antonin Dvořák

The beauty of being sleep-deprived is that you fall asleep really quickly. I didn’t have that “advantage” in my early 20’s. Back then it took me forever to fall asleep, so I would listen to music through my earbuds to relax. Which is what this piece did to me… that is before it gave me terrifying visions. More on that to come.

37. “Crash Into Me,” Dave Matthews Band

“Hike up your skirt a little more. And show your world to me. In a boy’s dream.”

How was it that I became the subject of a boy’s dream, exactly? It was the summer of 1997 and this song, was still fresh.