Most Meaningful Songs of All Time

A friend asked me to put together a compilation of songs from my embarrassingly large music collection for her teenaged son who is like wicked cool and a guitar player and he's kinda awesome. So, I spent a day and a half sorting through the list, parsing through the songs collected over a forty year period (I turn forty tomorrow), trying to find the ones that were the Most Meaningful.

I wasn't just sorting songs, I found I was sorting memories, feelings, old loves, periods of depression and lightness. My computer was moving at the pace it prefers - haltingly slow - so I had plenty of downtime in which to ponder those late teenage years where you feel torn in fifty million directions and none of them make sense. You are waiting for the singular path of your future to appear, with neon signs pointing it out - "Go This Way", but instead all you get are forks in the road, myriad forks with none looking any more promising than any other. You are a grown up and a kid at the same time, and - here's the tough part that I don't think you get until a few decades later - you think you are going to outgrow that feeling when you finally grow up, but you never really do. Even now twenty years past that point, I still feel like a child and a grown-up all at once, and I'm still looking for the one road with the neon sign saying "Go This Way". True, now that I'm a few decades in, many of the forks in the road have disappeared in the distance - no longer possibilities for the future - but there's still no outline to follow. And now I have my kids who think I'm the grown-up with all the answers, which would be hilarious if it didn't feel so weighty. Like I should have the answers but I somehow missed them along the way.

At any rate, here's the playlist of The Most Meaningful Songs of All Time. I tried to steer clear of songs that still get played on the radio, and I threw in some less meaningful songs so that the meaningful ones wouldn't drag my teenaged friend into some sort of depressed abyss. I tried not to pick anything from the past decade - preferring songs that were written before he was born (yikes - that's how old I'm feeling today). I went heavy on the guitar, since he and I share a love of that instrument, and I tried to steer clear of Seattle, because I think he knows all those songs already.

You Said That Last Night - Apples in Stereo
Heaven in the Gutter - Cobra Verde
Drawerings - Dinosaur Jr.
Not Ready Yet - Eels
The Swimmer - Frank Black
Any Other Way - Posies
Common People - Pulp
Driver 8 - REM
Screenwriter's Blues - Soul Coughing
A Good Idea - Sugar
Hook in Her Head - Throwing Muses
Swamp Song - Tool
Don't Go - Matthew Sweet
I Kill Children - Dead Kennedys
My Last Christmas - Dirtbombs
Carry the Zero - Built to Spill
Not Even Stevie Nicks - Calexico
Porno Starlet Vs. Rodeo Clown - Califone
All Her Favorite Fruit - Camper Van Beethoven
The Man's Too Strong - Dire Straits
Yer Ropes - Giant Sand
Growing Up (Falling Down) - The Living End
Divorce Song - Liz Phair
O Lonely Soul, It's A Hard Road - Mary's Danish
Wanted to Be Your - Spoon
Piss Up a Rope - Ween
Mr. Riely - Vic Chesnutt
Boys Don't Cry - Cure
No Depression - Uncle Tupelo
Cool as Kim Deal - Dandy Warhols
Doin' the Cockroach - Modest Mouse
Hole in the River - Crowded House
Bottle of Fur - Urge Overkill
Sugar - Bikini Kill
Dry - PJ Harvey
All F*cked Up - Nashville Pussy
Beauty in Vulnerability - Hybrasil
Exoskeletons - Lynnfield Pioneers
Scratch - Morphine
Oh Comely - Neutral Milk Hotel
Socks - King Missile
Bad Things to Such Good People - Pedro the Lion
Rebel Yell - Quintaine Americana
Moon Calf Tripe - Red Red Meat
RV - Faith No More
Pretty As You Please - Ass Ponys
Fell Off the Face of the Earth - Firewater
Satan Gave Me a Taco - Beck