Down the Rabbit Hole

Musical Favorites - October 16th

30-Day Blogging Challenge"
October 16th Prompt:
Share a list of your top 5 favorite songs and tell us why they’re your fave.

I have been consumed by my sister's nuptials for almost two solid weeks and now that she's finally married, I feel like I can re-enter the blogging world once more. I've not been very active in the challenge but here is to hoping I can at least finish out the month strong now that all my commitments to everyone else have been satisfied.

I have extremely varied musical tastes. My father was in a band and so classic rock has always been a cornerstone of my musical foundation. Santana and CCR and Jethro Tull still number among some of my favorite bands from my Dad's bass playing era. Over the years I've added many other acts to the roster, from a wide variety of genres. It is extremely difficult to pick my top 5 favorite tunes of all time...with only one or two standing out as clear front-runners and all the rest, falling into so many different categories that is it hard to compare favorites. I'll give it a whirl though starting with the one song that has been my absolute jam for as long as I can remember.

Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" is an almost near perfect musical composition. The live version, with the drums and the pan-African ensemble including Youssou N' Dour is magnificent. It gives me chills every time I hear it and the lyrics are inspired poetry...

"In your eyes
The light the heat
In your eyes
I am complete
In your eyes
I see the doorway to a thousand churches
In your eyes
The resolution of all the fruitless searches"

There couldn't be a more romantic and stirring refrain in my opinion. It has been covered so many times but nothing touches the Gabriel's original.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRSktm7GCmk

Taking second place is a piece of classical music. Tchaikovsky's "Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy" from the Nutcracker. It makes me feel like Christmas inside every time I hear it. It builds and floats and bounces, I love how you can hear the individual instruments and it is the perfect accompaniment to a magical fairy with winter-dusted wings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rapf3g_XvCc

And now it gets harder...

Jimi Hendrix, "Little Wing" would be one I would have to include. My classic rock roots may be showing but there is something about this song that always brings me peace. The melding of Hendrix's guitar with his simple, fanciful lyrics just moves me, always have.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5Vki76x-EU

I was a huge Concrete Blonde fan in college. Johnette Napolitano's distinctive voice remains one of most favorite ones today. Her haunting vocals on the song "Joey", just speak to me. There is a rawness to her that I love and that song in particular would end up being very poignant to my life later on when I would meet, love and lose my own "joey".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdpTcvSn8HQ

There are so many other great songs...by amazing artists like Joss Stone, Santana, Jack White....my list is virtually endless! To be fair, my last slot isn't filled by one song. I'm going to cheat a little here and say rounding out my top five would be the soundtrack to "The Greatest Showman", composed by the incredibly talented duo of Joseph Trapanese and John Debney. The soundtrack is stirring, dynamic and fits the film like a seamless glove. There are so many great moments in the film that are supported perfectly by the original songs. The scene with Efron and Zendaya's trapeze routine to "Rewrite the Stars" is stunning in every way. The performance of "This is Me" by Keala Settle and the cast is a powerful anthem of pride and ferocity in the face of oppression. It is the song we can all relate to, it is a song that finds triumph in being different, in being oneself. I could go on...there are so many others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwYRqbUn7zg

That's the best I could do with only five entries, and even then I had to cheat a bit on the last one