extremely specific things in songs that i love (an incomplete list)

  • the key change at the end of country roads, take me home
  • the “she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah” at the very end of all you need is love
  • this live version of fix you where the audience overwhelms chris martin in the last chorus and finishes the song
  • the part near the end of somebody to love where it climbs and climbs and climbs
  • the “dearly beloved” section of  jesus of suburbia
  • this one line in push“And I don’t know if I’ve ever been really loved by a hand that’s touched me, and I feel like something’s gonna give”
  • “peace up! a-town down! (yeah!)”
  • the charango and the flutes and the panpipes in the instrumentation of whenever, wherever
  • the fact that we as a society loved kesha’s verse in timber so much that someone, somewhere decided that we could edit out pitbull completely, so that there now exists a version where kesha sings the whole thing herself, and it – as the kids say – absolutely slaps
  • the electronic interlude in twrp’s synthesize her
  • the fact that i listened to i know i know i know so many times on a music trip my senior year of high school that even now, in my thirties, i still can only associate this one particular song not just with how i felt as a heartsick, disaffected teenager, but with the entire city of chicago, full stop
  • the live version of harry styles’ two ghosts that he sang as a duet with stevie nicks
  • prince’s guitar solo in the version of while my guitar gently weeps from the rock & roll hall of fame’s tribute to george harrison
  • the absolute, unbridled joy that is the entirety of whitney houston’s i wanna dance with somebody
  • dolly parton’s cover of stairway to heaven. just – the whole song.
  • “i was born in düsseldorf and that is why they call me rolf”