Stand By Me

Here’s a perennial favorite that has come around again and again, becoming a hit every few years thanks to new artists covering it for a new listener generation. Everyone knows this song, though everyone most likely has a different version that they think of as …

St. Elmo's Fire

It’s always best to hear an Eno record in its entirety. Even when he stoops to having individuated songs, it’s the oblique narrative that flows through the whole that matters. Eventually, of course, you get to the ones where there’s not so much a flow …

Squeeze Box

One of my all time favorite classic rock references in recent pop culture was an episode of the cult TV series Freaks and Geeks. In the episode, the main character, a teenager named Lindsay, asks her parents for permission to attend a Who concert. (The …

Spare Parts II and Closing

One gets the sense that all Tom Waits ever wanted was to be the piano player at some burlesque joint, preferably down the street from a greasy spoon. He really missed the boat on that one, growing up just when burlesque was going downhill. But …

Spare Parts I (A Nocturnal Emission)

In 1975 Tom Waits was seen as just another prematurely hoarse young man in a porkpie hat singing earnest songs about the travails of the drinking classes. Not entirely dissimilar from Bruce Springsteen or Randy Newman. It wasn’t selling him a whole lot of records …

Someone Saved My Life Tonight

Elton John has delivered decades’ worth of moving and dramatic performances, but this has to be the most moving. It is also, of course, one of the most personal. It recounts a particularly low point in John’s life, when he contemplated giving up his struggling …

Somebody Up There Likes Me

Political commentary was never David Bowie’s wheelhouse, and when he goes there it tends to feel half-baked. Here, he’s into some loose concept of the manifest destiny of charismatic leaders, who are not dissimilar from rock stars in their larger-than-life appearance. It was a theme …