Year: 1989
The Demon of Screamin’ screams a bit too much for my taste, but his vocal range is sure impressive. I only like a handful of their songs, but this one I will always listen to if it’s on. The line, “Without thinking you lost everything that was good in your life to the toss of the dice?” has a great rhythm and crescendo and hat tip to Tyler who has the lungs to pull it off.
Year: 1996
The first country song of many to come. Shut my mouth, slap your grandma!
This is his debut single. It’s nothing special, but it’s a good showcase for his vocal range and I find the coda hits the sweet spot. He’s not a terribly imaginative writer and after his first album I didn’t follow him much. But this song is in regular rotation.
He’s been married four times, major alcohol problem. Not especially interesting but no kidding the man has had a lot of trauma that would drive a lot of people to use chemicals. From various sources:
At age 17, Adkins was in an automobile accident in which his 1955 Chevrolet pickup truck hit a school bus head-on. He broke some ribs, punctured both lungs and his nose was partially torn off. Adkins was forced to give up college football after a severe knee injury at Louisiana Tech. Somehow he managed to come away from FIVE work-related accidents with his life and limbs intact. In 1982, he was involved in a bulldozer accident that caused such deep cuts to his hindquarters that “I thought I was fixin’ to lose both my legs.” Less than a year later, a tank containing 400 barrels of oil exploded while he was trying to repair a leak, and his left leg was totally crushed. In 1988, he flipped his truck on an icy overpass in Texas, putting him in a neck brace. A year after that, he accidentally cut off one of his fingers in another job accident. In 1989, Adkins, along with nine coworkers, were stranded on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico during Hurricane Chantal. He was shot by his second ex-wife Julie Curtis in 1994.The bullet went through his heart and both lungs. He survived and chose not to press charges.
And then he released his first album!
Year: 2011
I was tempted to post “Chasing Pavements” but dangit “Rolling In The Deep” is such an impressive song. The rhythm she created makes you not notice that almost none of the verses rhyme (or are slant rhymes at best) and it helps push through the anger without any contrived words. And of course her voice is just mind-bogglingly powerful.
Just one of those songs that transcends pop.
Year: 2001
I think this is the only song of his I’ve listened to. It has just the right amount of angst without the controlling misogyny of say, I don’t know, Bryan Adams songs. Apparently, “La Cienega” literally means “The Swamp.” It’s a street in Los Angeles, so I guess the girl lives there. Romantic!
He’s got a bunch of Grammys, so I guess he’s popular. If you like others by him, drop them in the comments.
Year: 1993
We’re getting all of our Swedish bands out of the way! This time instead of two couples it’s three siblings and a former Nazi (seriously).
In 1994 I lived and breathed this song for months. I still have my 7th grade journal and each week I tracked how this song was doing on the charts and every week it was number one I used a ton of exclamation points. The week it fell off number one I wrote a lot of frowny faces. It was the first CD I ever bought. I still do love this song. The octave Linn Berggren goes up in the final chorus gives me chills.
I find most of their songs to be overproduced and I don’t really care for most outside of “All That She Wants” and “Don’t Turn Around.”
Year: 1981
ABBA (sorry I can’t figure out the backwards “B”) was on constant rotation on the record player when I was a kid. I completely dug the ultra poppy “Rock Me,” “Take A Chance On Me,” and “Money, Money, Money.” As I grew older, “One Of Us” became my favorite. An incredibly sad song given that Bjorn and Benny wrote this during their divorce proceedings with Agnetha and Anni-Frid. The music video, while a bit weak on the cinematography, does a good job presenting the sorrow within the group.
This was their last #1 hit in Europe before they disbanded. Cool to see they got back together after 40 years to release an album a couple months ago. I listened to “Don’t Shut Me Down,” and I don’t know why it just feels like a GlaDOS song.
Year: 2003
Beyond just the music I will occasionally write about the artists themselves and how I reconcile any conflicts with their personal lives and or racist/sexist lyrics (especially when we get to country!). I don’t think I had ever read the Wiki pages for either 50 Cent or Nate Dogg. By all accounts it seems like Nate Dogg was not the best person, with a domestic assault conviction and several more accusations and charges before he died following two strokes at 41. 50 Cent has never had any similar accusations, though his relationship with his first son is sad, with regular public feuding, saying he didn’t love him and didn’t care if he died. Way to take the high road there. He came out as very pro-gay pretty early on which is pretty cool.
As for the song itself, it’s a sweet love song reflective of the experience of black men in thug life (Tupac Shakur’s concept of that). Mostly I love the instrumentation. The guitar work is repetitive, but I love the sound of the high E at the end of every line. This won’t be the last time Nate Dogg is featured this year; he had no part in writing this one, but the King of Hooks does a slick job with the chorus and the outro.
Year: 2000
One of those songs I quickly loved, then didn’t want to hear because it was overplayed, then now like again. I love the frequent crescendoing.
For 2022 I will be posting a song with an accompanying music video for every day of the year. Each day will be a different artist as to avoid monotony. The only times an artist will appear more than once is if he or she is a featured artist for someone else, or if the person had a band and a solo career. This only will happen a few times as I wanted to make sure the sounds were also distinct. So for example, I decided not to have a song from both Ben Folds Five and Ben Folds as you can’t easily tell the difference between the two.
I don’t like ranking songs, as that would change constantly depending on the mood I’m in. So this list will be in alphabetical order by artist.
I hope you enjoy this list. There are songs from the 1950s all the way through 2021 and every major genre is represented. Please don’t hesitate to give me recommendations for new music!
Inspired by a friend. And woah, a lot of white men here. The only female directors are the Wachowski sisters, and there’s only a handful of POC. I anticipate this will get better as I age.
Will keep this updated.
| Year | Movie | Director |
| 1938 | The Lady Vanishes | Alfred Hitchcock |
| 1939 | The Wizard of Oz | Victor Fleming |
| 1941 | Citizen Kane | Orson Welles |
| 1946 | It’s A Wonderful Life | Frank Capra |
| 1948 | Rope | Alfred Hitchcock |
| 1949 | Kind Hearts and Coronets | Robert Hamer |
| 1950 | Rashomon | Akira Kurosawa |
| 1952 | Singin’ in the Rain | Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen |
| 1954 | The Seven Samurai | Akira Kurosawa |
| 1957 | 12 Angry Men | Sidney Lumet |
| 1961 | Judgment at Nuremburg | Stanley Kramer |
| 1962 | To Kill A Mockingbird | Robert Mulligan |
| 1963 | The Birds | Alfred Hitchcock |
| 1964 | Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb | Stanley Kubrick |
| 1965 | The Sound of Music | Robert Wise |
| 1966 | How the Grinch Stole Christmas! | Chuck Jones, Ben Washam |
| 1967 | The Graduate | Mike Nichols |
| 1968 | Oliver! | Carol Reed |
| 1969 | Midnight Cowboy | John Schlesinger |
| 1971 | Brian’s Song | Buzz Kulik |
| 1972 | The Godfather | Francis Ford Coppola |
| 1973 | The Sting | George Roy Hill |
| 1974 | Young Frankenstein | Mel Brooks |
| 1975 | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest | Milos Forman |
| 1976 | The Bad News Bears | Michael Ritchie |
| 1977 | Star Wars | George Lucas |
| 1979 | Alien | Ridley Scott |
| 1980 | The Empire Strikes Back | Irvin Kershner |
| 1981 | Raiders of the Lost Ark | Steven Spielberg |
| 1982 | Blade Runner | Ridley Scott |
| 1983 | Return of the Jedi | Richard Marquand |
| 1984 | This is Spinal Tap | Rob Reiner |
| 1985 | Back to the Future | Robert Zemeckis |
| 1986 | Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home | Leonard Nimoy |
| 1987 | The Princess Bride | Rob Reiner |
| 1988 | Rain Man | Barry Levinson |
| 1989 | Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade | Steven Spielberg |
| 1990 | Misery | Rob Reiner |
| 1991 | The Silence of the Lambs | Jonathan Demme |
| 1992 | A Few Good Men | Rob Reiner |
| 1993 | Groundhog Day | Harold Ramis |
| 1994 | Pulp Fiction | Quentin Tarantino |
| 1995 | 12 Monkeys | Terry Gilliam |
| 1996 | Sling Blade | Billy Bob Thornton |
| 1997 | The Edge | Lee Tamahori |
| 1998 | Rushmore | Wes Anderson |
| 1999 | The Matrix | Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski |
| 2000 | Cast Away | Robert Zemeckis |
| 2001 | Mulholland Drive | David Lynch |
| 2002 | Insomnia | Christopher Nolan |
| 2003 | Kill Bill: Volume 1 | Quentin Tarantino |
| 2004 | Shaun of the Dead | Edgar Wright |
| 2005 | Batman Begins | Christopher Nolan |
| 2006 | The Lives of Others | Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck |
| 2007 | [Rec] | Jaume Balagueró |
| 2008 | WALL-E | Andrew Stanton |
| 2009 | (500) Days of Summer | Marc Webb |
| 2010 | Toy Story 3 | Lee Unkrich |
| 2011 | The Muppets | James Bobin |
| 2012 | Looper | Rian Johnson |
| 2013 | Her | Spike Jonze |
| 2014 | Edge of Tomorrow | Doug Liman |
| 2015 | Inside Out | Pete Doctor, Ronaldo Del Carmen |
| 2016 | Lion | Garth Davis |
| 2017 | Get Out | Jordan Peele |
| 2018 | Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse | Rodney Rothman, Peter Ramsey, Bob Perischetti |
| 2019 | Parasite | Bong Joon-ho |
| 2020 | Palm Springs | Mak Barbakow |
| 2021 | The Mitchells vs. the Machines | Michael Rianda |
| 2022 | Everything Everywhere All at Once | Daniel Scheinert, Dan Kwan |
Death By Troggles 
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