Friday CJ Random 11

It's one more random than 10!

If you’re having a dinner party and you’re looking to take the entertainment level up a few notches, simply have a book of Jewel’s poetry laying around. Hilarity will ensue like a red, red rose.

1) “My Best Friend’s Girl,” The Cars. It’s pretty easy to establish your career when your debut album opens with “Let the Good Times Roll,” this song, and “Just What I Needed.”

2) “Pretty Vacant,” The Sex Pistols. Their best song in my opinion, and it’s in my top 5 punk songs. I find that the legendary songs on this album are kind of slow, while the fast songs aren’t as memorable as the legendary songs. This is the one where they both meet: a punchy tempo full of classic Pistols bile. And the chorus is a must-sing-along.

3) “A Lack of Color,” Death Cab for Cutie. And now for something completely different...The UP is about to have a lack of color for the next few months. Hopefully there won’t be any red from me slitting my wrists when I remove that 100th inch of snow.

4) “She Bangs the Drums,” The Stone Roses. It is impossible to have a bad day when this song helps start it off. The guitar is like an old friend who is in town for a bit and who you can’t wait to hang out with again.

5) “The Hungry Wolf,” X. They were definitely the city wolves, but without losing their cool at the site of an exotic dancer.

6) “Domino,” Van Morrison. While not everyone will ever like a particular song, this is one of those timeless classics that nearly everyone can like. It’s soulful, catchy, sad, happy, and the song you could play at the end of a teen sex comedy where the snobs and slobs dance as they learn they have two things that transcend their social classes: a love of good music and unmitigated horniness.

7) “Paschendale,” Iron Maiden. Good Lord, I really am all over the place today. No one has the heavy-epic-about-historic-battles market cornered like Maiden. Despite having death in their name, Death Cab for Cutie isn’t writing a song about charging over the trenches into a hail of German machine gun fire.

8) “Milano,” Sigur Ros. This beautiful song is long enough that I could eat an entire bag of Milanos before it ended. Which would probably put me in a diabetic hallucination where Death Cab for Cutie were fighting the Germans.

9) “Let It Go,” Def Leppard. A song that exemplifies the principle of Tufnel’s Razor: if you’re not sure if lyrics are sexy or sexist, they are probably the latter.

10) “For the Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti,” Sufjan Stevens. Now that I live there, I think he really did capture the spirit of Michigan. A beautiful, delicate song.

11) “Party Til You Puke,” Andrew W.K. And here’s the opposite of that coin. This song has aged as well as an open bottle of beer left in the sun. It might be because there’s an expiration date on using the word party as a verb, and I’m beyond that point except when I go Vegas. At the same time, it’s a hell of a closer to a truly random 11.

Have a great weekend.