My liked songs list is now 3,870 songs long. That’s 18 more than the last time I did a Keeper or Not post. I know I’ve removed songs since then, but the release of new albums in the past two weeks by the likes of Pedro The Lion, The Lumineers, Keb Mo, and Lady Wray have swelled the ranks too.
So once again, here’s the setup: shuffle the whole list and share the first five songs in the queue, pronouncing definitively if they’re keepers or not. If not, delete them from the list.
Here goes.
Verdict: keeper. The Hamilton craze may have passed, but I’ll be enjoying these songs for a long, long time.
Verdict: keeper. There’s bound to be some embarrassing revelations in this exercise, and here’s our first of the day. This was one of my first cassette purchases with my own money, because I’d never heard a voice like Aaron Neville’s before “Don’t Know Much” came out, and he’s featured on this entire album. “So Right, so Wrong” is not “Don’t Know Much,” but it’s a keeper by association.
Verdict: keeper. I spent hours with The Ragpicker’s Dream in 2004 and 2005. This is the longest song on the album, but always worth the time.
Verdict: keeper. My friend Jeff and I have a collaborative playlist, and this is the very first song on it, because I asked Jeff, whose music tastes run deep and wide, to name five albums I should get acquainted with (Kind of Blue by Miles Davis and Grace by Jeff Buckley were two others I remember). This was in 2003, and Blind by The Sundays was one of them. This song isn’t from Blind but its precursor, Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, which I would never have heard without first hearing Blind. It’s terrific.
Verdict: not a keeper. I have a vague recollection of encountering beabadoobee in 2020, and I instinctively turned the heart icon green on the player after one listen. But this is the single version; I never heard the whole album it was on. It doesn’t do much for me today.
YoRocko! 