#30DaySongChallenge

30 Day Song Challenge, Day 8: A Song You Liked When You Were Younger

Full disclosure: I picked my song today mostly just so I could force you to watch the video again, which features a FAR more sketchy and morally-questionable spelling-lesson than I remembered from my childhood days watching Sesame Street. As you may or may not have heard, the early episodes of Sesame Street have recently been released as a…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 7: A Song That Is Your Guilty Pleasure

As a rule, I don’t like the category “Guilty Pleasure” when it’s applied to music.  You like the songs you like. Full stop. Most of the time, when asked to report their “guilty” music pleasures, people tend to name artists like ABBA or Neil Diamond or Shaggy or Boyz II Men— all of whom I…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 9: A Song That Makes You Want To Dance

There aren’t many Michael Jackson songs that don’t make me want to dance. But I’m a sucker for the “Little Michael” songs in particular, before he was “MJ” or “The King of Pop” or the tabloid-dubbed “Wacko Jacko.”  Give me the way-back-when, pint-sized wunderkind of The Jackson 5, strutting and mugging and hamming it up in his…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 10: A Song That Makes You Cry

My pick today, perhaps not surprisingly, is a song sung by one of the most heartwrenchingly beautiful female voices in the history of song.  Unless you’re a diehard fan of early-90’s alt-country music, you’ve probably never heard of Maria McKee (or her tragically under-rated and under-appreciated band Lone Justice), which is a damn shame.  I used…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 2: A Song That Helps Clear Your Head

My head often needs “clearing” and, as far as I’ve been able to tell, music is the only thing that can do that.  For others, the cure for a muddled mind is exercise, or meditation, or visit to church, or a good cry, or a long conversation with a dear friend… but none of those…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 1: A Song That Makes You Happy

There are about two dozen songs that every single R&B band in Memphis plays every time they perform.  Whether you’re on Beale Street, or in a local juke joint, or rolling down the river on the Memphis Queen or just down South at the casinos, you’re going to hear all two dozen.  Songs like “Proud…

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30 Day Song Challenge (The Sequel), Day 28: A Song You Like By a Band/Artist You First Discovered in the Last Year

It’s funny how the process of “discovering” an artist or band happens sometimes.  Nowadays, when almost every venue for purchasing or pirating music auto-recommends artists/bands to you, it’s very easy to get caught in a self-reinforcing loop of your own tastes and, correspondingly, it’s very difficult to just stumble upon something genuinely “new” to you. …

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30 Day Song Challenge (The Sequel), Day 26: A Song By a Band/Artist You’d Like To Have Dinner With

I’m going to assume that today’s prompt means for me to pick among living artists/bands, partly because it would be really creepy to have dinner with a dead person, but more so because the idea of choosing a dinner guest from all the living and dead artists ever is far too daunting a project for…

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30 Day Song Challenge (The Seuqel), Day 30: A Song You Never Get Tired Of, No Matter How Many Times You Hear it

Today marks the end of the 30 Day Song Challenge (The Sequel) and, although I’ve complained about the prompts several times this month, I think this prompt for the final day is an especially good one. I also realized over the past week that it’s going to be difficult to drop many of the habits…

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30 Day Song Challenge (The Sequel), Day 29: A Song You Like By a Band/Artist That Isn’t from North America, Europe or Australia

Since we’re now on the penultimate day of the 30 Day Song Challenge (The Sequel), I wanted to take a moment to say a few things about this whole venture.  First, I have to confess that, in my view, The Sequel’s prompts weren’t nearly as satisfying as the original 30 Day Song Challenge’s prompts. (Today’s…

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