WILT_2024-48

A playlist of songs that intrigued me from Sunday to Saturday. Week of 24 Nov 2024 to 30 Nov 2024.

1. Easy – Commodores
2. Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! – ABBA
3. I’ll Be Around – The Spinners
4. How Much I Feel – Ambrosia
5. Smooth Operator – Sade
6. Ain’t No Love In The Heart Of The City – Bobby “Blue” Bland
7. Ain’t No Woman (Like The One I’ve Got) – Four Tops
8. I Heard It Through The Grapevine – Marvin Gaye
9. What The World Needs Now (Is Love) – Dionne Warwick
10. It Never Rains in Southern California – Albert Hammond
11. My Cherie Amour – Stevie Wonder
12. Ain’t No Sunshine – Bill Withers
13. Rainbow Chaser – Nirvana
14. Life’s A Gas – T.Rex
15. Mambo Sun – T.Rex
16. Wild One – Thin Lizzy

Hyperlink to Spotify playlist: WILT_2024-48

Notes

As I was listening to music this week, the thought of the “perfect pop song” came to mind. It’s a formula that worked with the mainstream then, and it should with the mainstream now. To some extent, nothing has changed in that it captures the incredible ear-worm melody that provides a zeitgeist of the times, and to another extent everything has changed in the sense that audiences’ tastes have changed through the decades, movements, and social contexts.

The thought came to mind when Easy by the Commodores came on and it listened like such a well-packaged song with elements of everything that I love. Hooks, melodies, flashes of inspired musicianship and the discipline to lock in a product rather than the open interpretation that more artistic ventures tend to delve into. And perhaps I started listening to more widely celebrated songs from a bygone era rather than the contemporary because they still sound new and fresh from a time because these were still manufactured by hand rather than by industry. Or at least romanticism tells me so.

I also embarked on listening to the music of T.Rex when I chanced upon some performances by Mark Bolan on YouTube and the music was something that I was not familiar with but I had to quickly educate myself on because you could hear their influence on so much of the type of rock music that I enjoy.