Song of the Decade

Absolute Radio have been running a song of the decade vote; it being the end of the 2000′s. So I thought yeah that sounds like a great blog post and I’ve been agonising over it for weeks. Just one song from 2000 – 2009? It’s so hard, these past 10 years have been so changeable, my music tastes have swung from dance music to folk and everything in between and I’ve been to more live gigs and festivals than I’ve had cups of teas, which I assure you, over 10 years is alotta-teabags!

I mean there’s just so many good songs that have come about in this decade as well as some pretty awful ones too. I got thinking, what defines a good song, popularity or song writing, melody and structure, the instruments or simply the performance? The subject of the song, is that what makes it good, or your admiration of the people involved in the song?

John Mayer – Covered in Rain

 

I’ve chosen as my song of the decade a track by the highly talented John Mayer called covered in Rain. The song is about a girl, Lydia, his City Love, who we assume left. It’s just so bluesy, moody and raw, it really is an awesome song from every angle. The song itself was toned down after 9/11 and you can kind of read into the feeling of New York being covered in rain, changed by events, which for me sums up this whole decade. I’ve chosen this video because it’s an amazing live performance of that song, which for me is very soothing and it seriously rocks too.

I guess the single most defining moment in this decade for our culture at least may have been September 11th 2001, early on in this decade and since then many songs have referenced and charted the impact it had on us and on songwriters, from Moby who blogged from his apartment looking down on the devastation trapped unable to leave, to Ani Difranco’s fierce angrey poem “Self Evident” that I hope you listen to just once, to the Black Eyed Peas documenting the leadup to the invasion of Iraq of which 9/11 was used as justification. When the events in America were unfolding many national radio stations in the UK switched their output to music and played highly appropriate tracks to convey the devastation occurring.

It’s not just that which occurred in this decade which leads me to my sombre choice, we’ve seen two internationally involved wars, globalisation on the brink of collapse, a near depression, and a lot of upheaval and change back home, the decade has really scarred us. For me a good song is full of thought and emotion and can really affect you deeply. Of course it was artists rooted in New York who handled the emotions in their songs.

There have been hundreds if not thousands of what I would call good songs, but I wanted to pick out a song that summed everything up about this decade as it’ll be remembered and I think Covered In Rain does.

Posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009