The first song alphabetically by artist is “Take on Me” by A-Ha. Obviously. The first song alphabetically by song title is “Abilene” by Runaway Dorothy. If you don’t know Runaway Dorothy, here they are. Lovely band.

Only because you asked. “Bitch Went Nutz” by Ben Folds. The alternative version, ahem. Don’t play in front of the chillens or at work or almost anywhere, really.

This happened in the grocery store today and yes I did dance to it. “Brick House” by the Commodores. Shut up.

I wanted to be super cliché and say “There’ll Be Sad Songs to Make You Cry.”

But truth be told, many songs have made me cry and this is one. “Bruised” by the Bens is great. “Love just leaves you bruised” and “Like I care” with a not-quite-cheerful “ba-ba-ba-ba-ba” after it is my favorite.

Easy. It would be “Rain King” as well as “Untitled (Love Song)” and I happened to find a live video of both. If you haven’t heard “Rain King” live, it’s pretty awesome and “Untitled (Love Song),” originally by The Romany Rye, is lovely. Don’t think for a minute I didn’t sing along to every song they sang at the July concert, but these two are particularly singalong worthy.

First of all, I should tell you that my spouse has a taste in music that is only rivaled by a friend of mine who I say has a schizophrenic iPod. Scott plays everything from Michael Buble to the oldies country station. He gets hooked into those Time Life Music infomercials and I ordered two of them for his birthday. The concerts he has gone to in the past few years span from Neil Diamond to Duran Duran to Hank Williams, Jr. He had a Boston poster on his dorm wall when we were first dating.

My song for the hubs is by Jim Croce because I think he’s bought this CD twice since I’ve known him.

Oh, there is no other song. Transvision Vamp’s “Tell That Girl to Shut Up.”

I was friends with this crazy person I’ve called “Drama” on the blog before. We were friends in high school and roommates for one quarter in college, before she announced that she was bisexual and was moving to California. At our 20th high school reunion almost two years ago she walked up, asked how I was doing and said “fuck you” and walked away. It was like a bad movie.

This was the last song I heard before I got out of the car earlier, “Stolen Dance” by Milky Chance. I like this song. A lot.

It has to be “Pretty in Pink,” doesn’t it? I’m seeing Psychedelic Furs in November and I’m beyond thrilled. John Hughes heard the song and took it literally, this is from SongFacts:

• Richard Butler explained the song’s meaning to Mojo magazine November 2010: “The song was about a girl who kinda sleeps around, and thinks it’s really cool and thinks everybody really likes her, but they really don’t. She’s just being used. It’s quite scathing.”
• John Hughes named his 1986 movie after this song. Starring Molly Ringwald, Andrew McCarthy, and Jon Cryer, Hughes wrote the plot around the song’s lyrics, but according to The Psychedelic Furs, he muffed the meaning. Richard Butler recalled to Mojo how this song got co-opted onto the Pretty In Pink movie: “We did the song (on 1981’s Talk Talk Talk), and were very pleased with it. It wasn’t that we were disappointed it wasn’t a hit to begin with – at that point, we didn’t know what was going on, or whether any of them were singles or whether we were that kind of band. A few years later, Molly Ringwald took it to John Hughes and said, ‘I love this song, we should use it for a movie.’ He took it away, listened to it, and wrote Pretty In Pink, which totally got the whole thing wrong. It was nothing like the spirit of the song at all. It’s really hard to say whether it was damaging for us. I suppose we got tied in with the story of the film, and if that’s what people thought the story was about, and didn’t look much further than that, they were getting a very false impression.”
• This song was re-released with the movie, which was 5 years after it first came out. The re-release charted at #41 US and #18 UK. When it first came out in 1981, it hit #43 UK and did not chart in the US. This new version remixed to make the song more appealing to a Pop music audience. The original includes much rougher, edgier guitar riffs, and the closing, barely audible lines are muttered by Furs lead singer Richard Butler as though he’s ruminating in stream of consciousness style about Caroline while he’s in a drunken haze. The remix has more polished, more upbeats riffs, and while the same lines are included in the trail-off, a louder riff plays over them to make them even less audible and make the overall effect more pop and less bitter.

BONUS: song not on the soundtrack from my favorite movie, “Positively Lost Me” by one of my favorites, The Rave-Ups. Not including this song  would be the biggest misstep of soundtrack history.

My favorite current band is Counting Crows. I just saw them in concert for the second time this summer and they are simply wonderful. This is the chalk art reveal for “Palisades Park” from the new album, Somewhere Under Wonderland.  It’s a great song, reminds me of “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby” a little, although it’s completely different. I like the rhyming and the the chorus. The album is great. CC is back with songs like “Scarecrow” and “Earthquake Driver” (which my son likes dancing to because the child loves to dance.