When I embarked on that project to listen to every song in my iTunes library in alphabetical order, one of the purposes was to assign a star rating to each song. I kept it simple: Three stars was the default, four stars for the stuff I liked a lot, and five stars for the best of the best. (Anything that wasn’t worth three stars – which was generally anything I couldn’t bother to listen to all the way through – I dumped from the collection; fortunately, there were only a handful of such songs.) This week I noticed that the Shuffle Gods seemed to be giving me an unusually high percentage of four- and five-star songs – less than 30% of my collection is four-star, and only one out of about 60 songs has five stars. So I figured I’d do a Random Ten list from that bounty.
1. Fighting For Strangers – Flying Fish Sailors
2. Unchain My Heart – Ray Charles
3. If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day – Asylum Street Spankers
4. The Day The Bass Players Took Over The World – Trout Fishing In America
5. Here Comes The Night – Van Morrison
6. Chester Nimitz Oriental Garden Waltz (five stars) – Austin Lounge Lizards
7. She’s Always A Woman To Me – Billy Joel
8. Excursion Around The Bay – Great Big Sea
9. Baltimore – Eddie From Ohio
10. Pretty Fly For A Rabbi – Weird Al Yankovic
It’s probably not a coincidence that most of these songs are also by many of my favorite artists. The Onion AV Club recently wrote about great songs by terrible bands, or as I interpret it “songs I like by bands I don’t like”. I generally don’t like anything Paul Rodgers has ever done, but I make an exception for “Shooting Star”, by Bad Company. I’d give it four stars if I had it in my collection. What would you say is your favorite song by an un-favorite performer?