This post originated as an email to Julie Unruh. She had plans to jam with some friends and asked me to recommend a song or two that she could take with her, preferably post-2000.
Here's the thing about me and new music. Since the collapse of radio, I haven't really listened to new music much. I've never had a subscription to Sirius, and the times I've been on Spotify there's just been too much to sift through. I really miss the days of shared cultural experiences. As I've written about before, the last great heyday of rock music was the nineties, and in Charleston we had one of the best rock stations in the country. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Screaming Trees, Counting Crows, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day, Radiohead, U2, R.E.M., Kristin Hersh, Natalie Merchant, Matthew Sweet, Hole, Beck, Indigo Girls, Elliott Smith, the list goes on and on, were "alternative" artists who broke through on the national level. (Eddie Vedder was on the cover of Time magazine.) I mean, if you look at the pop charts from those days, very few of these artists appear, and yet they were well-known by the broader culture. And this is the reason many of them are still able to tour to this day, because they still have a sizeable fan base. Today, I can't name a single rock band, much less a song by one.
A few years ago I had to work at the local Food Lion as a side hustle. The satellite radio they played was mostly pop—every once in a while you'd hear a song by Dave Matthews or Edwin McCain or Muse or even U2—but mostly it was pop music that I had never heard. In fact, some of it was so bad, so generic sounding, that I seriously thought that it was the modern-day equivalent of Muzak: pop-sounding music that was created by studio musicians. Then I heard a song that I thought might be by Katy Perry, and when I got home and Googled the lyrics I found that I was right. Gradually I began to recognize that these were all top pop songs of the day. (Thank god the manager chose this "station"; other stores played the country station, or the oldies station.) There began to be a few songs that I really liked, and when I asked one of the kids working at the store who they were by, they looked at me like I was from Mars (not really; they all liked me, they just knew I was old); most of these songs that I found I liked turned out to be by the same artist, Taylor Swift. "Trouble When You Walked In"; "22"; "Love Story"; "You Belong With Me"; "Red"; "Shake It Off"; and "Blank Space," which is my favorite TS song and one of the best songs of the decade. There's a version of her playing it on acoustic guitar at a Grammy event. For those who might think Swift doesn't have a real singing voice, this performance puts that to rest. Also, there's a D chord in the chorus that she left out of the studio recording, and the first time I heard it it knocked me out.
Of course, my favorite songs from the last couple of decades are my own! A good one for you and your mates to jam on might be "You Know What?" The verse is just two chords. The first chord is A. The second chord is the D confinguration (see what I did there!) on the seventh fret (the second dot on the neck; the note is actually something on the G scale). The chorus is D and A, finishing on E. Then back to A. I'll give you the lyrics in a Word document attached. Sorry, the video cuts off at the very end, but that's the end of the song anyway. As you'll see in the lyrics, I substitute "but it's too late" for "a little sooner." There's a live version with this ending, but I like my home version better; there's an extra couple of bars between the verses in the live version that I don't care for.
