1. Neighborhood #2 (Laika), The Arcade Fire. I love this song just for this line: “C’mon Rockford, you can do it!”
2. Song of the Shrimp, Frank Black. The former Pixie relates the woeful tale of a naive young shrimp. Really.
3. Learning to Fly, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Have you seen the lineup for this year’s Austin City Limits festival? My goodness. If you’re anywhere near Texas, please go in my stead. I don’t think there’s a bad act there this year.
4. Buddy Holly, Weezer. Takes me straight back to homeroom my sophomore year of high school. What did we ever do to those guys that made them so vi-o-lent?
5. The Days of Wine and Booze, The Minus 5.
6. Lay All Your Love On Me, ABBA. I’m not familiar with this particular ABBA number, but it’s definitely disco. And that’s all I have to say about that.
7. Gentle Moon, Sun Kil Moon. Poppy likes to croon along to this song.
8. Little More Time with You, James Taylor. “Passed on the cocaine, said bye-bye to my methadone, put down the bottle for one more day, backin’ off of my tobacco jones.” Just what I want to hear in an adult-contemporary, romantic ditty. And yet, I love this song.
9. Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels), The Arcade Fire. A bazillion songs on the iPod, and it just keeps playing the “Neighborhood” songs. That’s OK, though, because I like this one. Especially this line: “Then we tried to name our babies, but we forgot all the names that, the names we used to know.”
10. Smoke, Ben Folds Five. Have I ever told you about the time my friend Sinead and I sat in the VIP beer tent at a Ben Folds show? It was fabulous.
11. Spark, Tori Amos. “She’s addicted to nicotine patches. She’s afraid of a light in the dark.” I love the way she enunciates.
12. She, The Pretenders & Emmylou Harris. Emmylou has a terrific voice, and this one’s good to sing along with. “Oh, she sure could sing.” Even if I can’t.
13. Someone’s Daughter, Beth Orton. This is another artist that Rockford loved long before I did. And then he took me to a concert, and I was hooked. “I wanna shout about it, but I keep quite about it. Wanna laugh about it, but I don’t joke about it. Wanna live without it, but I can’t do without it.”