Nickys's meme - list ten songs that you identify with and explain why.

[original_aj]

In no particular order:

1) Billy Bragg - A New England

I wasn't as politically active as many of my peers in the Eighties - this song reflects my priorities quite well.

2) Bruce Springsteen - Walk Like a Man

The importance (and difficulty) of behaving in the way which you think is correct, plus the realisation that most of us are pretending a greater confidence than we actually have.

3) Eric Clapton - Wonderful Tonight

The song he played immediately after nickys & I got engaged at his gig. Also how I feel about her.

4) Jimi Hendrix - Castles made of Sand

How little in our lives turns out the way we expected it to, whether for better or for worse, and the importance of dealing with what happens on it's own merits rather than by measuring against what didn't happen.

5) Leonard Cohen - Famous Blue Raincoat

The importance of behaving well, even if you are hurting. Losing gracefully. Also recognising that if you love someone letting them go can be the best thing you can do for them - just because you love them it doesn't mean that you are the one who will make them happy. Loving someone doesn't give you any rights over them.

6) Eric Bogle - I Was Only 19

The way war is glamourised and young people find out the hard way that they've been lied to and it's not what they expected. How the survivors are often left to deal with the psychological effects with little or no support. Plus the love that grows between people who go through the experience together.

7) The Men They Couldn't Hang - The Green Fields of France

My favourite version, because of the anger. How people in positions of power use other people's lives for their own ends. The way the ordinary troops keep having to pay the price when a regime which has been allowed to grow (and often nourished) by the same leaders who sit safe at home making macho speeches while others clean up their mess. (Or their Dad's mess....)

8) Rush - I Think I'm Going Bald

A great song about aging.

9) Stiff Little Fingers - At the Edge

Double reason this one. It summed up very well how I felt as a teenager, living in a small provincial town. Now I'm older and wiser I find it amusing - like the errant husband who claims his wife doesn't understand him, I suspect I was actually understood all too well. The arrogance and self importance of the young.

10) Whitesnake - Help me thro' the day

A relationship is a team, and together we are stronger. And a man expressing need and weakness - how just by someone being with you you can feel stronger, more confident, more secure.


I've left out songs that it was when or where I heard them that's important. Mostly they were just nostalgia. And I mostly avoided more conventional "Significant" songs, or ones that relate to closed chapters in my life. There are quite a few relating to forming and losing specific relationships, for instance. I tried to go more for general philosophy rather than specific circumstances.