#489 A Girl Called Eddy – Golden

Last month I spent some time in Tokyo. I was walking the streets of Shinjuku, plugged into my old iPod, when this song came on. I had not heard it for years, but it seemed to frame to scene perfectly.

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#490 Fake Blood – I Think I Like It

500 Songs is quickly turning into one of those projects I only deal with during national holidays, and so I am kicking off Easter 2010 with some annoyingly addictive blog house.

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#491 Ellie Goulding – Under The Sheets

In the mission statement, I warned that 500 Songs would be comically current – not dating much farther back than a few decades. Here is living up to that.

Ellie Goulding is going to be the La Roux of 2010, when her debut album Lights drops in March. She has already been a blogosphere darling for the past six months or so, even before the first single was released digitally in September of last year.

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#492 Death Cab For Cutie – The New Year

This is an obvious one.

I am writing this on the last day of the year – the decade even. With the suspension for tomorrow’s parties building, there is also the blue hue of broken promises and families, dead end jobs, aging bodies. You could call it bittersweet.

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#493 Daso – Tinnitus

House music has always been a bit of a blind spot for me.

I think it’s something with a style of music with such a coherent structure, that to an outsider, it all sounds the same. See also, jazz and classical.

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Intermission: Five Star iTunes Slave

This is something I wrote years ago at Last.fm, but it still rings all too true.

Also, intermissions will also be a reoccurring feature on 500 Songs.com. Because not every thought is accompanied by chords.

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#494 Jack’s Mannequin – The Lights and Buzz

As I will probably still be posting songs here next Christmas (and the one after that), I first intended to save this song. But, with the holidays just a few days away, I didn’t want to keep this gem from the few followers that this site might already have.

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#495 Bright Eyes – White Christmas

With only a few days to Christmas Eve, I figured it was time to start churning out the holiday songs.

This one is special in more ways than one.

The original song – easily my favorite among traditional ones – was probably written in 1940. There’s some debate about that, but we do know that Bing Crosby’s version is the best selling single of all time with more than 50 million copies sold. Also counting collections, that number reaches eight figures.

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#496 Battles – Atlas

I don’t care too much for ever changing genre definitions. My iTunes library, while compromised of tens of thousands of songs, only has a handful of different genres. Pop, rock, hip hop, electronic, jazz, classical. I am still figuring out where some of my favorite music should go.

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#497 The Republic Tigers – Buildings and Mountains

Here’s one I don’t have much of a story for.

I might have picked this song up from a tv show, most probably something like The OC, Gossip Girl or One Tree Hill. Even though I didn’t watch the latter two that much, they do have terrific music supervisors, so I tend to get their soundtracks.

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#498 Mick Boogie and Terry Urban – Lost Part 2

You’d be hard pressed to find anything more influential in music during the 00’s than mashup culture.

A lot of the time, the resulting music is interesting rather than good (The Grey Album), but there are a few exceptions to that rule. The hyperactive bite size music of Girl Talk will probably end up on this list, and I always intended for Mick Boogie and Terry Urban to be as well.

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#499 City and Colour – Love Don’t Live Here Anymore

In the mission statement (I like calling it that, as if this site is some kind of blue chip business venture) for 500 Songs, I mention that it won’t have a lot of old soul songs.

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#500 Matthew Jay – You’re Always Going Too Soon

I would like to kick this project off by contradicting myself.

When I planned 500 Songs, it was very clear to me that this list would reflect my views on musical geography, where London is not the capital of the world. It has not been for more than 40 years.

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