• Welcome to OGBoards 10.0, keep in mind that we will be making LOTS of changes to smooth out the experience here and make it as close as possible functionally to the old software, but feel free to drop suggestions or requests in the Tech Support subforum!

My 100 favorite songs

Great choice for LZ. Dazed and Confused (the song) would have been a candidate for me, along with Kashmir.
 
Houses of The Holy was probably my favorite album growing up and my favorite album for the longest part of my life, and Led Zeppelin was my favorite band for the longest part of my childhood. I have a brother who's 8+ years older than I am who was probably introduced to Zeppelin too young himself, but definitely introduced me to Led Zeppelin too young. Not the music, but all the shit around it. I read Hammer of the Gods in third grade and I know I didn't understand half of it (a red snapper ate her red snapper, what does that even mean???); even if a lot of that stuff is apocryphal, I'm sure enough isn't.

A memory I think about often is on one trip up to Rhode Island to see my grandparents, my father took us to Newport to do the cliff walk. My brother and I got way ahead of the rest because my younger sister was probably 3 or something and walking slowly, and we just ended up laying in one of the huge lawns in front of one the huge mansions. We were like "man, sure would be nice if we had some tunes right now" "yeah, like some Zeppelin" "yeah." Just then the mansion we were in front of started to blast Houses of the Holy. No joke. Sometimes I think I made this up in my head, but occasionally I won't think about it for a while and will be with my brother somewhere and he'll be like "remember that time in Newport?" So maybe it did happen. I'll go with it. Not that I need an excuse to think about JPJ's mellotron masterclass on "Rain Song."

Anyway, the beginning of Song Remains the Same always takes me someplace. "I had a dream. Crazy dream."

I think my favorite Zeppelin recording ever is the BBC session "Since I've Been Loving You," though, just some heavy, heavy plodding screechy blues, and Plant's scream at 4:50-something gives me chills every time, and I think for like a minute after he says "all my tears they fell like rain" I could live off the feeling I get from that for many years and never take drugs again. Plant howling, Page conjuring Crowley spirits with Link Wray illegal Satan picking, Bonham going crazy, and JPJ staying cool at the organ while playing like fifteen different mad scientist lines.
 
OTHAFA - has been my favorite Zeppelin song for as long as I can remember. Kashmir and When the Levee Breaks may have jumped it at some point, but not for long.
 
Top 5 Led Zeppelin:

Communication Breakdown
Misty Mountain Hop
Dancing Days
Nobody’s Fault but Mine
D’yer Mak’er (play it before Sean Kingston - Me Love for a laugh)

Honorable Mention:

Achilles Last Stand
Ramble On

WTLB is incredible but it is really hard for me to not associate it with Katrina.

Picking Stairway for a best song is like picking Touch of Grey, both are really good but you don’t pick them. Reminds me of the scene in Coco where Miguel wants to play Remember Me and Hector’s like nahh. The last 2:30 is an absolutely epic face melting Page outro, but the first 5:30 is too long to get through. Fleetwood Mac got it right with The Chain in terms of keeping the front end shorter while we wait for the back end pay-off.

Speaking of too long, Kashmir has the catchiest hook (Godzilla) but it is way too long / repetitive. I’m sure it was amazing live though. Achilles Last Stand is my favorite long Zeppelin song because it holds my attention throughout and the insane Bonham solos make me think of Achilles cutting dudes heads off. I don’t like long songs (>6min) in general though.

LZIV is my favorite album. I’ll give SIBLY a try, I’ve always skipped over LZIII other than Immigrant Song.

Led Zeppelin had arguably the best guitarist and drummer of all time. I feel kind of bad for Plant because his singing was the weakest link in the band but that says more about the talent of the band than his singing.
 
Last edited:
Have to through in the what is and what should never be. Great jam with a hilarious origin story (well not for some people)…
 
12. Bon Iver - 33 “GOD”

Justin Vernon is my favorite individual musician of the 21st century. He’s that mix of painstaking and prolific, reclusive and massive. The trajectory his music has taken from For Emma to I, I with side projects and features in between has been spectacular. This album and song shows the influence various producers, but especially his time with Kanye West, had on his music. The song is very Los Angeles, playing on various landmarks like the Ace Hotel, modeled after the Segovia Cathedral, making a religion out of the aesthetics of his life today.

For Emma and the Blood Bank EP are both marvels. They’re poppy enough, dripping in saccharine lyrics and nostalgia, and just weird enough to be indie darlings. I love them each so much. Couldn’t pick a favorite from them if I tried. Gayngs, Volcano Choir, the non Taylor Swift Big Red Machine songs, Deyarmond Edison, he lends his sound all over the landscape. His gravitational pull is immense—22, A Million has some of my favorite performers on album tracks (S Carey, Jenn Wasner), and he brings artists like Colin Stetson around with him in his touring band.

I am excerpting this long section from Trevor Hagen’s piece about 22, A Million, written from the perspective of a friend, because it made me appreciate so much more what this album is doing:

This spectacular upheaval of life after these albums provoked an inner storm, a mental sickness of anxiety for Justin. Of course it did. The dream had taken on its own life. It all came to a head on an empty Atlantic beach. I bore witness to my best friend crying in my arms, lost in a world of confusion and removal. Justin could barely even talk. It was only days before, on a misguided solo trip to an island off the coast of Greece, that he had recorded the opening words of 22, A Million, "It might be over soon", into a portable sampler. The forecast that begins this next Bon Iver undertaking is a reminder of our fragile existence. How when everything appears stable, it may crumble and fall through our fingers. How do we hold on to what is important? How do we make sense of the events that rip us apart? What choices do we have and how do we make them? It was the beginning of an unwinding of an immense knot inside. When confronted with daemons one must hold up the mirror in order to see the other side. For Justin, that begins with 22.

22 stands for Justin. The number's recurrence in his life has become a meaningful pattern through encounter and recognition. A mile marker, a jersey number, a bill total. The reflection of '2' is his identity bound up in duality: the relationship he has with himself and the relationship he has with the rest of the world. A Million is the rest of that world: the millions of people who we will never know, the infinite and endless, everything outside one's self that makes you who you are. This other side of Justin's duality is the thing that completes him and what he searches for 22, A Million is thus part love letter, part final resting place of two decades of searching for self-understanding like a religion. And the inner-resolution of maybe never finding that understanding. When Justin sings, "I'm still standing in the need of prayer" he begs the question of what's worth worshipping, or rather, what is possible to worship. If music is a sacred form of discovering, knowing and being, then Bon Iver's albums are totems to that faith.
Click to expand...

The last line there is 33 GOD, we can transcend via this music. These are still personal songs for Justin, as they ever were but now they’re wrapped in layers of abstraction, they’re taking more musical chances, they’re sampling and advancing the form. Like a gospel choir, like the ancients chanting in a ceremony, we can find our way to salvation through music. Hallelujah. I remember when I was a kid in youth group trying desperately to feel something in church, hoping for clarity or at least comfort. It never came. When I saw Bon Iver in DC, he brought out Bruce Hornsby for a couple songs and I saw god. Or at least for a few moments in time I felt proper peace, humbled by the music, alive and not alone.
 
Every time a new bon iver album comes out, my girlfriend dumps me. Not on me. By the third time I was expecting it
 
11. Neutral Milk Hotel - Song Against Sex

When I was 20 I thought Neutral Milk Hotel would forever be the most important band in my life. I could have written ten thousand words on Aeroplane and barely scratched the surface. For a relatively obscure band, I came to them reasonably early, like freshman year of college, and I think as an 18 year old while your frontal lobe is still forming you can just get completely and utterly blown away by something and make it part of your personality for years to come. That was still way too late to catch them live while they were first on tour. I’d later see Jeff on the solo tour in York, PA (front row! Bawled my eyes out.) with some friends; know some fellow Deacs were there too. And eventually did get to see NMH at a big venue in Philly. Had a poster up in my cubicle at work from that show until we changed offices over the pandemic. So I guess they are still a very meaningful band for me, I just find the commitment of listening a lot more to take on these days, or maybe some of the novelty has worn off.

However, there are some extremely special things for me about the band I’ll think about forever. That York show was one of Jeff’s first back after the long break, and he was clearly so nervous. Halfway through the first song the crowd was screaming words back at him and his expression and body language totally changed—he was completely shocked people were this into it, that they’d pack a theater and hang on his every note. Oh Comely was forever the biggest impact on me, and busting that one out just about broke us all, I think. That memory will go down as one of the most personally thrilling and special shows I’ve seen.

At the show in Philly we met up with one of my wife’s friends who, within the span of 18 months had been kicked out of her parents house when she came out to them as gay, while she was undergoing chemotherapy for a rare bone cancer (she’s in remission now and married and killing it), and she’d just lost her job and her dog died. It was a lot to catch up on—we sat in the tailgate of my trunk and drank a couple Troegs beers and smoked a quick joint and rode into the venue on some pretty heady vibes. When NMH came on, our friend’s face completely and utterly transformed—she told us after the show it was the first good thing to happen to her in a long time. They closed that show with Song Against Sex. Members of the band left the stage and walked into the crowd playing the flugelhorn and the saw and the banjo while Jeff rocked on a rocking chair and took it all in. How strange it is to be anything at all.

I’m glad I didn’t fully miss the boat on this crew. Song Against Sex has replaced Oh Comely and Holland, 1945 as my favorite some time ago. I have to chuckle first of all at the notion of people having sex while any NMH song plays. While it still has some gross out style lyrics and bizarro instrumentation, this is the most straightforward and rocking song they wrote. It is a couple steps from a mainstream pop hit. It’s not that I don’t still embrace the weird, the scary, the ultra high concept, the hard to immediately grasp. I do, but I think growing up a tiny bit I appreciate good songwriting when I hear it now too, and this is definitely it.

What a way to send off a song and kick off a record

So why should i lay here naked
When it's just too far away
From anything we could call loving
Any love worth living for
So I'll sleep out in the gutter
You can sleep here on the floor
And when I wake up in the morning
I won't forget to lock the door
Because with a match that's mean and some gasoline
You won't see me anymore
 
I would definitely say I like Zeppelin and some of their songs are ones I "casually" love and randomly get stuck in my and randomly sing: Whole Lotta Love, Rock and Roll, Ramble On, Trampled Underfoot, Immigrant Song, etc. WLL is probably the riff I play the most if I'm mindlessly noodling on guitar, either that or Tweezer. (honorable mention is "In Context" by Field Music who I'm pretty sure blomqvist taught me about on these here boards).

But I've never really gotten attached to them for some reason, this might not be factually correct, but I get the impression that they didn't spend nearly as much time on their songs as some of the bands I really love. E.g. I don't think there's anything Zeppelin did that gets me even close to as excited about as almost any of the songs on Rumours. A friend of mine used to just drink and go into crazy detail talking about the nuances of the musicianship (almost like one of those Rick Beato videos on YouTube), but LZ has never elicited that type of response for me. I do really like the intro to The Song Remains the Same.

I'm curious if I'm crazy or if that is a shared opinion.
 
I’d have to think some of the odd tunings are interesting to guitar players at least?
 
TownieDeac said:
11. Neutral Milk Hotel - Song Against Sex

When I was 20 I thought Neutral Milk Hotel would forever be the most important band in my life. I could have written ten thousand words on Aeroplane and barely scratched the surface. For a relatively obscure band, I came to them reasonably early, like freshman year of college, and I think as an 18 year old while your frontal lobe is still forming you can just get completely and utterly blown away by something and make it part of your personality for years to come. That was still way too late to catch them live while they were first on tour. I’d later see Jeff on the solo tour in York, PA (front row! Bawled my eyes out.) with some friends; know some fellow Deacs were there too. And eventually did get to see NMH at a big venue in Philly. Had a poster up in my cubicle at work from that show until we changed offices over the pandemic. So I guess they are still a very meaningful band for me, I just find the commitment of listening a lot more to take on these days, or maybe some of the novelty has worn off.

However, there are some extremely special things for me about the band I’ll think about forever. That York show was one of Jeff’s first back after the long break, and he was clearly so nervous. Halfway through the first song the crowd was screaming words back at him and his expression and body language totally changed—he was completely shocked people were this into it, that they’d pack a theater and hang on his every note. Oh Comely was forever the biggest impact on me, and busting that one out just about broke us all, I think. That memory will go down as one of the most personally thrilling and special shows I’ve seen.

At the show in Philly we met up with one of my wife’s friends who, within the span of 18 months had been kicked out of her parents house when she came out to them as gay, while she was undergoing chemotherapy for a rare bone cancer (she’s in remission now and married and killing it), and she’d just lost her job and her dog died. It was a lot to catch up on—we sat in the tailgate of my trunk and drank a couple Troegs beers and smoked a quick joint and rode into the venue on some pretty heady vibes. When NMH came on, our friend’s face completely and utterly transformed—she told us after the show it was the first good thing to happen to her in a long time. They closed that show with Song Against Sex. Members of the band left the stage and walked into the crowd playing the flugelhorn and the saw and the banjo while Jeff rocked on a rocking chair and took it all in. How strange it is to be anything at all.

I’m glad I didn’t fully miss the boat on this crew. Song Against Sex has replaced Oh Comely and Holland, 1945 as my favorite some time ago. I have to chuckle first of all at the notion of people having sex while any NMH song plays. While it still has some gross out style lyrics and bizarro instrumentation, this is the most straightforward and rocking song they wrote. It is a couple steps from a mainstream pop hit. It’s not that I don’t still embrace the weird, the scary, the ultra high concept, the hard to immediately grasp. I do, but I think growing up a tiny bit I appreciate good songwriting when I hear it now too, and this is definitely it.

What a way to send off a song and kick off a record

So why should i lay here naked
When it's just too far away
From anything we could call loving
Any love worth living for
So I'll sleep out in the gutter
You can sleep here on the floor
And when I wake up in the morning
I won't forget to lock the door
Because with a match that's mean and some gasoline
You won't see me anymore
Click to expand...
Great choice. No surprise but I absolutely love Neutral Milk Hotel. This song you chose, is so good. I got into them my senior year of college (fall of 1999), just after the band evaporated, and I still love all his lyrics and inventive instrumentation. I still listen to them all the time. I tend to listen to Avery Island more that Aeroplane, because Aeroplane is like 1 single 45 minute song for me where as Avery Is. has a few break points. He has(d) such an amazing way of weaving person stories of tragedy with societal and historic events. I've long thought much of Avery Island was about abortion, but who knows really.
 
Avery Island reminds me of a walk on a boardwalk, a carnival of horrors and delights

Aeroplane is about the horrible things people can do to each other and the ways the innocent live on

It’s some of the most profound and earnest storytelling you’ll find in all of music
 
I was late to the NMH party by a lot, and I still haven’t listened to Avery Island. Maybe I’ll do that today. But Aeroplane is a masterpiece. It reminds me a lot of Astral Weeks, I can’t listen it without feeling like the artist has gone somewhere the rest of us cannot go and brought back something perfect and singularly unique.
 
I was thinking about doing the exact same thing.

That style probably isn't my favorite (although tbh how to define it / who falls into it, I'm assuming stuff like Bill Callahan and Mountain Goats), but Aeroplane is still one of my favorite albums.

Knowing myself, I'll prob end up just listening to Aeroplane a bunch of times and never getting to Avery Island.
 
Avery is weird, but beautiful, give it a chance.

“All I perceive is wasted and broken
Silvery streams, sacred when spoken
Slam into me and into the ditch of debris…”

“No quarter phone booth calls to home,
Just late night television, inside my bedroom all alone…”

“I swear I have nothing to prove, I just want to dance in your tangles so give me some reason to move…”
 
IAppreciateIt said:
I would definitely say I like Zeppelin and some of their songs are ones I "casually" love and randomly get stuck in my and randomly sing: Whole Lotta Love, Rock and Roll, Ramble On, Trampled Underfoot, Immigrant Song, etc. WLL is probably the riff I play the most if I'm mindlessly noodling on guitar, either that or Tweezer. (honorable mention is "In Context" by Field Music who I'm pretty sure blomqvist taught me about on these here boards).

But I've never really gotten attached to them for some reason, this might not be factually correct, but I get the impression that they didn't spend nearly as much time on their songs as some of the bands I really love. E.g. I don't think there's anything Zeppelin did that gets me even close to as excited about as almost any of the songs on Rumours. A friend of mine used to just drink and go into crazy detail talking about the nuances of the musicianship (almost like one of those Rick Beato videos on YouTube), but LZ has never elicited that type of response for me. I do really like the intro to The Song Remains the Same.

I'm curious if I'm crazy or if that is a shared opinion.
Click to expand...

I love those Rick Beato videos.
 
IAppreciateIt said:
I would definitely say I like Zeppelin and some of their songs are ones I "casually" love and randomly get stuck in my and randomly sing: Whole Lotta Love, Rock and Roll, Ramble On, Trampled Underfoot, Immigrant Song, etc. WLL is probably the riff I play the most if I'm mindlessly noodling on guitar, either that or Tweezer. (honorable mention is "In Context" by Field Music who I'm pretty sure blomqvist taught me about on these here boards).

But I've never really gotten attached to them for some reason, this might not be factually correct, but I get the impression that they didn't spend nearly as much time on their songs as some of the bands I really love. E.g. I don't think there's anything Zeppelin did that gets me even close to as excited about as almost any of the songs on Rumours. A friend of mine used to just drink and go into crazy detail talking about the nuances of the musicianship (almost like one of those Rick Beato videos on YouTube), but LZ has never elicited that type of response for me. I do really like the intro to The Song Remains the Same.

I'm curious if I'm crazy or if that is a shared opinion.
Click to expand...
I agree they didn’t spend as much time on their songs as the other great groups did. Per Bonham, the most takes they ever did was four.

They would have benefited from applying an editorial lens. Whole Lotta Love is pure gold 0-1:18 and 3:06-4:04. Why fill it with crap in between?

I guess they were trying to appeal to phan and other Kashmir fans.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top