After doing my favorite albums, someone asked what songs I would put on an ultimate mixtape, so here goes. I decided the ultimate mix tape would have to be 12 songs because that's my favorite number. I chopped down a list of 25 songs to 12 which was difficult but I didn't want to make this post so long that no one would read it. A few songs that missed the cut "Brightly Wound" by Eisley, "When Mac was Swimming" by The Innocence Mission, "Maps" by The Yeah Yeah Yeah's, "Daughter" by Pearl Jam, and "In the Arms of the Angel" by Sarah Mclachlan
This is Switchfoot's best song, it was so good they released it on two of their albums with very minimal differences. On The Beautiful Letdown its called "Dare you to Move" but I like the original stylings on Learning to breathe where the song is called "I Dare you to Move." What makes this song so great is that it presents the concepts of the Gospel in a non-preachy way. The opening stanza is about God's creation "Welcome to the planet, welcome to existence," the second stanza is about sin, "welcome to the fall out... between who you are and who you could be, between how it is and how it should be," the bridge is about God's response to our sin, "redemption with stories to tell, forgiveness is right where you fell... salvation is here," and the chorus is our response, "I dare you to move, I dare you to lift yourself up off the floor." Switchfoot is great at explaining and introducing Christian concepts to a secular audience.
Favorite Lyric- "maybe forgiveness is right where you fell"
In my opinion, this is a perfect song. Great build, perfect lyrics, it all blends into a very powerful and emotional song. The song is a prayer of brokenness at the foot of the cross. The singer wants God to have all of him, to take his world apart but giving everything up is by no means easy. Not easy for the person, and not easy for God either. The song dwells on both sides of the coin from the singers perspective as he stands at the foot of the cross and asks God to take his life (not kill him though) and the singer knows that this can only happen because of Jesus and his death on the cross. When the song crescendos near the finish I am almost always moved to tears because of the desperation in the singers voice and the brokenness that he is praying for.
Favorite Lyric- "serve the ones that I despise, speak the words I can't deny, watch the world I used to know, fall to dust and blow away, I look beyond the empty cross, forgetting what my life has cost."
This is another song that can easily move me to tears, usually at the part where Crowder belts out, "oh he loves us, oh how he loves us, oh how he loves" after the second verse. He just lets go of everything and sings it like its the only thing that matters, because, really, it is the only thing that matters. The other parts of the song are great too, as Crowder is describing how great God's love is by comparing it to a hurricane, or an ocean, or the surprise of an unforeseen kiss. This is a great worship song, it magnifies the Lord's vast love for us.
Favorite Lyric- "Yeah he loves us, oh how he loves us"
4. "How Deep the Father's Love for Us" by Stuart Townend
I've actually never heard this song performed by its author, but I have heard it many times by the old Campus Crusade for Christ worship band at UCDavis that was led by Scott Blackhart circa 2003. Scott has the pipes that few singers have and he is great at building things up from soft to intense when he performs. The song is a response to God's sacrifice and the recognition that we are sinners, yet God's love for us is immense, it goes beyond our sin. This song opened my eyes to the fact that Jesus had the power and justification to not go through with the crucifixion and could have called for angels to rescue him at any moment, but he went through with it because of His love.
Favorite Lyric- "Behold the man upon the cross, my sin upon his shoulders, ashamed I hear my mocking voice, call out among the scoffers. It was my sin that held him there, until it was accomplished."
This is off the Winter EP by Switchfoot lead singer Jon Foreman. His solo stuff is poetry in motion. With Switchfoot, I always thought their slower songs were deeper and more thought provoking then the more rocking songs, so when Jon released four solo albums that were basically acoustic, I had a feeling these songs would connect with me. It took me awhile to actually track down these albums but when I did, they were in heavy rotation for quite some time. The song "In Love" doesn't stand out at first, it features a mandolin playing in the background and has a more eastern (Asia not New York) feel to it. What sets this song apart is how the lyrics slowly start to reach out to you. In between every line, Jon says, "In love" or "my love." When reading the lyrics, you can see that the words "in love" threads through everything. Think about that for a moment, everything God does is with love at the forefront, so love threads through everything He does. This song captures that idea. I secretly hope that one day I will be taking communion and the church I'm at will play this song during it because it mentions "this cup... this bread." It would be a great song to reflect on during communion.
Favorite Lyric- "Come drink, my love, my blood, my love, my life, my love, in death, my love"
There are a lot of great Radiohead songs, dozens actually. Over the past year or so I've listened to Radiohead pretty heavily and I enjoy how they take risks with their sound. Their music is almost prophetic in that they have been singing about their dissatisfaction with our disconnected society at the hands of technology since The Bends. The album Ok Computer probably touched on this predicted disconnect and the dissatisfaction therein the most, but the song Fake Plastic Trees from their preceding album The Bends does it the best. It's a song about pursuing things that are fake or shallow, and how that will eventually drive us to misery.
Favorite Lyric- "she lives with a broken man, a cracked polystyrene man, who just crumbles and burns, he used to do surgery, for girls in the eighties, but gravity always wins."
Written originally by Leonard Cohen but covered perfectly by Jeff Buckley. This singer had a perfect voice. One of the best in modern music. This song has been covered by a few other artists, but Jeff Buckley's remains the best. The song itself is about David of the Bible after he sinned against God by sleeping with another mans wife named Bathsheba. David sings Hallelujah as a broken man.
Favorite Lyric- "I've seen your flag on the marble arch, love is not a victory march, its a cold and its a broken hallelujah."
I love Bob Dylan. He is the most prolific American songwriter of all time and I haven't even heard half of his classics. No one can write a song and play around with the words like Bob Dylan can. His early stuff like "Blowin in the Wind" and "The times they are a changin" are classic civil rights songs that captured the spirit of the 60s. "Masters of War" may be Dylan at his meanest. He sings against people who profit from war, and does it with justified vitriol. He rails at how rich men send young men to die in a war while they sit comfortably behind their desks. At the songs end he even hopes that the masters of war would die and he would follow their caskets until they were buried so he would be sure that they were dead. Yikes.
Favorite Lyric- "Let me ask you one question, is your money that good, can it buy you forgiveness, do you think that it could, I think you will find, when your death takes its toll, all the money you made will never by back your soul."
Rage Against the Machine is a political band that supports the Zapatista movement in Mexico. Now I'm not too familiar with this organization except for that they desire a revolution in Mexico and have actually declared war on Mexico (although they aren't actually at war and aren't literally fighting). Because of their desire for political upheaval in Mexico and in the USA, Rage Against the Machine plays high energy music that has a lot of anger in it. Bulls on Parade is an awesome angry song. When you just need to let loose and blow off some steam this is a great song to play. Ironically, its an anti-war song to boot. The guitarist, Tom Morello plays a catchy riff to open the song and then near the end he makes his guitar sound like a turntable. I don't know how he does it, but it sounds awesome, I used to think the band had a DJ but it turns out, all the sounds are coming from his guitar.
Favorite Lyric- "Weapons, not food, not homes, not shoes, not need, just feed the war cannibal animal"
Another song that oftentimes brings me to tears. 2Pac tells the true story of a 12 year old girl who gets pregnant after getting molested. She thinks she's in love, but the man leaves and she's left to have the baby on her own. She gives birth without anyone knowing it because she had been hiding her pregnancy from everyone. She then throws the baby in the trash but as she walks away, she hears the baby crying so she takes the baby back and tries to raise it. Unfortunately, she has no support from her family so she sells drugs to make money, then becomes a prostitute and is eventually found slain. This song shines a light on the reality of our fallen world, it makes you face mankind at its worst. 2Pac wrote some of the most heart-wrenching songs about black women living in poverty, this one is the most powerful. The build musically is perfect, as things go from bad, to worse, to even worse, the music matches the intensity. This is pretty close to being a perfect song.
Favorite Lyric- "Now Brenda's belly's gettin bigger, and no one seems to notice any change in her figure, she's 12 years old and she's havin a baby, in love with a molester who's sexin her crazy."
They say the best live show in music is The Flaming Lips. I have never seen them live but when I have seen them play on TV I can see why. They are very creative visually and there music has a fun yet introspective sound. This song questions "what is love and what is hate" and "why does it matter?" If I'm not mistaken, the song is coming from the perspective of evil robots as the album that this song is on is called Yoshimi battles the Pink Robots and apparently the robots became evil and Yoshimi (who has a black belt in karate) fights them to rescue mankind. The robots are justifying their evil nature by questioning love and hate itself. I might be wrong on all of this, cause I just started listening to it, but this song also contains one of the best bass lines in rock music.
Favorite Lyric- "What is love and what is hate? The calculations error."
This song is a masterpiece on an album that is also a masterpiece. I recommend hearing the album as a whole but this song sums up the themes pretty well. The singer is in love with Anne Frank and is facing the reality of her demise. His different descriptions of death in the song have a childish innocence to them as does his grief.
Favorite Lyric- "And now we must pick of every piece, of the life we used to love, just to keep our selves at least enough to carry on"
