My Favourite Songs

There are a number of ways you could enjoy my favourite music. You could pop by and listen to some sides on my stereo which is back to fully functional, or in the past you could have taken a peek at my loved tracks and most frequently listened to artists on Last.fm, but I’ve since embraced Apple Music. I also wrote a lot of PHP visualizing and exploring my record collection and music meta data, but I think a lot of that has stopped working and now over 12 years later, I don’t seem to have time let alone desire to code in PHP.

Below are listed for posterity, the songs that I marked with five stars in iTunes and loved on Last.fm, but yeah eventually even I stopped using that service because it doesn’t get along with Apple Music.

9 Years Later

And I finally decided to rate another song five stars in iTunes/Apple Music. The song I finally decided to give this rating to was “Leave Something Behind” by Sean Rowe. This is the song that plays over the closing credits of the movie, “The Accountant” which I saw on a plane flying between Canada and China. I liked it and bought it online. Several years later I finally decided to rate it five stars.

12 Years Later (Not Five Years)

Now that I’ve been using Apple Music for a couple years, the algorithms recommend me a variety of songs, artists, and albums to listen to. One artist that I’ve gotten heavily into is Lucero and one song in particular I kept listening to over and over until I finally gave it five stars.

Unlike most people, I still make mixtapes, but I did move on to using CD-Rs no longer using cassettes. They start out as playlists, but I keep many of them to 80 minutes or less and one I worked on for years is called “Time Was” my sister didn’t like it. But not only did it feature the above song, it also features a host of time titled songs and one of them I also decided to rate five stars, because how could I not? But why make it so I can’t embed your video on my website David?

1952 Vincent Black Lightning

This was the next song I decided to rate five stars, apparently on 2024-08-17. I know this through the power of metadata. Ironically Sean Rowe also covers this song, but I decided to go with the original even though I suspect I may have heard it first from Robert Earl Keen. Embedding YouTube videos in blog postings is more challenging than it was twenty years ago or even fourteen.

The Ballad of Love and Hate

I’ve been listening to the Avett Brothers for a while, but I never owned an album by them, they are another band that was offered up by the algorithms or perhaps more truthfully by tribute albums and magazine CD samplers. They apparently were on Magnet New Music Sampler 46. I had a subscription to that magazine during the dark ages, but now it is all about the algorithms not who is a darling of the music industry press.

The original list is below:

• Warren Zevon – The French Inhaler
• Beastie Boys – Paul Revere
• The Beatles – Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)
• Johnny Cash – Delia’s Gone
• The Rolling Stones – Sympathy For The Devil
• MC5 – Rocket Reducer No. 62 (Rama Lama Fa Fa Fa)
• Canned Heat – On The Road Again
• Tom Waits – (Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night
• Smokey Robinson – Tracks of my Tears
• Buffalo Springfield – Mr. Soul
• The Who – Magic Bus
• Kris Kristofferson – Me And Bobby McGee
• The Doors – People Are Strange
• Lightnin’ Hopkins – See See Rider
• Ron Sexsmith – Seem To Recall
• Townes Van Zandt – Our Mother The Mountain
• Townes Van Zandt – Rex’s Blues
• Neil Young – Mr. Soul
• Grateful Dead – Cumberland Blues
• Matthew Sweet – Thought I Knew You
• Public Enemy – Rebel Without A Pause
• Matthew Sweet – Girlfriend
• Big Sugar – Dear Mr. Fantasy
• The J.B.’s – Doing It To Death Pt. 1
• Lightnin’ Rod – Doriella du Fontaine
• Howlin’ Wolf – Spoonful
• Run-D.M.C. – Walk This Way
• Neil Young – Harvest Moon
• Bob Dylan – Girl From The North Country
• Slick Rick – The Ruler’s Back
• Leonard Cohen – Suzanne
• Rheostatics – Four Little Songs
• Johnny Cash & Willie Nelson – I Still Miss Someone
• The Tom Russell Band – Blue Wing
• The Gourds – Gin and Juice
• Curtis Mayfield – Freddie’s Dead (Theme From “Superfly”)
• Tom Waits – Long Way Home
• Hayden – Bad as They Seem
• Luke Doucet – Broken One
• Thirteen – Big Star
• I Lost It – Lucinda Williams
• Dublin Blue – Guy Clark
• Rose Tint My World
• Dear God – XTC
• Jackson – Lucinda Williams
• Ooh La La – Faces
• Bad, Bad Leroy Brown – Jim Croce

If you still need more awesome? I’ve been growing my concert t-shirts collection. If you have a favourite song listed above, you can leave a comment below.

This entry was originaly posted on January 6th, 2011, it was last edited on February 15th, 2026 and is filed under: Rambles and tagged: iTunes, Last.fm, Music.