these are my perfect songs.
words by tom johnson
It was procrastination that led me to think about perfect songs. A untangling distraction from simple life admin tasks, a house that needed tidying, a handful of grey hours to pass. Specifically, the procrastination led me to start building a giant sprawling playlist of what I thought only as 'perfect songs'. It's the kind of project I’ve undoubtedly started before, maybe even blogged about way back in the day, but if I have then the results have been lost among the digital ether; shifting streaming platforms , forgotten passwords, clumsy fingers.
It’s an incredibly fun thing to do, to delve into that musical map of your life. A quick glance will reveal shiny, obvious things on the surface, those gleaming songs that have arrived and stayed around in your life, ever-present when you reach for your record collection, when you line-up songs for a road-trip, a wander, a late-night search for bliss, for memories.
A lot of the songs that I quickly added to the playlist I'm constructing are such all-timers, pieces that have felt like they've been there all the time. Songs I’ve carried with me through miles, through homes, relationships. Songs we know the shape of like our own limbs, like friends, family members. You’ll know your own already, as you're reading this. We've imbued them with personal memories, all the detritus of life that can gets swelled together to make one person's work, somehow, our own too.
Like other meaningful things – we can call them treasures – it’s the digging around that reveals the most interesting rewards. Something I think about a lot are those very early days of music discovery, the hours/days/weeks/months where your own music fandom was growing into something altogether more serious, for want of a more elusive word. Where spider-web trails were tumbling out into the distance, drawing lines between artists and albums, record labels, producers...each song or album a landing point that led to some other intriguing discovery; a whole world of opening up from the corners of your room.
"If you love x, you should check out y!"
The seemingly never-ending gossamer web of this funny little art form that we give so much of ourselves over to lies in that sentence just above. In many ways, that little suggestive phrase has been the beating heart of GFP over the years. I like to find and show you new things, in the hope that a song/album/artist can make a little impress upon your own world. Maybe one such thing will sit in your own perfect-songs playlist if you were to make one today (and you should). There are many within my own list that have arrived via that same road, grabbed and held onto from the joy of sharing.
I’m lucky in that so many of the songs I've found from digging around in the digital soil are documented online, some sixteen years of writing, mixtapes, playlists all laid out like a map to run my finger over and pull from. Like any map though, even this one is liable to take me to the wrong place from time to time. Maybe the place we were looking for, that we’ve forgotten the name of, lies just past the fold, stays hidden, consigned to memory. Maybe you needed that song only for the one moment it happened to catch the sun right and fall perfectly upon your day. Maybe you didn't need to hold on to it.
But if we deem these hidden things to be perfect songs, wouldn’t we always remember them? Well, I don't think so. Because the thing about perfect songs is that there are no rules, you see. That's where the fun lies. A song I deem to be perfect fills no other criteria than that. It doesn’t even have to be what we deem to be an artist’s ‘best song’. Sometimes it makes no sense at all.
A perfect song is just one that you sit down to listen to, and in that moment, regardless of love, light or loss, of season or surrounding, makes you say to yourself, though often aloud: ‘Huh, what a perfect song’.
Some perfect songs will just straight-up bangers, joyful moments of expression that burst with life, that have been carved deliberately to stir such feelings. Almost objective in their ability to dazzle, to move us (Dancing On My Own, Run Away With Me et al.). Some are brash and bold and layered and full of textures that wind themselves around us, stir us to dancing, others are just three chords and a lone voice that presses weight upon our chest. Others are built only from all the spillage of our own contexts, how and when the perfect song found us, the feelings that we left in those quiet moments as the song ended.
One example: What else is there to say about Marching Bands of Manhattan being on the playlist, other than to tell you that when I first, and finally, visited New York City, and after walking through a crisp, clear-blue autumnal morning, I sat down in a window seat of a coffee shop to watch that beautiful and ridiculous swell with life at the same moment that song drifted in through a couple of speakers in the back corner of the room.
Perfect, see?
Often, and actually quite importantly, because it removes any doubt at all regarding their inclusion, there’s an expletive attached to our choice of perfect song. These are the songs that carry just slightly more weight than the non-expletive songs. You’ll know the ones yourself, and again there’s no argument to be made here. Archie, Marry Me? A perfect song, I'm sure we'll all agree. Gang Gang Dance’s Glass Jar? Now that’s a perfect fucking song. Don't believe me? Find a place where you'll have no interruptions for approximately 11-minutes and play it as loud as you can.
And the thing that makes all of this so much fun, so enriching, is that a perfect song can appear from anywhere. Like a magic trick; a new love. Earlier this week, when I asked Instagram for perfect songs, lots of people sent me their own choices, all shaped by the reasons outlined above, I'm sure. Many of those weren’t perfect songs for me, how could they be? And that’s a beautiful thing in itself. Some I knew already, and even loved, others I just couldn’t get inside of, didn’t have the context needed for all the tangled edges to intertwine with mine, and form that scruffy little dance we perform together with a song.
Some, however, did cross through that barrier. A few gently eased their way into my day, to stop me in my tracks. One friend, for example, sent me their perfect song choice: Untitled Love Song, from the album How I Loved You, by Angels of Light. I still don’t know anything about the song, the artist, the album. Right now, that doesn’t matter at all. I have listened to the song a double-digit number of times in the past few days, and felt my chest swell every time I did so. It’s in the playlist already; a perfect fucking song.
“There's nothing true and nothing's real,” the song’s two voices sing in the heart of it all. “But I remember one clear feel: warm beneath your gentle company.”
Which, somewhat beautifully, reads like a perfect encapsulation of everything I’ve been writing out here; all these scattered words that don’t really have any point at all, but helped me remember a whole bunch of songs that have traced – and in many ways illuminated – the paths of my life. And how lucky we are to listen; to sing and dance. A few of these perfect songs I have listened to for as long as I can remember. One of them I had never heard of until Monday afternoon, but there was that one clear feel. Thank you, Will.
A what a thing to remember, to know, that a perfect song is being conjured up and sketched out right now, brought to beautiful life somewhere out there in this strange old messy world. It's happening while I write this, and as you read.
In so many secret ways, they’re already on their way to you.
~
My Perfect Songs playlist is currently sitting at 197 tracks, and 16.5 hours long
If you'd like to dive into it you can do so here, via Qobuz
