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Listen to the ’60s Hits Essentials playlist on Apple Music. 100 Songs. Duration: 4 hours, 53 minutes.
- Roger Miller – King of The Road
- Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames – Yeh, Yeh
- Jackie Wilson –
- Roy Orbison – Crying
- Russell Morris – The Real Thing
- Leonard Cohen – Suzanne
- Louis Armstrong – What A Wonderful World
- Tom Jones – It’S Not Unusual
- The Monkees – Daydream Believer
- Del Shannon – Runaway
Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” shines a light on the traveling man. The track, a delightful country-pop crossover, tells the story of a nomadic hobo, untethered from all obligations and material goods. The song’s most famous line, “I’m a man of means, by no means, king of the road” was bitingly cynical, reveling in the freedom of refusing to con...
Georgie Fame and his band, The Blue Flames, found the perfect intersection of pop, jazz, and R&B. Audiences agreed. The group’s version of “Yeh Yeh,” topped the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” on the UK chart, ending a five-week run from the Liverpool chaps. Shortly after topping the UK charts, “Yeh, Yeh” reached #21 on the Billboard Pop charts, proving tha...
The instrumentation for Jackie Wilson’s “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher” is as crisp as it gets. The bass sounds like it was recorded in a hermetically sealed vacuum, while the iconic conga groove pops without a crinkle or crack. All Wilson had to do was show up. And show up he did. The instrumental for the 1967 hit was written by G...
Roy Orbison had plenty of 60s hits to choose from, including “Oh, Pretty Woman” But we opted for “Crying,” which begins with a seminal line, familiar to those even who have never heard the song: “I was alright for a while, I could smile for a while.” The song is Orbison at his most vulnerable, admitting that the feelings hidden from a former partne...
Written by Johnny Young and produced by Ian “Molly” Meldrum, “The Real Thing” was initially envisioned as a soft-rock ballad in a similar vein as The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever.” But the demo was superseded by Meldrum’s expansive vision, and “The Real Thing” became one of the first studio masterpieces of the modern era. Alongside engineer ...
Leonard Cohen drew a throughline straight from poetry to folk music. “Suzanne,” his stirring acoustic track from Songs of Leonard Cohen is one of the most powerful examples of this style, with Cohen’s lyrics first appearing as a poem in 1966. (Cohen ripped the poem for a second use because he was short of material for his forthcoming album.) The so...
“What a Wonderful World” is a lesson in perseverance. It’s also one of the best pop ballads ever recorded. Armstrongfirst started making records in 1923, but it was in February of 1968, when Amstrong was 66, that he released “What A Wonderful World,” which would become the biggest-selling song of his massively influential career. Armstrong made mus...
It’s hard to believe now, but Tom Jones was deemed far too sexy for the BBC when he first arrived in the 60s with this song. As such, it was the efforts of pirate radio station Radio Caroline that drove the initial success of Jones’s “It’s Not Unusual.” The upbeat tale of heartbreak was Jones’s second single for Decca Records and his first No.1. Ru...
John Stewart wrote “Daydream Believer” shortly before he left the Kingston Trio, the third track in a trilogy aimed at capturing the malaise and boredom of suburban life. In that respect, he was an innovator, bringing life to the lifeless suburbs in a cry for help – or, at least, a helicopter back to the city. The song was turned down by both We Fi...
“Runaway” almost never happened. Back in 1960, Charles Westover and keyboard player Max Crook earned a recording contract. The recording contract ended disastrously. Perhaps it was another tale of small-town kids intimidated by the Big Apple, but Crook and Westover (who had recently taken on the stage name Del Shannon) failed to impress the bosses ...
- 100 Send Me A Postcard. Dutch psych rockers Shocking Blue would score a US Billboard Hot 100 No.1 with 1970’s ‘Venus’ (covered so memorably by Bananarama 16 years later), but ‘Send Me A Postcard’ is a darker proposition altogether, singer Mariska Veres evoking Julie Driscoll or Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick as she hollers over fuzzed guitar and the obligatory swirling organ.
- 99 Ring Of Fire. This paean to the grisly aftermath of an unforgiving curry – or tribute to love’s steamy embrace, whatever you fancy – was written by Johnny Cash’s future wife June Carter with Merle Kilgore, and originally recorded by June’s sister Anita.
- 98 I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night) The opening track on Lenny Kaye’s ‘Nuggets’, his essential compilation of late-60s garage and psych rock, ‘I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)’ was written by professional songwriting team Annette Tucker and Nancie Mantz but musses up its classic structure with needling, distorted guitar from Ken Williams – recorded backwards – and a growling lead vocal from James Lowe.
- 97 My Girl. They might have done the gritty thing with ‘Ball Of Confusion’ and ‘Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone’ or tried overwrought testifying on ‘Ain’t Too Proud To Beg’, but the Temptations song that gets reeled out most these days is this soppy, doo-wopping poem to a girl who makes everything all right.
Dec 6, 2021 · The 100 Best Songs of 2021. The tracks that defined an unsettling year, featuring Japanese Breakfast, Olivia Rodrigo, Caroline Polachek, Megan Thee Stallion, and more. By Pitchfork. December...
- Pitchfork
- ABBA, "Don't Shut Me Down" One of the year’s most gratifying LP releases was ABBA’s Voyage comeback set, a delightfully low-stakes set of shimmering pop confections with precious little imprint from the 40 years that had passed since the pop legends’ previous album.
- Lana Del Rey, 'White Dress' The opener for the first of her two 2021 albums, Chemtrails Over the Country Club, “White Dress” sets a vivid, dynamic first scene for the otherwise lukewarm LP, with all the drama fans have come to expect from Lana Del Rey.
- Pronoun, "I Wanna Die But I Can't ('Coz I Gotta Keep Living)" “I Wanna Die But I Can’t” functions as both a scream-along anthem about stunted emotional growth, and proof as to why Pronoun leader Alyse Vellturo needs to be playing bigger stages — who wouldn’t want to lose their mind to this chorus in an arena?
- Brockhampton feat. Danny Brown, 'Buzzcut' After 2020 marked the first year since 2016 without a new Brockhampton studio album, the self-proclaimed boy band returned in early spring with the acclaimed Roadrunner: New Light, New Machine.
Billboard 2021 YEAR-END CHARTS Hot 100 Songs on TIDAL. 100 Tracks. Created by Bones. Play on TIDAL. Levitating. Dua Lipa. Future Nostalgia (The Moonlight Edition) Save Your Tears (Remix) The Weeknd Ariana Grande. Save Your Tears (Remix) (Remix) Blinding Lights. The Weeknd. After Hours. Mood (feat. iann dior) E. 24kGoldn iann dior. El Dorado.
