This song could come out today and hit the top of the charts. It's from 1964.

I have made peace with my ambivalence about Michael Jackson. In my opinion it's OK to absolutely love someone's art and the imagination and emotion behind it, while being disturbed and repelled by the behavior of the human who brought it forth. Somebody who does great things while possessing deep flaws, we call them a "tortured soul."…

Damn. Sooooooo beautiful. 1000 miles in your carWe’re halfway to LA todayThe ones I love know who they areAnd the rest all just slip away I wanna burn the circus tentsI wanna crash your party dressI want it all to make some senseBut it’s cool if it never doesI wanna be with you on this…

I have felt sheepish about loving this song. His persona is "slightly skeevy rock star who thinks a little too well of himself." But not knowing anything about the performer, the song is heartfelt and sad and lovely. This interview mitigates a bit.

Watching the jets high up sparkle like the starsWe live under a dome that keeps space and earth apartYou were sucked into a cloud and I thought that you drownedInto the light pollution and never found a way out Watching the cars paint the highway red and whiteMy eyes are filled with comets burning warm…

This is one of those songs I don't understand why it isn't playing everywhere all the time. I have felt alone in my appreciation of it. It samples little clips of movie dialog throughout the last half. It's so beautiful and tender and emotional. If my name were Violet and my love composed this song I would…

I was in living in Miami when this first came out and it's inextricable from my memory of being there. I made myself a wonderful gauzy, drape-y white curtain for the sliding glass door in my bedroom. For some reason it comes to mind when I hear this. The video is terribly cheesy. Maybe I'm jaded from watching Sons…

This is another of those earnest anthems that I buy into wholeheartedly. I'm not much for watching the Olympics, especially in the summer, so I didn't know until recently that it was the closing theme for the 1996 games in Atlanta. 

I feel a surge of hope every time I hear this song. May it be.

Entertainment writer Rashod Ollison described "Bad Weather" as "an obscure Stevie Wonder song [that] boasts a bouncy cosmopolitan production, zipping horns and all, that’s very 1978 but charmingly so." It takes me right back to my early twenties as a woman in a new city, Mary Richards-style. (The city was Minneapolis, even.) A few years ago, this song played…