Once upon a time on Popdose, Michael Parr wrote a feature called The Friday Five, which featured him putting his music library on shuffle and writing a few sentences about 5 tracks that came up. He hasn’t done this since 2015 and many people have picked up the mantle in the intervening years. In the spirit of “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” I present my own version of this, titled the Sunday Six. This may be a regular feature, it may not be. One thing I’m not doing with this is forcing myself to write, but I do feel like something like this will inspire me to produce something and music is something I love to write about. Music was such a huge part of my blogging years and I think that it can be that again, even in this day and age of short attention spans and decline of long-form writing.
So with no further ado, here’s this week’s Sunday Six, with Spotify links to all of them so you can listen along if you like.
“Wrong Number” by Alisha
I was introduced to this song in 2010 by a guy I met on Twitter who was as in to pop music as I was. I remember doing a blog post around that time about phone songs and this was his contribution to that. It’s a wonderful slice of 80s cheese and features what I think might be the only instance of the melody of a chorus being punched out on a touch tone phone. The friendship ultimately didn’t last but the music sure did.
“Dangerous Times” by Cher
I absolutely love Cher’s faux metal era in the 80s. Truth be told, it’s probably my favorite Cher era, even including her transformation into a gay dance diva. I hadn’t heard this song in forever when it shuffled up and I’m shocked at how well it holds up. I recall mocking Cher a little back then that she would have a comeback at such an advanced age. She was FORTY. My teenage self was so ageist lol.
“The Way You Make Me Feel” by Michael Jackson
Listening to this in 2024, you really have to try to separate the man from the music. I don’t know if the world will ever know if the accusations against Jackson were true or not, but his 80s output soundtracked my teenage years. I hold the minority opinion that Bad is actually a better album than Thriller, the most likely reason being is that I experienced Bad in real time, vs. Thriller which I mostly discovered after it had run its course (I was too busy listening to Olivia Newton-John and only Olivia Newton-John.) “The Way You Make Me Feel” is inseparable from its memorable video and remains a jam to this day.
“Bent” by matchbox twenty
I vividly remember the first time I heard matchbox twenty. It was on VH1 and the song was the inescapable “3AM” which I still love to this day. I never thought they would go on to much beyond that but they really ended up surprising me, having a good run of successful singles and albums in the late 90s/early 00s. “Bent” was another one of those songs I hadn’t heard in an age and kind of made me want to search out the vinyl of this album. (EDIT: I looked and it’s available on sky-blue vinyl for a reasonable price…hmmm.)
“Ray of Light (Sasha’s Ultra Violet Mix Edit)” by Madonna
My love of Madonna is legendary but the remixes of “Ray Of Light” did not impress me much in 1998 when they were released. They were gargantuan and repetitive and I was honestly reaching the end of buying CD maxi singles because I just didn’t feel I needed 7 different versions of the same song, each with fewer and fewer vocals than the one before it. But what I will say is that the edit of this remix works great. Honestly, the entire Finally Enough Love box set was a stroke of brilliance because it whittled down those unwieldy, excessive remixes to something that was much more palatable to me. Its inclusion in the Celebration Tour was a high point although to be honest, I have so much trouble remembering a lot of that tour because my tour amnesia makes it feel like a dream in retrospect.
“You Need A Man Around Here” by Brad Paisley
My daughter has a soft spot for what she calls “clever white boy country.” The song that started it all was Rascal Flatt’s “Backwards” which details happens if you play a country song backwards. I sent her Brad Paisley’s “Two Feet of Topsoil” and when I heard “You Need A Man Around Here” I thought to myself “I really need to send this to her, too.”
What’s in your now playing this week? Sound off in the comments!