Stealing this off @kierongillen author of the amazing Phonogram: The Singles Club. Trying to kick start writing for fun, I’ve been working to deadlines and for other projects I’ve began to dread the keyboard. So am using this to shake the mud of my shoes a bit.

day 01 – your favorite song
day 02 – your least favorite song
day 03 – a song that makes you happy
day 04 – a song that makes you sad
day 05 – a song that reminds you of someone
day 06 – a song that reminds of you of somewhere
day 07 – a song that reminds you of a certain event
day 08 – a song that you know all the words to
day 09 – a song that you can dance to
day 10 – a song that makes you fall asleep
day 11 – a song from your favorite band
day 12 – a song from a band you hate
day 13 – a song that is a guilty pleasure
day 14 – a song that no one would expect you to love
day 15 – a song that describes you
day 16 – a song that you used to love but now hate
day 17 – a song that you hear often on the radio
day 18 – a song that you wish you heard on the radio
day 19 – a song from your favorite album
day 20 – a song that you listen to when you’re angry
day 21 – a song that you listen to when you’re happy
day 22 – a song that you listen to when you’re sad
day 23 – a song that you want to play at your wedding
day 24 – a song that you want to play at your funeral
day 25 – a song that makes you laugh
day 26 – a song that you can play on an instrument
day 27 – a song that you wish you could play
day 28 – a song that makes you feel guilty
day 29 – a song from your childhood
day 30 – your favorite song at this time last year

There is no chance of me doing this daily, don’t even look at me like that. And I’m going to do this in any order I damn well please. My Blog my rules baby.

Song you want played at your funeral – You Can’t always Get what you want – Rolling Stones

To any music fan this is a high pressure question, your final chance to show your musical chops to what essentially a captive audience. Anything too popular is a no no really, I’d like to think that I’m not one of those hipster twats in life, but in death I really feel the need to shun the obvious. The chosen song will forever be tied to your memory to those that attend and should capture some public essence of you. Its hard to fight the perverse instinct to be flippant, request the theme song to Button Moon or choose something that will make people laugh with the bad pun of a title, but to a true music fan it’s also a puzzle to be solved a cryptic riddle of your life that is to be solved in 3 or 4 minutes.

Or in my case 7 and and a half minutes. OK it doesn’t pack the raw emotional punch of Wild Horses but Wild Horses is a track for being in love and even though I suspect love will play a big part of my life, it talks of the needing desperate love between lovers and it could start a fight between one of my six or seven wives about who it was meant for. Also, frankly, when I heard Susan Boyle sing it it was ruined forever.

The choral start is both at once sweet, reverential and somehow a little dirty. The inferred corruption of the angelic voices in the context of my funeral, utterly relevant. The song itself at its heart is an acoustic guitar ditty that sweeps up into a giant number with piano and orchestration. With Keith Richards almost minimal and genius lazy guitar poking his head in when relevant. The song has a laid back optimism weaved through it saying ‘everything will be alright’, I like that.

Timothy Leary had a theory that the drugs that your brain released when you die mess with your ability to perceive time, that your last moments were stretched to a point that our brains could mistake as infinite. How you felt in those infinite seconds would be your own personal heaven or hell. Now Tim was full of shit about a lot of things but that is both a startlingly terrifying and comforting thought. For me, You Cant Always Get What You Want stretches into that long comfortable and ultimately hopeful forever, while leaving my loved ones that message of pragmatic optimism.

*for perhaps the best example of the lazy genius see the solo in The Stones’ other epic Sympathy For The Devil – the way he doesn’t fill the space left for the solo with needlessly complicated finger work, he just lets the piercing sound of the few notes he does play just fucking ring)