The Earwyrms Canon, Pt. VIII: Bluets
ISSUE #193
I’m tackling the impossible: the 100 best songs ever recorded. Not ranked from #100 to #1, but instead given their own meaningful sequence, a personal structure to reveal itself over the next few weeks. It will be a compass for navigating my sonic perspective. An Official Earwyrms Canon.
When wrapped in true despair, there’s no energy for music. All our attention is stolen away. Silent are the bleakest moments—there are no birds on the darkest days.
But song ensures bad is never its worst. We sing to bring joy to shipless oceans. This batch of Canon songs carry that knowledge—flames of understanding for those thinnest wicks of heart.
“Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space” | Spiritualized
1997
Before we knew space for the vacuum it is, we once looked up and pictured heavens. Choirs sang somewhere above the sky. This masterpiece is now the closest we get, with its gospel finale of "Can't Help Falling in Love." Many songs are beautiful, but few are this much so.
“1979” | The Smashing Pumpkins
1995
The grass makes a special sound when it waves at passing cars. I learned this from sitting on my Iowa lawn. The swish is like skin brushing another’s skin, always louder for those speeding hearts—teenagers in a pickup’s bed, third-shifters making their ways back to love. This was all a prairie once, before bricks were baked by human hands—each a sculpture all its own.
“Hard Times (No One Knows Better Than I)” | Ray Charles
1961
Bad things happen, and they happen a lot. Charles’s knowledge of that truth is what keeps this sounding so desperately modern. Even Sam Cooke on “A Change is Gonna Come” can’t reach what Ray is plumbing here—it’s maybe the weariest voice of all.
“Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want” | The Smiths
1984
If you’re feeling a bout of acute self-pity, put this on and take a shower. You should release your soul of blame—too stiff an upper lip will give you lockjaw. The song works because it’s not as heavy as it feels to hang your head. It’s simple as the core of circumstance and gentle as the rain.
“Master of None” | Beach House
2006
Haunted house music is hard to make. It’s easy to lean too far into scary, to forget that houses spend most time in the sun. It’s about building a structure for feelings, and that’s exactly what the organs do here. It’s the ineffable that makes good music so good—the spirit of a staircase or stained-glass window.
“I'd Rather Go Blind” | Etta James
1967
Love is the brighter end of addiction, but they’re born from the same emotional beast. We need to replace unfulfilled desire with something else that will quench us. Never has there been a starker picture of that jealousy than this.
“Inchworm” | Danny Kaye
1952
This proto-Schoolhouse Rock ballad from a bizarre film called Hans Christian Andersen is my go-to anthem for resilience. It’s a lush bit of Disneycore that I first heard from a DJ stint that David Bowie did for BBC in 1979. It’s less about arithmetic and more about will—the drive we need to get through a day, the strength to get inch-by-inch through muck.
“Ooh La La” | Faces
1973
Spend enough time stitching your heart back together and you have to laugh at the shape it takes. That’s the tone that Rod Stewart strikes in this musical version of “so it goes.” Save it for those brighter days, when that boogeyman Regret looks like nothing but nonsense.
“Song to the Siren” | This Mortal Coil
1984
In this version covering Tim Buckley’s original, Elizabeth Fraser sounds like the voice of God. It’s quintessential ethereal goth—no surprise that it’s David Lynch’s favorite. One of music’s strongest metaphors and one of the greatest pop poems to boot, it’s simple enough to glean at first reading but deep enough to plumb for years. It’s gotten me through my darkest times.
“Flightless Bird, American Mouth” | Iron & Wine
2007
Not even Twilight can sandbag this song—in fact, its legacy is bolstered from it. Guarantee it'll still make anyone cry.
Next week—more to come.
Every song I've heard this year felt like it'd be the last. It's the scorch (praise be its name!)—every drive, I blast my mounted phone with max AC. It's a prayer that keeps it from overheating.
As I listened to the long list of songs for this issue, over the many weeks it took me to get my groove back (jury’s still out), I was surprised at how sad this project was making me. I’d been more than ready to revisit the dull bite of those pandemic memories, obviously, but this emotional hedging made it only more of a shock when I was blindsided by intense anti-nostalgia,
We have entered the arbitrary quarter century, which is fascinating because I’ve lived through it all. Remember: 25 years into the 20th, we had The Great Gatsby and “Rhapsody in Blue.”
The best song of 2024 isn’t on Spotify. It’s called “24/7 Heaven,” Diamond Jubilee’s closer. It comes drenched in strings and draped in blue light, at the end of Cindy Lee’s two-hour album. It’s the epitome of sublime, if you ask me—a sweet and perfect fruit, an apple at first sight.
Technically, halfway through the year is next Monday, July 1st. This is a leap year, after all. They’re the only years where there’s an even split in days; the only times the divide falls at midnight, not noon.
That first song you hear? That’s my #1 song of the year. That’s right—for the first time in Earwyrms history, I have made a best-of playlist from one to ten. Grief demands you do something different, and—like Soderbergh producing the 93rd Academy Awards—only time will tell if we fell for seductive folly or landed on love’s new paradigm.
A collection of the best songs from these first several months, featuring Gia Margaret, Jessy Lanza, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, JPEGMAFIA, Danny Brown, Wednesday, ANOHNI and the Johnsons, Jess Williamson, and more.
The trouble with writing about music every week is you don’t actually end up knowing that much more about music. Quite less, in fact. The time, the work, the attempted balance leads to short cuts, and I become more drawn to the oldies and goodies instead of pressing play on something new.
The future is back, baby! Coming at the heels of two bifurcated years—one by a virus, the other its vaccine—2022 stands tall in history as the year the Great Machine roared back to life. Belch ye black smoke into that unbearable blue sky!
Welcome to your Earwyrms Wyrpped for 2022. This year, we explored a lot of new genres here in the dirt, from phonk to roadhouse, dungeon synth to goth. We got through 42 issues together, but your favorites were the ones that sounded like home. Here are the most popular Earwyrms issues of 2022.
A confession: I have not finished a single book all year. I normally average between 15 and 30 by year’s end. And listen, I’ve tried—oh! have I tried.
When did 2021 begin? Was it January 1st? It couldn’t be—that was thirty Jeffreys ago. Was it two weeks after we got the second shot? That was May 1st for me. Half a year went by before I emerged, stunted and shaking.
This is the year of our reclaimed youth: I’ve loved more skate pop and power emo this year than I have since Earwyrms began. Last year around this time, music’s big players were coping with the pandemic by dropping albums early or cashing in on nostalgia while young bands waited in the wings and prayed there’d be a future to play through.
We're here—I'll get right to it, but I want to say thank you for reading. Also, I've put them all into a playlist arranged from top to bottom, for whenever you have six hours to kill. Now, for the final leg of the tour:
As we enter the Top 50, you know the routine—this is not a race but a retrospective, and while I do admit that the closer we get to #1, the closer these songs get to my heart, I will not be handing out any trophies.
As I said before, lists can be as prescriptive as they are restrictive if they are read as a hierarchy. Mine should not be; they're subject to the whims of my everyday thoughts and feelings (two of my most favorite things—until we reach the limit of my being and encounter yours). I intend to serve and share, not impose. This is less a competition than a hundred-course meal for the ears, each song a specialty dish on a gourmet menu.
Know that lists like these are flawed by their very nature, limiting art the same way pinning an identity to your infinite spirit will limit what you feel you're able to become. With that in mind, these numbers are not a hierarchy—they are more like tree tags marking a path through a dazzling forest. Think of this more as a guided tour of nature than a tournament or competition.
One of the most frequent questions I get is about how I’ve been able to pick up temporary work throughout my travels without falling afoul of the law.
One of the most frequent questions I get is about how I’ve been able to pick up temporary work throughout my travels without falling afoul of the law.
I can't leave without saying that I lament this had to be on Spotify because it meant I couldn't put Joanna Newsom on the list. Just know that there's a good chance she would've cracked the Top 10, and go listen to Have One on Me if you never have before.
A large chunk of the Top 40 are love songs, a thing I guess I'm just obsessed with. With music being the most directly emotional art, it's natural that this medium best explores these weird heart feelings.
We're getting to the hardest part now—do I really have to choose between two masterpieces, to arbitrarily put one over another? I do. Which is why I must remind you: these opinions are not definitive; they're not even sound. Best songs are as subjective as bagel preferences.
Lots of sad ones this time—sorry!—that's just how the chips fell this round. As I said last week, this project is not meant to be an edict from some supreme musical being, just a catalog of what this idiot kept coming back to over and over since 2010. Ultimately a narrow purview, but maybe you'll hear something you like.
I could say a bunch of sweeping things about the past ten years, but the truth is a decade is hard to package together coherently. I will say that ten years is fun because it's all about what sticks with you.
Here are my twenty favorite songs of the year so far, in reverse order to build suspense. Hold on tight!
To kick off this month of Top 10 Countdowns, I wanted to share the ten best movies of the year. They're more my favorites than the objective best, which is true of all lists, but of this one especially because I didn't get time to see many movies during the tumult of the year.
Listen to my favorite songs of the past six months so you can enjoy them before the summer is over. I wrote about them below in classic backwards-list order, and the playlist mirrors it.
This year was awesome, of course—the future always is—promised (ripped straight?) as it has been from speculative literature. It's a huge slap to the haters that the best songs of 2025 were artificially generated, ripe and ready to fill the coffers of the First Family. That's life, baby—that's liberty, that's the... the... sorry, my hands don't usually quake like this.