Playlist: Never Not Better

Songs that rip no matter how many times you hear them.

Last night Music Intern Sam did a NO CHILL radio hour on kchung that I didn’t tell you about because he didn’t tell me about it. We are both professionals. He made the mistake of asking the Tabs Discord for requests and received one for: “Stairway but it gets faster every time the DJ realizes he's running out of time,” which incredibly he managed to fulfill. [CW: Airhorns… lots of airhorns, but this really achieves liftoff at 2:55 imo.]

Of course after hearing this I had to unironically listen to Stairway, which struck me as it has over and over since I was about 12 as a song that consistently goes just as hard as I remember no matter how many times I hear it. Yes, it’s a musical cliché, but the actual experience of it always manages to escape the black hole of its own reputation. I might start off rolling my eyes at the mellotron flutes and vaguely high-fantasy lyrics, but by the time Robert Plant is screaming “AND AS WE WIND ON DOWN THE ROAD“ I am always helplessly on board.

The other song that never fails to rise out of the swamp of its own cliché-hood is the drunken douchebag’s favorite hollered concert request: “Free Bird!” Would I spend an hour listening to the last four minutes of Free Bird? Yes I would. It’s the musical equivalent of breaking out of jail, flooring the gas on the open road, and heading for the horizon, and no amount of boorish concertgoers will ever take that away from it.

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So for the open thread today, let’s make a playlist: What are one or two songs that, for you, never manage to lose their power no matter how many times you’ve heard them or how long it’s been since you actually put them on? Hopefully I’m describing the vibe coherently enough—it’s not just “your favorite songs,” it’s those special songs that should be drained of all their vitality by repetition and familiarity by now, but just can’t be. Any genre, any era, any style, whatever meets the brief for you.