Songs That Are Like Old Friends, pt. 3

To continue the task suggested by a friend:

"Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to post five cool songs in as many days. Each day, I'm tagging three friends, in the hopes they'll do the same. Expanding horizons, facilitating the tapping of toes, providing distractions from the looming void, etc."

I’ve chosen my five songs for their significance in my life, their illustration of larger musical currents of their era, and to some extent (I hope) their relative obscurity.

If I had stuck to my personal favorites, I might have chosen the Hollies’ “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress,” Creedence’s “Fortunate Son,” the Moody Blues “Story In Your Eyes,” Thin Lizzy’s “Jailbreak,” the Monkees’ “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” half a dozen Beatles tunes (from “Nowhere Man” and “Paperback Writer” to “Eleanor Rigby” and “She’s Leaving Home”) or even some really great cover songs, such as Devo’s version of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” Santana’s killer cover of “She’s Not There,” and Dave Edmunds’s “I Hear You Knockin’ ” -- nearly all of which I would imagine most of my friends have heard.

Walking the Talk

Just like I suspect you have, I’ve fallen short on some of my resolutions this year. I stopped getting over to the gym every week (despite a running start -- literally -- toward the end of November), and I’m still inhaling sugary pastries and syrupy lattes at Starbucks.

As I’ve written here in the past, I try to avoid making classic, hard-and-fast new year’s resolutions. My strategy has been not to be too precise, because that’s mostly setting yourself up to fail. Instead, I think about general directions in which I’d like to move over the coming year.

In some ways, my 2015 plan is working. Tiramisu and Caramel Flan lattes and my absence from 24-Hour Fitness aside, on a grander scale I’m accomplishing at least some of what I’d hoped to this year.

Giving up pleasure reading, as I described on Feb. 13, turned out not to be that difficult. I simply don’t take stuff out of the library and have it lying around, if it isn’t a title chosen by one of my book discussion groups. And of course I don’t shop for books to own. Although I’ve felt the occasional jones to reach for a book whenever a quiet moment strikes, it hasn’t been too hard to fight.