12. November 2018
Bob
Music , Guitar
Lists of favorites artists and favorite songs are a dime a dozen, but still - I thought that it might be a worthwhile endeavor to jot down a list of rock songs that were significantly important to me over the years. These are the songs that I would pull my car off the road to listen to over the radio, or I struggled to learn on the guitar when I was first starting out as a musician, or they had an indelible affect on my playing.
Trying to compile a list such as this was difficult for me, because some of the artists - like Rush - have dozens of songs that I would consider among my list of favorites, so I had to limit myself to just one song per artist. In addition, a few of these songs are not necessarily what I would consider to be the best songs by their respective artists, but they were the songs that made me initially fall in love with that artist's music.
Presented in alphabetic order (as opposed to order of precedence):
There are some artists - like Queen, Triumph, Journey, Styx, and Genesis - who are conspicuously missing from this list, even though I saw many of those artists in concert and several of their songs might be on my top 100 list of favorites. There are two reasons for their omission: 1) I eventually ran out of room on this list, and 2) there was no single song by those artists that I would consider as a milestone in my musical upbringing.
Note: One song in the above list - Dust in the Wind - probably needs a bit of explanation, since it might seem a little out-of-place in a collection that is otherwise dominated by straight-ahead rock pieces.
To be honest, I didn't like Dust in the Wind when I first heard it; I thought it was interminably boring. But as I continued to learn the guitar, I forced myself to learn the song, and I quickly came to appreciate its educational value when learning Travis Picking (and fingerpicking in general). I eventually taught that song to nearly all of my guitar students in order to help get them started.