The Music of My Life – 2006

Welcome back to The Music of My Life, where I feature ten songs from each year of my life. In most cases, the ten songs I choose will be ones I like personally (unless I explain otherwise). The songs will be selected from Billboard’s Year-end Hot 100 Chart, Acclaimed Music, and will all be released in the featured year.

I started this feature with 1970 and we have come to 2006. As each year progresses, it has been interesting. I have noticed that some years it is difficult to get 10 songs, while other years I have trouble narrowing my picks to 10. I have a feeling that as I get closer to the end, there may be the need to pick less than 10. We’ll see.

2006 was a year of ups and downs. It became clear that my mom’s cancer battle may be drawing to an end. There was quite a change in her. After ten years of fighting, she was tired. She passed in October.

In October, just 11 days before my mom passed, the Detroit Tigers went to the World Series for the first time since 1984. My dad and I were so excited. Of course, the high was brought low when they lost it in 5 games.

Musically, 2006 wasn’t a bad year. My list has a variety of genres and a few songs that mean more now than they did in 2006. So let’s turn on the radio …

I love the sound of a good acoustic guitar and a simple vocal. If you look back over the years I’ve covered, there are quite a few songs like that. In 2006, Hey There Delilah jumped out of the radio for me. I loved the sound.

Delilah is a real person. Her name is Delilah DiCrescenzo. She is a steeplechase runner Plain White T’s lead singer Tom Higgenson met through a friend. He thought she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.

He told Songfacts:

“I was like, ‘Well, all right, I’ve got to write a song for this girl.’ I literally started playing it. The first verse just poured out exactly as it is, all the way through to the chorus. I didn’t really know the girl, you know? So, it was like, ‘What’s it like in New York City? Tonight, you look so pretty'”

He told Clickmusic that he felt this was possibly the most well-crafted song on the album:

“I think I definitely spent the most time on the lyrics with that song. It’s a lyric-driven song, so every line was important. It’s very exposed and vulnerable, but it’s very simple.”

Tom didn’t get the girl – Delilah was dating somebody and wasn’t interested – but he did get a number one song out of the encounter.

Hey There Delilah

The next song was one that I played when working in country radio. It was one of those songs that surprised me and became a country hit. I don’t know that country music would have ever been associated with Bon Jovi!

Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora wrote two versions of Who Says You Can’t Go Home. Both are on their Have a Nice Day album. One version is just the band and was a hit on the Adult Contemporary charts. The other is a country version featuring Jennifer Nettles of the band Sugarland.

At first, Jon Bon Jovi wanted Keith Urban to sing with him on the country version and play the banjo. It didn’t work out since their voices were so similar and the banjo didn’t sound right, so they used Nettles. The song went to #1 on the Country charts, the first time a rock band has done that.

Jennifer was a bit anxious about singing with Bon Jovi. In an interview she said, “I had his New Jersey posters on my door when I was in the seventh or eighth grade. It made me nervous because the last thing I would want is to ruin a Bon Jovi song.” I think it is safe to say that she didn’t.

Who Says You Can’t Go Home

The next song is just one that struck a chord lyrically. When I heard the story behind the song, it took on a deeper meaning. Isaac Slade of The Frey explained to Songfacts how he came up with How To Save A Life. He explained that he wrote this song about an experience he had working at a camp for troubled youths:

“One of the kids I was paired up with was a musician. Here I was, a protected suburbanite, and he was just 17 and had all these problems. And no one could write a manual on how to save him. I got a lot of email about it. One kid died in a car accident, and I guess it had been the last song he downloaded from his computer. They played it at his funeral, and some of his friends got ‘Save A Life’ tattooed on their arms. The response has been overwhelming.”

Lead guitarist David Welsh told I Like Music the story of this song:

“The song came about very organically. Isaac had this idea on the piano of this kind of lullaby. Then he concocted this repetitious drum beat that moved the lullaby along with Ben. The lyrics came from an experience Isaac had with a teenager he was mentoring who was struggling with drugs and addiction. It was just a very natural process, the song developed and the lyrics fitted very well.”

The Fray is comprised of devout Christians, and this song certainly has some religious subtext, with specific references to God:

And I pray to God he hears you

The Christian music community embraced the song, sending it to #4 on the Christian Songs chart, but it wasn’t marketed as a religious song and was also a hit in the secular community – it made #3 on the Hot 100 and was also a #1 Adult Contemporary hit.

How To Save A Life

The first and only cover song on my 2006 list is a classic. In 1960, The Drifters recorded Save The Last Dance For Me. It was originally a B-side. The legendary Dick Clark thought Save the Last Dance For Me was the better of the two songs and started playing it on the radio. Bingo – it became a number one song.

It is a song that has been covered by many artists including Buck Owens, Dolly Parton and John Davidson! In 2006, Michael Buble’ released it as the third single from his It’s Time album. There were many remixes of the song before the single was released. After Bublé performed the album version of the song during the closing credits of the film “The Wedding Date,” that version was released to radio, peaking at No. 5 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart.

I love his version! I love entire feel of it. It is so different from the original and the instrumentation is SO good. Every time I hear that horn line, it gives me chills. I like that it gives a little nod to the original by going from the strong brass sound to the lone guitar with the opening vocal.

Save The Last Dance For Me

If I mention the song Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol to my wife, she will immediately remind me that it was used in an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. A friend of mine will remind me that it was used in an episode of One Tree Hill. I have seen neither one of these shows – by choice.

It was a song I heard on the radio and I remember thinking was a great love song it was. It’s a great song about just getting through day by day with just you and your significant other. Lead singer Gary Lightbody, who called it “the most pure and open love song I’ve ever written.”

It’s such an amazing song, and Lightbody was even impressed with it. He wrote it under unique circumstances. He says he wrote it in the garden of producer Garret “Jacknive” Lee’s cottage one night while in “a blur of red wine and Percocet.” He says he wrote about 10 songs that night, and when he looked at them the next day nine of them were terrible, but “Chasing Cars” stood out like “a diamond in the s–t.”

It took 35 weeks to get there, but the song did reach #1 on the Top 40 charts. It was the only Top 40 hit foe the band in the US.

Chasing Cars

Country music listeners can get offended easily. In my years working in the format I can recall the division that songs like Goodbye Earl and Honky Tonk Badonkadonk stirred up. You had people who loved them or people who were offended by them. So when Love You by Jack Ingram hit my desk, I wasn’t sure about adding it.

You ask, “Why? Why would a song called ‘Love You’ be one you didn’t want to add?” Well, the “love” in the song means anything but “love.” Wikipedia says that this is a “kiss off” song. “Its lyrics feature several phrases where the F word is replaced with the word “love.”

It’s the ultimate “radio edit!” Here is part of the chorus –

“Love you, love this town / Love this mother-lovin’ truck that keeps breakin’ lovin’ down”.

There are also more traditional replacements in the song, with “dang” (“damn”), “heck” (“hell”), and “shoot” (“sh*t”) appearing several times in the first verse.

The song took on a whole new meaning for me when I was going through my divorce. It was a song that I would often listen to after a heated interaction with my ex.

My next song is here because I have a distinct memory of my oldest song when he was about 5 singing it in the back seat. I remember thinking, “Where did he hear that?!” Nothing like hearing your 5 year old singing, “You got soul, you got class. You got style, you’re badass!” Thanks a lot, Christina Aguilera!

It had been 4 years since Aguilera had released an album. Ain’t No Other Man was the first single from her Back To Basics album. The song samples a 1968 Latin soul tune called “Hippy Skippy Moon Strut” (aka “I’ll Be a Lucky Man”) by Dave Cortez and the Moon People, and “The Cissy’s Thang” by Soul Seven.

She said of the song, “I wanted to make it light and easy for people to dance to and sing along to, so the whole song is based on feel-good elements of soul and blues and jazz. Lyrically, I just got married, so it’s about someone in particular, but it’s all about feeling good and not taking anything too seriously.”

It’s definitely a catchy tune and people still like to dance to it. I dig the horns.

Ain’t No Other Man

The next song on my list is one that many can relate to. At any workplace, you are going to have people who will stand around and tell you what would make life better or what the government needs to do. They are right there with “solutions” to the world’s problems, but all they do is talk. They are not doing anything to make a change in things, instead, they wait on the world to change.

When you hear the lyrics of Waiting on the World to Change, you can see just how deep John Mayer is. You’d think it was written by someone in their 40’s, but he was only 28 when he wrote it.

Songfacts says that this song is how most people deal with problems in the world. When Mayer sings, “Me and all my friends, we are all misunderstood, say we stand for nothing but there’s no way we ever could,” he’s talking about his generation and their lack of faith in the government – all we can do is wait, and it seems like everyone is waiting for the world to become a better place. We sit on our hands and watch as the government takes control.

In an interview with the Daily Mail December 21, 2007 Mayer explained why he wrote this song that makes a point without laboring matters: “I wanted to start a debate. Most of us are happy to wait for things to change.”

Waiting on the World to Change

The next song is another example of a song that didn’t mean much to me in 2006, but means more to me now. In 2006, I had only my one son. My second son arrived in 2007. Until 2020, I was a “boy dad.” In 2020, my daughter was born. All of a sudden, all of those Daddy/Daughter songs started to hit hard.

Working in country radio, there is no shortage of songs about kids, songs about family and songs about daughters. If I had a dollar for every time I played My Little Girl by Tim McGraw as a Bride/Bride’s father song …. I could go on a long trip!

It was featured in the film Flicka. It is one of many that I want to dance with my daughter to.

My Little Girl

My final song for this week is one that I heard while visiting a church. Many of the modern churches will sing contemporary Christian songs instead of traditional hymns. I love those hymns, I won’t lie. I get chills singing many of them.

My brother-in-law at the time invited us to their church. It was odd for me, as I felt like I was watching a play or production instead of being in church. To me, it should be about the message and not so much the “tug at your heartstrings to make you cry” production. Anyway, I heard this song there and I did like it.

Chris Tomlin has had many Christian hits. Songfacts interviewed him about the song:

Tomlin said, “I wrote that song when I was living in Austin, Texas. I remember sitting on my sofa in my little apartment. And Psalm 104 was the psalm I was looking at. It said, ‘You our lord are very great. You’re clothed with splendor and majesty, wrap yourself with light as with a garment’ – through those opening verses and just describing a little bit of God, the glory of majesty, that little chorus came out. I started singing the chorus and, man, I had no idea, I thought the chorus was just a little simple thing and it was. And I had no idea it would become such a song in the church, and a song that finds its way in so many different cultures, different languages. It’s so transferrable, so accessible. I had no idea that it would ever become that.

I remember I had the song, I thought it was finished. I didn’t have a bridge to the song, and I met Ed Cash who produced that record it was on. First time meeting him and talking to him about maybe producing my new record. And I remember he picks his guitar up and says, ‘This ‘How Great is Our God’ song, I think it’s pretty good, but it’s not finished.’ And I’m like, ‘What are you talking about? Who do you think you are?’ And I remember him grabbing his guitar. I believe it was something about, ‘What if you do something like this?’ And I remember he just started singing, ‘You’re the name above all names, you are worthy of our praise.’ And it’s really good, but when you open up and let somebody else sneak in, it just makes it better. So that’s when we knew it was taking it to another level.”

How Great Is Our God

With all I have been through, I know my faith got me through. They say that it is often played with the hymn, How Great Thou Art. I can totally see the two songs complimenting each other.

So what song from 2006 did I miss that was your favorite? Tell me in the comments.

Next week it is 2007. My list includes one of the biggest dance crazes of the 2000’s, a song about murder, a song about time flying, and a fantastic song by a classic group from the 70’s and 80’s. Join me next week …

Thanks for reading and listening!

The Music of My Life – 2001

In 2001, I turned 31. It is a year that I will not forget. It was that year that I found out I was going to be a father for the first time. To say that I was freaking out a little was an understatement. My mom continued to get treatment for breast cancer. There was a time where I prayed that she would be around for my wedding. Now I was praying that she’d be around to meet her first grandchild. My first song was inspired by, coincidentally, a mother with cancer.

It was also the year of the 9/11 attacks. I, of course, was around for the Challenger accident. Many folks called that the “JFK assassination” of my generation. As sad as the Challenger accident was, 9/11 was on an entirely different level. I remember sitting alone wondering about the world we were welcoming our baby into. The event caused many of us to think … more on that shortly.

Train’s Drops of Jupiter came from devastating loss for lead singer Pat Monahan. In a VH1 interview, he revealed that he wrote this song about the death of his mother. Train was were touring in 1988 when Monahan’s mom was dying of lung cancer – she was a heavy smoker. Cell phones had not yet become widely used. This found Monahan making many stops to pay phones on the tour to speak with his mom. It was in December of that year, his mother died.

In early 1999 Train was working on their next album when their record company started pressuring them for a hit. Monahan returned to his childhood home in Pennsylvania, and woke one morning with the words “back in the atmosphere” in his head. Beginning a time of healing, he started to compose the song. Pat said: “Loss of the most important person in my life was heavy on my mind, and the thought of ‘what if no one ever really leaves? What if she’s here but different. The idea was, she’s back here in the atmosphere.”

He recorded a demo of the song and played it for the president of their record company at Columbia. The president loved it and told him it was his Grammy song. He was right: It won Grammys for Best Rock Song and Best Instrumental Arrangement With Accompanying Vocalist. The label had Train record the song quickly. That way they could put it on the album and use it as the title track.

Pat Monahan is quoted as saying, ““It was an obvious connection between me and my mother. ‘Drops of Jupiter’ was as much about me being on a voyage and trying to find out who I am. The best thing we can do about loss of love is find ourselves through it.”

That is SO true.

Drops of Jupiter

I mentioned when I did my list in 1999 that I’ll Be by Edwin McCain is hard to listen to. It was the wedding song my ex and I used. In 2000, Edwin released I Could Not Ask For More, which is a more beautiful song, in my opinion.

This song itself is about spending time with your true love. It is about realizing you do not need anything else in life to make you happy. The song was written by Diane Warren, who has written quite a few songs that I have written about. McCain said that he had to speed the song up to suit his voice. He said, “The tempo of the song was actually half of what it is now. At first, I wasn’t into it. Now it’s a popular wedding song; every night on tour people tell me that it was their wedding song.”

It was in 2001 that country singer Sara Evans covered the song. While not too different from McCain’s version, I love her version more. I have always felt that she has one of the best female voices in country music. She is also one of the most beautiful singers I have met. I loved watching her perform this live.

I Could Not Ask For More

This next song is on my list for one reason and one reason only – the video! I can still remember the first time I watched it and was blown away by Christopher Walken. I had no idea he could dance like this!

Weapon of Choice appeared on Fatboy Slim’s third album and featured Bootsy Collins. Bootsy is, of course, known for his work with Parliament-Funkadelic and Bootsy’s Rubber Band. Boosty co-wrote the song and plays bass on it.

According to Songfacts:

The official music video for “Weapon of Choice” reveals a surprising side of Christopher Walken, known for his intense, often villainous roles in films like Pulp Fiction, The Deer Hunter, and True Romance. What most of us didn’t know until this video appeared is that Walken is a great dancer – he trained at the Washington Dance Studio and appeared in musicals such as 1981’s Pennies from Heaven. In a 2014 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Walken said he accepted the role before he became “too decrepit to dance.”

He choreographed the video with Michael Rooney, son of Mickey Rooney, and performed stunts, including flying across the mezzanine in a harness. Reflecting on the humor and playfulness of the video, Fatboy Slim told Higher Frequency in 2006: “I think it’s full of irony, and to see an actor that I really admire but who’s famous for playing psychopaths, to see him do that silly un-psychopathic dancing made me smile and made everyone else smile.”

The “Weapon of Choice” music video was a huge hit! It won six MTV Video Music Awards in 2001. It won for Breakthrough Video, Best Direction, Best Choreography, Best Art Direction, Best Editing, and Best Cinematography. It also went on to win the Grammy Award for Best Music Video. To top it all off, it was named the greatest music video of all time by VH1 in 2002.

Weapon of Choice

I recently saw where Brian Cranston, Jane Kaczmarek, and Frankie Muniz announced that they will reunite for a reboot of Malcolm in the Middle. The show debuted in 2000 and did very well. I always watched it because I could relate to the constant fighting between the brothers. I also loved the humor of the show.

They Might Be Giants recorded this song specifically for Malcolm in the Middle, and can be found on the show’s soundtrack. The show used other songs from the band throughout the run of the show.

The rumor is that the song is about guitar player John Flansburgh’s brother. I can totally see this. We may not have used the exact phrase growing up, but I know my brother and I often said that the other couldn’t boss the other around. It hits home in that way for me.

Boss of Me

The next song was a triumphant return for Weezer. Their fans were a little worried about the band in the late ’90s. After touring for their 1996 album Pinkerton, they took some time off and went through some lineup changes. It was during this time that Rivers Cuomo was taking classes at Harvard. He enrolled there in 1995 and attended sporadically when it suited his schedule. “Island In The Sun” was welcome relief for fans, showing that the band was back and in a good place. (Cuomo did eventually graduate Harvard, earning a degree in English in 2006.)

Songfacts says, “Unlike many Weezer songs, there’s no trace of pathos and no deeper meaning, making it an easy song to enjoy even if you’re not a big fan of the band. It became one of their most popular songs, although it was never a bit hit, reaching a chart peak of just #111 in the US.”

This is another one of those songs that I remember hearing a lot on the radio. I find it hard to believe that it only reached #111 on the charts. It was obviously good enough for them to play on TV. Weezer played it along with “Hash Pipe,” when they were musical guests on Saturday Night Live, May 19, 2001. It was their only guest appearance on the show.

Sing along…. “Hip. Hip.”

Island in the Sun

What do Neil Diamond, The Monkees and Smash Mouth have in common? One MONSTER hit!

Neil Diamond wrote I’m a Believer in 1966. Don Kirshner was looking for material for the Monkees to record and liked it. Neil was allowed to record it as well as part of their deal and did so in 1967. The Monkees version went to #1in ’66.

Jump ahead 35 years to 2001. Smash Mouth recorded a version of the song for the Dreamworks animated movie, Shrek. The song was picked because it fit the movie’s theme, as it was a sort of fairy tale. The opening line of the song is “I thought love was only true in fairy tales.”

Smash Mouth’s version is a great modern take on the song and still fun to sing along with. When I hear it, I am taken back to watching this movie with my oldest son. He loved Shrek and we watched it MANY times.

I’m a Believer

The next song was one that I often used as a first song at parties and weddings. It was a good one because it was the “kick off” song and literally got the party started.

Songfacts.com says: Get the Party Started was written by Linda Perry of 4 Non Blondes. After the group broke up in the early ’90s, Perry released two solo albums and started writing for other artists. She learned that hits of the ’00s were made digitally. She bought Akai MPC and Korg Triton digital workstations and started experimenting with them. As she was learning how to use them, she came up with the track by adding layer after layer, then she quickly banged out a lyric with every party cliché she could think of, arriving at lines like:

I’m your operator, you can call anytime
I’ll be your connection to the party line

It worked: “Get The Party Started” was a huge hit for Pink and launched Perry’s songwriting career. Her next hit was “Beautiful” for Christina Aguilera.

The song is synonymous with Pink, but it was almost offered to another singer. Thankfully, a phone call changed that. Perry initially thought this could be a hit for Madonna. However, Pink happened to call her the week after she wrote the song. Pink was a huge 4 Non Blondes fan. She sought out Perry, who was very surprised to get a call from a pop star. When they met, Perry gave Pink an MP3 copy of the “Get The Party Started.” Pink’s management loved the song and arranged for them to work together on her second album.

Get The Party Started

When an artist’s first single is a ballad, it is usually because the ballad is amazing. Most record labels want uptempo songs. (Honestly, most radio stations want uptempo stuff, too!) There are no shortage of ballads waiting to get airplay!

When it came time to release his first single, Enrique Iglesias fought to get “Hero” released. “Everybody thought first singles at the time had to be uptempo,” he told People. “But I knew that it was one of those songs that when I wrote it it just felt special.” It was, and he was right. Iglesias attributes the success of this song to a combination of good lyrics, melody, and excellent production. He feels those three qualities need to work together to make a timeless hit.

The song took on a whole new meaning shortly after it was released. This song was released on August 14, 2001, just a month before the September 11 attacks on the US. The song doesn’t describe the type first-responder heroes, but the theme of standing by a loved one resonated at this time. The song became quite popular because of that, reaching a chart peak of #3.

One pastor taught a message on husbands and wives. He stated that what a husband wants is to be his wife’s hero. That’s the guy who will take away her pain and be there through thick and thin.

Hero

MercyMe is a contemporary Christian group. They had an Adult Contemporary crossover hit with a song that was written by their lead singer Bart Millard. I Can Only Imagine is simply about imagining what it will be like meeting Jesus for the first time.

In a Songfacts interview, Bart said that he that he wrote the song in about 10 minutes. He said that it was one of just three songs he wrote where he felt like he was “a spectator watching the song being written.”

Regarding the song’s meaning, Millard stated: “When my father died of cancer in 1991, he left me with the assurance that he was headed to a better place. For several years following his death, I would find myself writing the phrase ‘I can only imagine’ on anything I could find. That simple phrase would give me a peace thinking about what my dad was finally experiencing. Years later, in 1999, MercyMe was writing songs for an independent project. I remember coming home from a show and being wide awake on our bus at 2 o’clock in the morning. I was trying to write lyrics in an old notebook of mine, when all of a sudden, I stumbled across that phrase. About ten minutes later, the song was written. Some people say it’s amazing that it was written in ten minutes, when really it had been on my heart for almost ten years.”

This one means a lot to me personally. I am so grateful for my faith and my Savior. It is an amazing thing to imagine….

I Can Only Imagine

I can still vividly remember the morning of 9/11. I was in a meeting with my boss at the radio station when the morning gal came in and told us that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. We went into the newsroom and were shaken to the core when we watched the second plane it the Twin Towers. That would be one of the longest and most emotional days in my radio career.

I worked at a country station at the time. We saw a lot of patriotism come out of those attacks. Songwriters wrote songs about being an American and such, but none of the equaled the contribution made by Alan Jackson.

The 9/11 attacks made a lot of us stop and think about life. We were left with so many questions. We were left shocked and scarred by the images we watched on TV. It was constantly on our minds. Alan Jackson seemed to be on the same page as everyone else, and conveyed it all perfectly in the song Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)

He wrote the song alone, with the idea coming to him at 4am in the morning. He explained to The Boot that the lyrics really “came out of nowhere.” “It was just a gift,” he said. “I got up and scribbled it down and put the melody down so I wouldn’t forget it, and the next day I started piecing all those verses together, thoughts I had or visuals I had.”

The song made its debut on the Country Music Association’s annual awards show on November 7, 2001. I still cannot believe that he was able to sing the song without breaking down. Alan considers this to be one of his biggest (if not the biggest) accomplishment. He said in an interview: “I [recently] did a radio interview, and the guy was talking about being at the [CMA] Awards the night I sang ‘Where Were You,'” he explained. “Even though that was a hard performance for me and an emotional time, I still get so many comments about that. Of all the awards, and all that kind of stuff, the music is still what I like. To be able to create a song that really affects people and makes a mark in the music industry, I would have to say that would be a highlight.”

To this day, the song still gives me chills. I’m sure you will never forget where you were when the events of that day unfolded either.

Where Were You

Sorry to wrap up the year on a somber note, but that wraps up my list. How about you? What song from 2001 did I miss that was your favorite. Mention it in the comments.

Next week, we’ll head to 2002. My list features movie music, an in your face patriotic song, a song full of 70’s and 80’s nostalgia, a cover song, an appearance by the Muppets, and the return of the King! I hope you’ll check it out.

Until next week, thanks for listening and for reading!