Welcome back to The Music of My Life. I began this feature last May on my birthday. Over the past 11 months, I have featured 10 songs from every year of my life. The songs featured were released in that week’s particular year. It may have been a bigger hit the following year, but I decided to stick with the rules I had put in place.

This week, I guess I am breaking on of the rules. The rule was that I’d feature 10 songs per year. Last week (2015) I was able to get 10 songs, but from here on out I doubt I will be able to. Whether lyrics were just to raunchy, or some other reason, I found myself looking at songs I disliked or had never heard of. Every once in a while, I’d come across a song or two, but it has become very difficult.

So today, let’s tackle two years 2016 & 2017. It was during these two years that I was going through a very difficult time. These were the last days of my marriage and the beginning (and end) of the divorce. I was only occasionally doing a DJ gig here or there, so I became unfamiliar with many new songs.

Let’s start in 2016 first,

2016

My first pick for ’16 is an amazing song by Tim McGraw. Humble and Kind was written by Lori McKenna. She wrote the song at her home when her kids were at school. She set out to write down what she and her husband would want the children to know, fully aware that kids are bombarded with advice and most of it goes right through them.

“Honestly, it’s a very simple song,” she told The Boot. “It’s really just this list of things that I wanted to make sure we told them, in this rhyme form. I was lucky that the chorus made as much sense as it did. I did write it in that one sitting; it took me a few hours, but it was a lucky day.“

Tim McGraw says, “I guess I had it for a year and a half or so, and it was just her and an acoustic guitar playing it. The night that she wrote it, she sent it to me, and I listened to it over and over, and I just fell in love with the song and her version of it.”

“I knew I wanted to record it, but I just couldn’t quite get my head around how I wanted to do it,” he continued. “I couldn’t get past her demo of her singing it. It was just so beautiful and so touching. If anybody’s ever heard Lori just sit and sing with a guitar, she could sing anything to you and sell it to you. It’s so beautiful what she does.”

It is a fantastic song with a universal truth.

Humble and Kind

My wife and I don’t really have a “song” that we claim for ourselves. We’ve talked about it before and we have songs that were “possible” songs, but never came up with one. One of those possible songs was From The Ground Up.

While we were just beginning our life together, the fact that the song was written about a couple that had been together a long time didn’t matter. Because all relationships have to start from scratch and move forward.

This song finds Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney singing of a love between an elderly couple that’s rooted in commitment and grows deeper with every passing year. “‘From the Ground Up’ is a song that started with a conversation about our grandparents and the love that they shared for the 65-plus years that they were married,” Smyers said. “It tells the story of the life that they built through their power and dedication to each other, and the perseverance to endure whatever would come their way.” (from songfacts.com)

From The Ground Up

Next is a song that Time magazine hated. Justin Timberlake’s Can’t Stop the Feeling. They voted it the worst song of 2016. They said, “The insipid earworm – which was ostensibly recorded for an animated movie about trolls – became essentially unavoidable at any social gathering where someone in attendance was likely to use the phrase ‘cut loose.’ Forget the feeling – just please, please stop this song.”

This song was huge at the few DJ gigs I did do in 2016 & 2017. From songfacts:

Justin Timberlake told People he would never have written the song if it wasn’t for Trolls. “Listening to [producer] Gina Shay and [directors] Mike Mitchell and Walt Dohrn talk about the movie and how it was really inspired by the ’70s, I started bringing up the soundtrack from Saturday Night Fever, movies where the soundtrack was released before the movie and got people equally excited,” he explained. “The movie seems like an unabashed pop song to me, so I was like, ‘Let’s just write an unabashed pop song.'”

“Our task was to write a song that encapsulated the message of the movie, and by the way, we want people to be able to dance to it,” Timberlake said on the red carpet leading up to the Oscars. “When I was watching the movie it reminded me of disco, so that’s where I got the idea for a modern disco song.”

Can’t Stop The Feeling

Next is a powerful song from Alessia Cara – Scars To Your Beautiful. Cara said to her fans before premiering the song. “The standards that we have to kind of face as young women in everyday life just to feel, or look a certain way, or act a certain way, because there’s a lot of pressure being a young girl, and just girls and women in general,” she said. “So I wanted to make a reminder to just love yourself and appreciate yourself no matter what.”

Many of her fans, as well as people hearing it for the first time, have said how much this song meant to them. I can agree with them.

Scars To Your Beautiful

Play That Song by Train was a song that was playing in the background while I was doing something. I was able to pick out the familiar melody, which made me wonder “What is this? Is this a current song? Who is this?”

(Songfacts) The song is built around the melody of the much covered classic “Heart and Soul” written by Hoagy Carmichael and Frank Loesser in 1938. American band leader Larry Clinton recorded the most successful version in 1939, reaching #1 on the chart. Modern listeners probably best known it as the song that Robert Loggia and Tom Hanks play and dance to on a giant foot-operated electronic keyboard in the 1988 movie Big.

The video shows Train singer Pat Monahan dancing around a sunny Los Angeles as he listens to the song. There is a nod to Big as we see him at one point moving back and forth on a giant keyboard. It’s kind of hard not to feel good when you hear that melody.

Play That Song

2017

If the melody of Feel It Still by Portugal The Man sounds familiar, there is a reason. Songfacts explains:

The melody on this track kicks it like it’s 1961, interpolating the Marvelettes hit “Please, Mr. Postman.”

Ooh woo, I’m a rebel just for kicks, now…

Oh yes, wait a minute Mister Postman…

“That ‘Please Mr. Postman’ melody is every bit of the way we grew up,” John Gourley said in his Songfacts interview. “I grew up with dog-mushing parents – which I know is a bizarre thing for anybody outside of Alaska. And even within Alaska, it’s such a small community within the state. So I grew up around really long drives. We were off the grid our whole lives until I left. Like, an hour drive to town. Sometimes a two-hour drive to town. That’s four hours, both ways. So we would just listen to oldies radio, and ‘Please Mr. Postman’ is a staple.

I always wanted to sing something to that melody. It’s a totally different song, and that to me is what music is about. What songwriting is about is paying homage and creating something new. It’s no longer ‘Please Mr. Postman.’ Now, it’s ‘Feel It Still.'”

Feel It Still

I didn’t know much about Imagine Dragons until I started working at the Adult Contemporary station. I played quite a few of their songs there, including Thunder. What struck me about this song is that he is a boy with dreams of being on stage. His classmates make fun of him for dreaming about being a star.  The tables turn in the second verse, as the Dragons frontman (Dan Reynolds) flips the script on those who mocked him.

Now I’m smiling from the stage
While you were clapping in the nose bleeds

Karma strikes back. Reynolds says, “‘Thunder’ is: ‘I’m so happy for a really (crappy) middle school and high school existence and getting kicked out of college. It’s reflecting on all those things and saying, ‘Good, I’m happy for all that because that brought me to this place of being. It created angst inside of me that bred art.'”

Thunder

Speaking of Karma, Taylor Swift sings about it and a bit of revenge in Look What You Made Me Do. This is another song that interpolates another as it follows the rhythm of Right Said Fred’s I’m Too Sexy.

Right Said Fred frontman Richard Fairbrass explained how Swift interpolated their tune:

“The title of ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ is based upon the verse of ‘…Sexy.’ That’s basically it. What’s weird about ‘Sexy’ is that when people sing it, they sing the verse, not the chorus – nobody sings that. Everybody sings: ‘I’m too sexy’ – it’s the verse that people have latched onto, not the chorus.”

In Taylor’s song they adapt that rhythm and attitude of the ‘Sexy’ verse as a chorus – so they’ve just interpolated it differently, that’s all it is. I’d be an idiot to complain about it. We’ve been really lucky to have been picked by somebody like Taylor, who is obviously very cool and very successful and open-minded and relaxed about it. She’s not like some people.”

Fun Fact: Taylor Swift’s bathtub in the music video is filled with $10 million worth of Neil Lane diamonds.

Look What You Made Me Do

Ed Sheeran’s Perfect was a song that I suggested as a possibility for “our song” to my wife. It is a truly beautiful love song.

Ed Sheeran wrote this waltz-time love song for his girlfriend Cherry Seaborn, who is an old school friend. After writing it he had no idea whether or not she really likes the track. “I just recorded it and sent it because she was living in New York at the time so I didn’t see her reaction,” he told BBC Radio 2. “I think she liked it.”

Ed calls the song a bit “cheesy,” but I truly like it. 

Perfect

The final pick for this week is a song I played at both stations I was working at. I was doing part time work at the country station and part time work on the adult contemporary station. Meant to Be played on both stations. It felt weird to say Florida Georgia Line on the AC station and even weirder to say Bebe Rexha on the country station.

Bebe Rexah said the song was one that helped her get through some personal issues:

“I’ve recently been going through heartbreak, and I listen to the song, and it makes me feel better and like there’s some type of destiny and if something doesn’t work out then, there’s something better waiting for you,” she said. “I think that’s something we need more than ever with all the events going on in the world. People want to feel safe and like everything’s going to be OK.”

Just how did FGL and Rexha get together for this song? FGL’s Tyler Hubbard says,

“Man, it was pretty organic. We ended up, last-minute, kinda out of the blue, getting together with her in LA when we were [there] writing, and wrote it kind of on a whim, late-night. The next thing you know, we just kinda hit gold, if you will. A really special song kinda fell out of the sky, as we call it. It doesn’t happen like that every time we get in a room to write.”

The song really has the life lesson of “It will happen if it’s meant to be” in it.

Meant To Be

Well, that wraps up 2016 and 2017. I had trouble finding my songs, did I miss one of your favorites? Tell me which ones in the comments. Next week, we’ll combine 2018 and 2019. On my list a song that has one of the weirdest videos I have ever seen. Also on the list some movie music, a country ear worm, and a touching song about grandparents. See you then.

Thanks for listening and for reading!