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.

Like last week, this week I will be focusing on two years because I couldn’t really come up with 10 songs from each year. As I went through the songs from the more current years, I found that the lyrics were just to raunchy, or 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 2018 and 2019. In 2018, life began to change for me. I had found my soul mate and we got married. In 2019, we found out we were expecting our daughter. Life began to get better and better.

2018

I was back at the country station in 2018. Honestly, I was not really liking the whole “Bro Country” scene. I felt that the format was steering too far away from its roots. I never understood why rap would need to be in a country song.

Florida Georgia Line was a duo made up of Tyler Hubbard and Brian Kelley. They came on the scene in 2013 and had matured by 2018. This song came after each of them had gotten married. Their writing became deeper, yet simpler.

Simple is a song that I can relate to. It hit me when I was playing it on the air because of my new found love.

Simple

Down to the Honky Tonk is yet another country song from my days at the station. This one stuck with me every time I played it and for days after. Apparently, that was the intention. Jake Owen chose to record the tune as he suspected it was one that would easily get stuck in listeners’ heads.

“It’s a special kinda song. I think when people hear that song, it’s one of those that’s just like an earworm,” he said. “It’s something that connects, and I feel like in a world of a lot of music and art and ways to distract us and our attention, it’s super-important if you’re gonna put out any sort of content, that it’s content that grabs people’s attention.”

Personally, I liked the words and word play in the song. I think the chorus of the song fits me at a particular time in my life. I spent a lot of time in the bars in my 30’s.

I might not end up in the Hall of Fame
With a star on the sidewalk with my name
Or a statue in my hometown when I’m gone
Nobody gonna name their babies after me
I might not go down in history
But I’ll go down to the honkytonk

Who’d want a statue of me anyway?

Down To The Honky Tonk

I never saw the remake of A Star is Born and I don’t have a desire to do so. However, I remember playing Shallow on the Adult Contemporary station and thinking that it sounded “out of place,” but in a good way.

(From songfacts.com) This dramatic duet features Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper (Who knew he could sing?). Gaga plays the rising star Ally, and Cooper the established musician Jackson Maine, who becomes her mentor and lover. Gaga explained that the song serves a crucial moment in the film. She told Zane Lowe on his Beats 1 Radio show: “It’s two people talking to each other about the need and the drive to dive into the deep end and stay away from the shallow area.”

The song was something special as it won many awards: It won the Golden Globe award for Best Original Song From A Motion Picture; It won the Grammy Award for Best Pop/Duo Group Performance at the 2019 ceremony; and it won the Oscar for Best Original Song.

Shallow

Did you ever see a video that leaves you wondering just what the heck it was all about? My buddy is always sending me crazy videos and stuff, so when he sent this I didn’t know what to expect. I watched this and really couldn’t understand a thing I was watching. It is basically everyone doing this weird walk while moving their arms in and out.

It still perplexes me, which is why I include it on my list. It is by a Russian band called Little Big. According to Wikipedia:

On 26 January 2019, the music video won the category “Hype of the year” of the Ketnet award “Het Gala van de Gouden K’s 2018”, which took place in Belgium The song was also nominated for the “ZD Awards-2018” for “Trends of the Year” and “Hype of the Year”, which were presented on 28 February 2019. On 16 February 2019, the music video was awarded the “Chart’s Dozen” prize for “Best video”. On 10 April of the same year, the video was nominated for the awards for “Best video” and “Best Song in a Foreign Language” at the Muz-TV 2019 awards.

So, it is an award winning song that went viral. Little Big challenged fans to post their own Skibidi dance videos, which they called the “Skibidi Challenge”. I would imagine if I walked into work like this, they’d call and have me committed!

Skibidi

When I found my wife, I knew I had found my soulmate. The next song says, no matter what life throws at you and whatever money worries you might have, you’ll be fine if you have the right person by your side. It also is a great reminder that life is short, so “Make It Sweet.”

The guys from Old Dominion say writing it came easy, “…t he words just came tumbling out.” The next thing they knew, they had recorded “Make It Sweet.”

“That [final] recording is probably the second time we’ve ever played that song,” lead singer Matthew Ramsey said in an interview with Billboard. “You can kind of hear the excitement and the energy we have for it right there, because we had just created it and said, ‘Okay, let’s record it.'”

Make It Sweet

The older I get, the older I feel. Some days it is just hard to get up in the morning. The I read the story of how the next song came about:

(From songfacts.com) Toby Keith wrote “Don’t Let the Old Man” for Clint Eastwood’s 2018 film The Mule and it featured in its trailer. He told Billboard that he was inspired to write the song after a conversation he had with the 88-year-old Eastwood while the two played golf.

When Eastwood told him he was about to start working on a new movie called The Mule, Keith asked him, “How do you do it, man?” Eastwood responded, “I just get up every morning and go out. And I don’t let the old man in.”

Keith immediately started writing around Eastwood’s “don’t let the old man in” line and what he knew about his character in the movie.

The day he recorded the demo for Eastwood, he was sick with a bad cold. “I gave it the best vocal I could that day, and I sent it off,” he recalled. “It’s a real raspy, sleepy, tired, sick vocal. I said, ‘Well now you’ve got a reference, and I’ll go back and put a vocal on it for you.'”

Eastwood liked the recording because Keith’s raspy delivery fit the movie. “He wanted it sick and tired and dark like that,” said Keith. Clint didn’t want Toby to change his vocal and used that version for the movie.

The song took on a personal meaning for Toby. He performed it at the 2023 People’s Choice Country Awards after being awarded the Country Icon award. The performance was his first time back on red carpets and television after his diagnosis of stomach cancer the previous year. Keith said he chose the ballad because it inspires those who’ve been touched by his cancer journey.

Don’t Let The Old Man In

Let’s wrap up the week’s list by moving into 2019 ….

2019

The next song was one I played on both the country station and the AC station. It was a nice crossover hit. Maren Morris wrote The Bones when she was getting ready to marry singer Ryan Hurd. It is “a story of a long-lasting partnership where the couple have been through many storms together.”

When the bones are good, the rest don’t matter
Yeah, the paint could peel
The glass could shatter
Let it rain
You and I remain the same
The house don’t fall when the bones are good

When the song came out the two were already married. The video features clips of Morris and Hurd during their vacation in Hawaii in June 2019. The couple split in 2023.

“The Bones” hit #1 in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and remained a big hit throughout lockdown. Morris said she feels it resonated as it’s more than just a love song.

“It’s kind of amounted to being this really medicinal cry for hope in a time where it’s a very unsteady and unpredictable time that we’re in right now,” she said. “I feel like the whole message of ‘if the bones are good the rest doesn’t matter’ has applied to this year of 2020 being a complete mess.  A ton of fans had reached out and said, ‘This feels like a cry for the world right now. Like we’re in the homestretch of the hard times.’ So it graduated beyond earthly love to something broader.”

The Bones

The Jonas Brothers had broken up six years before, so it was a big surprise when they released Sucker in 2019. The song speaks of being a “sucker” for the love of a woman.

I’ve been dancing on top of cars and stumbling out of bars
I follow you through the dark, can’t get enough

The song debuted at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. This was their first ever #1 song. It was one that I not only played on the radio, but at some of the last few DJ jobs I did. It always made folks dance and I liked the sound of it.

It would go on to be the most-heard song on US radio in 2019 with 3.49 billion audience impressions. I guess I was a sucker for this song.

Sucker

You can thank Tik Tok for the next song. Old Town Road gained popularity as a result of memes on the social media platform, where users uploaded clips using snippets of the song, plus the hashtag #oldtownroad. Lil Nas X uploaded the song to TikTok himself, masterfully using the platform to launch the track.

 On April 5, 2019, a remix featuring Billy Ray Cyrus was released and the song exploded, going to #1 on the Hot 100. It was one of the few songs that was so popular, I’d have to play it twice at dances to make the audience happy.

Personally, I disliked the song, as I felt it fell into that rap/country category. However, I did laugh at the 2020 Super Bowl commercial for Doritos. It featured Lil Nas X and Sam Elliott. They line up for a duel, and when Elliott says, “make your move,” Nas busts out a dance move, triggering a dance-off. Billy Ray Cyrus appears in the kicker, saying “I ain’t dancing.”

Old Town Road

The deaths of my grandparents devastated me. They were so important to me. So when I was at the country station and played the next song from Riley Green, it hit home. It’s about more than grandparents, though, it is about those great things in life that end a bit too soon.

I wish high school home teams never lost
And backroad-drinking kids never got caught
I wish the price of gas was low and cotton was high
I wish honky-tonks didn’t have no closing time
And I wish grandpas never died

It, like a few other songs on my list this week, was thought provoking.

I Wish Grandpa’s Never Died

So that wraps up this week. I know many of my readers are unfamiliar with songs after the 2010, so apologies to them. For those familiar with new stuff, what did I miss that was your favorite from 2018 and 2019? You can drop it in the comments.

Next week, believe it or not, we will wrap up the feature, or at least this aspect of it. Looking ahead, I was able to go through 2020-2025 and come up with a few tunes. That sort of tells you how I feel about the last 5 years of music. It will be a short list next week. I hope to see you then.

Thanks for listening and for reading.