Charm City Jukebox

Mood music month is coming to an end, and this list is by far my favorite. Listening to my favorite calm songs several times over made me silly tranquil. My angry songs turned me into raging Hulk. My sad songs post was so hard to write that I stopped several times, and worried that I would never wrap it up. But these songs? Pure bliss. It’s amazing how effective music is when it comes to your moods. I hope these five tracks lift yours, whatever state it’s in.

“Ain’t That Enough” by Teenage Fanclub

Six months ago, I fell in love with Nick Hornby’s “Song Book.” I tracked down some of the songs the first time I read it, and was thrilled with them: O.V Wright’s version of “Let’s Straighten It Out” was perfection, “Ain’t That Enough” was heady British bliss. I was sure I was on to something good—it felt like one of my favorite authors had arranged a mixtape, just for me.

Of course that’s not how music works, or music writing. Hornby made a mixtape based on him, just like I do every week right here on this blog. Recently I’ve tracked down lists on Spotify cataloging every song from Songbook. And it’s a little grim. I’m not sold on the bands I’d never heard of, the songs that were meant to redeem artists I had heard of didn’t do much for me. I keep test-driving the songs though because of “Ain’t That Enough,” a song I wouldn’t have found, a song I wasn’t sold on from first listen. Now it’s a song that epitomizes happiness to me, a song I listen to several times a week. “Ain’t That Enough” makes me happy and hopeful, about all things, including Hornby’s list of maybe mediocre songs that could, on 100^th listen, be secretly brilliant

“French Navy” by Camera Obscura

“French Navy” has the soaring, upbeat rhythm of a Motown girl group dance hit. The tambourine glitters and bangs, the violin quickens your pulse. The lyrics are laced with heartbroken melancholy, and periodically a little odd: “You and your dietary restrictions/Said you loved me with a lot of conviction” always gets lodged in my head for a few hours post-listen. The song encapsulates the dangerous excitement of new love—it’s riveting, sinfully catchy, and brimming with joy. The first time I heard this, I spent months tracking it down. I’ve listened to it thousands of times since and I’ve never grown tired of it. In low or tired spirits, it always does the trick.

“The Love You Save” by The Jackson 5

Few musicians warm the cockles of my heart like pint-sized Michael Jackson. That voice! The dancing! The tiny vests! The circa Jackson 5 Michael Jackson is as adorable as he is brilliant. Jackson 5 songs are 100% attached to happy memories for me: Dancing as a kid at bat-mitzvahs, dancing at weddings as an adult, reading High Fidelity (which introduced me to this particular Jackson 5 song), visiting SF before I moved here, sitting around the Mt. Washington Tavern in Baltimore one night with childhood friends, laughing and drinking beers and taking the jukebox hostage. All happy, warm-hearted, smile filled stuff, full of shaking hips and good friends and cold beer, soundtracked by the pure joy that is classic Jackson 5.

“Birdhouse in Your Soul” by They Might Be Giants

Really, the entire Flood album is one giant mix of happy songs for me. I’ve been listening to this album since before I can remember. It exists, like beloved stuffed animals and childhood bedrooms in long ago apartments, in this fuzzy memory netherworld for me. I can hear my mom, who was my age now, walking around the living room singing “I’m having a wonderful time/ But I’d rather be whistling in the dark.” I can see the dust that twinkled in thick beams of sunlight during the showtuneish opening of “Theme From Flood.” I can see my pudgy little kid limbs, plopped on the dining room table, with my trusty sidekick Bunny Puppet standing guard as I dunked my blonde head into an enormous bowl of chocolate mousse, emerging innocent-faced and chocolate-haired when my mom walked in. She washed tall peaks of dessert out of my curls as “Keep the night light on inside the birdhouse in your soul” played cheerily in the background.

“This Will Be Our Year,” by The Zombies

There’s a writer I really like who wrote a blurb about this song and said she wanted to play it at her wedding. Her argument for this was “How awesome would it be for your wedding song to be by a band called the Zombies?” And while that’s a fine reason, and I salute that awesomeness, I think a better argument for this as a wedding song is that it’s the happiest, warmest musical love bauble I’ve ever come across. It’s not just a perfect love song, it’s a perfect sonic hug of a song that makes me want to skip through a meadow painted in bright, psychedelic palette brushstrokes. Lovely and simple and so warm, it is all kinds of happy. Don’t wait to play at your wedding when you could be playing it right now. This kind of happy music deserves daily air time, not just a special occasion spotlight.