There’ll Be Sad Songs…

…to make you cry, sometimes you get tagged with memes tooooooo…

Okay, so I took a little poetic license to the lyrics. Phlegm Fatale splattered me with a meme, and it goes something like this:

1. Go to the Billboard #1 Hits listings
2. Pick the year you turned 18
3. Get yourself nostalgic over the songs of the year
4. Pick 5 songs and write something about how these songs affected you
5. Pass it on to 5 more friends

I never really listened to a lot of pop hits from the year I turned eighteen. I was more of a fan of 70s rock, and the odd country song or two in the 80s. I turned eighteen in 1986, but I was only eighteen for a couple of months of that year, so I’m taking a page from Phlegm and Holly and using songs between October 1986 and October 1987.

If that violates the spirit of the meme, then screw it. I’m a rebel. That’s just how I roll, baby.

[secretly hoping there are chicks out there turned on by a bad boy Ambulance Driver]

1. Amanda, Boston. Call it a holdover from the 70s, but I have this thing for guitar ballads. Probably because they got me laid. The guitar licks are mediocre, and the lyrics are stale and sappy, but lucky for me back then, eighteen year old girls were no more discerning in their taste in music than their taste in eighteen year old boys. Case in point, ladies: How many of you used to swoon back in the day when you heard More Than Words, by Extreme?

Yeah, I thought so. Apparently, if you sing some version of “If you really loved me, you’d put out,” it works much better than actually coming out and saying it. And for those of us who couldn’t sing, we could always pop the Extreme cassette in…

2. The Way It Is, Bruce Hornsby and The Range. I still love that song to this day. In fact, I have all the songs from that album downloaded from I Tunes. I wore out two copies of the cassette. Even now, the lyrics ring true to me:

That’s just the way it is,
Some things’ll never change.
That’s just the way it is,
Oh, but don’t you believe them.

Melancholy and hope, all in the same song, and with that piano sound only Bruce Hornsby can do. It speaks to me.

3. Walk Like an Egyptian, The Bangles. Hated the song. Hell, hated the Bangles. But I wanted to run away and make little babies with Susanna Hoffs, so I watched their videos whenever I could. Susanna was hot. H-O-T. Muy caliente. Even now, whenever I think about Susanna Hoffs, I get all tingly in my naughty parts.

Ahem. Y’all may have to excuse me for a minute…

4. Lean On Me, Club Nouveau. I was too young for the original Bill Withers version, but I still dig the dance mix/reggae version Club Nouveau did. We be jammin, mon!

5. Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, U2. Because it’s U2, fer Chrissake. Forget their politics, the whole “rockers with a message” thing. They made good music, with good lyrics and The Edge on guitar. Nuff said. And the Joshua Tree ranks high on my list of best albums ever.

Anybody else want to take this one up?