The 100 Greatest Recordings Ever: #10 – Townes Van Zandt

The 100 Greatest Recordings Ever: #57, Townes Van Zandt

Townes

Townes Van Zandt
12.5" x 8", oil on wood, 2012

To continue the thread (from last week) on familiar music a little note now on the Texan songwriter Townes Van Zandt. I've seen him perform a number of times and met him once on one of these occasions. We had a few (more) drinks after a concert in Columbus in the Fall of 1996. There were maybe five other people in the room while he talked a bit about some songs and strummed his guitar. He would never remember me as he was much more interested in the female I was with than with me reminiscing about a concert of his together with Guy Clark I saw in the Netherlands a few years earlier. It's a moot point anyway, Mr. Van Zandt died a few months later. The inclusion in the Top 100 of the song Waitin' Around to Die by Townes Van Zandt raises the numbers of repeats from last year to a meager five. A cover of the same song by the Be Good Tanyas is another one of these five. Waitin' Around to Die is also only one of five songs that feature in the list of 500 songs counted over 29 years as well. At number 160 it is Townes' second best in the all time greatest songs list. His song Nothin' resides at #10. Needless to say that I made quite a few paintings of him over the years. All together they could fill a whole wall. I probably could paint his portrait without looking at a photograph by now. Next time he's in I'll try to do just that, promise.

The statistics

Townes Van Zandt
25.5" x 19"
oil on wood, 2010

    The painting, fairly big, a little awkward, is of Townes Van Zandt, the newest entry in this year's 100. Townes Van Zandt has been in a Top 100 multiple times so I'm not going to write a whole lot about him other than to mention that the documentary film by Margaret Brown Be Here to Love Me is really worth seeing... And that the song in the Top 100 will be Waiting Around to Die, one of his classics, with unforgettable lyrics from the category, in his own words: "The songs are not so much sad, they're kinda like hopeless".
    What I do want to write about is in line with the last one (Games, Games, Games) as I make the obvious jump from games to their statistics.Just a few days ago I found out that maintaining a blog comes with a whole set of statistics that the publisher, blogspot.com, automatically updates with every new visit. Now that's something that as list keeper is right up my alley. Now that there are 40 songs somewhat certain of inclusion in the list I deem it due time to forward the statistics. I would love to use the same beautiful graphs and pie charts as blogspot.com uses, but I don't know how. Anyway, the first statistic is of the countries from which the 40 songs originate. There are no less than 16 different countries and it won't surprise anyone that the majority of recordings come from the United States: 18 (three of which are from 'ethnic' groups, sung in different languages than English). Next is Norway (black metal) with 4, 3 from England, two from Australia and India, and Spain, France, Sweden, Barbados, Nigeria, Mali, South Africa, Mexico, and Vietnam all have 1 each. 22 from North America but none from South America, 10 from Europe, three from Africa and Asia, and two from Australia. Next up is the format of the music, the format of how it originally came to m: Vinyl, 19 (15 LPs, 4 singles); digital, 13 (6 from YouTube, 5 from Last FM, 2 from other sites); 8 recordings come from the CD format of which 4 were tucked into a book as an illustration to the text). I should mention here that the numbers 1, 2, and 3 from the list all come from the last category, and coincidentally all originate from England. Next up is the division of the music into genres. In doing so I first make the division between commercial (recorded with the intention to profit) and field (recorded with the intention to document), the ratio is 33 to 7. It changes a little bit when shifting the categories from Western as opposed to World Music, here the ratio is 25 to 15. Dividing up the 25 commercial western tracks gives the following result: Metal-7, Folk (singer-songwriter)-7, Popular (general, singers/performers, for lack of a better term)-5, Jazz-3, Alternative-3. Several genres that are usually represented are missing: Blues, Classical, and Hip-Hop/Rap. Last statistic is the division between recording dates, by decades: 1890s-1; 1910s-1; 1950s-4; 1960s-9; 1970s-7; 1980s-5; 1990s-4; 2000s-9.
   People call my tastes/interests eclectic but I don't like the term, it implies such a serious attitude (like the word connaisseur) when I'm really just a musical tourist. I am interested in all of it, all genres, all instruments (I still have a hard time with the vuvuzela), all cultures, all ages. Obviously I like one recording at one time better than an other (that's the premise of the Top 100).