Dave Elder's Favorite Songs Playlist
What's my favorite song? That's a tough question, and this playlist is my answer. I don't know that I could ever pick just one song. These are the cuts that I listen to, and that mean something to me. I have lots of memories and stories tied up with them, and I share a portion of those tales on this list. Surely you will recognize some of the tracks here, but probably you'll find some that you don't, and hopefully I can help you discover some good music. You might notice that some numbers are missing, including number 1, and that's because the linked videos are no longer available, so those songs have been removed from the list.
This page only includes a few recent bits. If you'd like to read some older ones, the previous link below will take you to the post before the last one, on my Blogspot runway, which has links to earlier writings. The Master List page has links to all of the playlist Blogspot articles. However, my earliest playlist rambles, before Song 185, only live on this website, since I didn't start posting on Blogspot until February of 2014.
-Dave
Recent Songs
(Sunday, 4/20/25) Song 767: April Come She Will by Simon & Garfunkel, written by Paul Simon. You can find a YouTube video of it here. This positive prediction came along during the frigid months of my freshman HS year, giving us all a good reason to anticipate the expected arrival of moderate climate in the spring of 1966. While I might have heard it a few times on the radio, the main place I got to hear it was at my best friend's house. My close buddy Ed had become a big fan of the folkie duo and he had acquired all of their LPs, so whenever I would visit him during our HS years, as I often did, he would spin all of those 33s on his turntable. As a result, I soon got very familiar with their entire collection of captivating musical adventures, to the point that I could have sung along with a foresight about how a romantic partner would come during a certain warming time frame, would stay the following month and then change her tune a month later, so that when the hot weather arrived, she would fly.
(Monday, 4/14/25) Song 766: Windblown Mind by Jeff Larson, who also wrote the song. You can find a YouTube video of it here. Seven weeks after my previous personal friend song post, this week's fanned forecast comes from my top CA partner. During my decade in the East Bay, I mainly hung out with the Berkeley singer/songwriter circle, but I had one other close musical buddy that I hooked up with about a year after I hitch-hiked into the area. We saw each other do a set on a San Francisco stage and we each liked what we heard the other do, so we soon developed a chummy musical camaraderie, and we briefly became a melodic duo. I think I first heard him do this tune in 1983 or 1984, and I liked what I heard. However, I also had a song with that title and some similar lines, so I decided to change mine to Windblown Rhymes, which I included on my 1985 cassette Going My Way. Even four decades ago, I already knew I would have no way to find all the strays I've left behind, and that list has gotten a lot longer since then, but I still might at some point hear a sound to set me free.
(Sunday, 4/6/25) Song 765: Long Cool Woman by the Hollies, written by Allan Clarke, Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway. You can find a YouTube video of it here. Fifty-two years ago this month, as a U.K. quintet started informing listeners about a lengthy crispy female, my romance with a cool woman began another chapter, though I would not have called her long - she was about an inch-and-a-half shorter than me, so that made her three inches shorter than the tune's chilly star. While at the time I did enjoy singing along with the title, I don't think I had any idea back then about the piece's law enforcement TV show narrative. I never saw a pair of 45's that were weapons, since I never went to a bootlegging boozer on the west side, or anywhere else. The 45s that I knew about during that era were discs, NOT pistols.
(Sunday, 3/30/25) Song 764: Do You Wanna Dance? by The Mamas and The Papas, written by Bobby Freeman. You can find a YouTube video of it here. The Mamas and The Papas had roped me in during the spring of 1966 with their chart topper about the first work day of the week. I had struggled for over two years to try to avoid the devil's music if possible because of my family's religious disapproval of it, but when that Monday, Monday (Song 302) saga came along, I could no longer resist the captivating sounds. A few months later, when my family went to visit my father's relatives in Ohio, we spent one night staying with his brother and family, as we usually did. However, this time around, the place had a very different appearance. My father's brother had built the home's basement many years before, and previously when we visited, we stayed in that basement along with all of his family, but since our trip two years earlier, he had finally constructed a very impressive two-story house on top of that basement. On this visit, at a certain point, my cousin welcomed me into his nice new bedroom and put his If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears LP on his turntable. I relished hearing the whole record, which included this pleasing question. Of course, I could never admit to anyone in my family, other than my younger brother, that I might wanna dance, because fundamentalists also disparaged that activity as a sinful move, and you could only make romance and squeeze a lover all through the night after you had a legal wedding that the church approved.
(Sunday, 3/23/25) Song 763: Dreams by Fleetwood Mac, written by Stevie Nicks. You can find a YouTube video of it here. As the temperatures started to get warmer in the Windy City region in late March of 1977, I began to have Dreams about heading to the West Coast, but I also knew that I couldn't turn such fantasies into a reality until the next year, due to dental problems that would take some time to repair. Because I planned to leave the Chicago area the following year, I did not add Rumours to my LP collection, as much as I would have enjoyed having the disc, but I sure did appreciate hearing the record's shining tales on the local radio station. During that period, I spent a lot of time behind the driver's wheel, and part of that time got enlightened by the radio sounds, while thunder only happened when it was raining. Often I would see the crystal visions of where I planned to go, and then, in July of the following year, I did get to stretch my thumb out in that western direction.
(Sunday, 3/16/25) Song 762: Vehicle by Ides of March, written by Jim Peterik. You can find a YouTube video of it here. I greatly widened my musical horizons on the very day that I got to my university dormitory in the fall of 1969, soon becoming good friends with other male students on my floor in that facility who had very impressive disc collections. On top of hearing some amazing classic rockers that I hadn't previously known about, though, I would also sometimes tune in to the local hit radio, since I only shared my living space with one other guy who liked rock, rather than residing in the home of a family that disparaged the devil's music. When this remarkable mover started riding the airwaves around this time of year in 1970, sometimes I had pictures, I had candy and of course I considered myself a lovable young man, but I did not have a vehicle, so I could not take someone to the nearest star, or anywhere else that they might wanna go.
(Monday, 3/10/25) Song 761: Blowin' in the Wind by Peter, Paul and Mary, written by Bob Dylan. You can find a YouTube video of it here. Back in my single-digit years, I would sometimes hear.a song I liked coming from a radio nearby, but I didn't generally pay much attention to them. However, early on during my second decade, a musical trio started getting plenty of recognition in the summer of 1963 from an anthem about rambling answers to major questions, and it soon became the first current hit that got a lot of my focus. The folkie style wouldn't have bothered my parents the way the devil's music did when it showed up six months later, and the values expressed in the lyrics seemed to align with basic Christian concepts, so I saw no conflict between my religion and the hit. I quickly learned the songwriter's name, and over the next few years I would notice that moniker a few times, such as with Mr. Tambourine Man (Song 326), but I wouldn't actually hear his voice until I got to my college dormitory. When I first heard the breezy song, I didn't know how many roads I'd have to walk down before people would call me a man, but even now, no matter how many times some of the cannonballs did fly since then, I don't expect them to get forever banned any time soon!
(Sunday, 3/2/25) Song 760: In the Year 2525 by Zager and Evans, written by Rick Evans. You can find a cool YouTube video of it here. Around the time that I went to the graduation ceremony where I got my HS certification in June of 1969, I started hearing a folkie duo expressing their musical predictions of the distant future, and while I had no way to evaluate the validity of their prophetic assertions, I did enjoy listening to their melodic foresights. Actually, still living with a fundamentalist family at the time, I believed that the rapture would come along at some point in the near future, and I did not expect human civilization to even make it to the first quarter of the 21st century, so back then, I felt certain that humans would never get to that same point in the 26th one! Now I don't really know, and I do not dismiss the threat of nuclear armageddon, but currently I do know that sometimes when you have something to do, maybe some machine's doin' that for you, and possibly humanity will advance to the point that if someone wants a child, they can pick a son and pick a daughter too from the bottom of a glass tube.
