I don't know whether I can honestly say this the song 'feels like home' to me, but I do recall once, long ago, arriving in Edinburgh from London, and walking up the Bridges with Transformer playing, and thinking it felt like coming home.

'Walk on the Wild Side' is the second track from Transformer to feature on Crucial Tracks, I note, but that's not surprising. I'd consider it a 'crucial album'.

Which song would you use to introduce yourself to someone new?

Not sure this is a thing I've ever done in the musical kind of sense, but I guess somebody might say, 'Tell me a song you love,' or something. I could answer with 'Sit Down' by James, for sure.

I saw them live a ton of times in the late eighties/early nineties. They're probably the band I've seen most, along with The Pogues and The Fall. Including on my 25th birthday, headlining the Reading Festival. Actually The Pogues were on that day, too. Or so my memory says, even if the Reading histories don't.

An interesting thing about 'Sit Down' is that they released it as a single and it didn't do much. I saw the video a load of times on the old ITV Chart Show on Saturday mornings back when I lived in Walthamstow.

But like a year or so later they didn't just rerelease it; they rerecorded it, with reordered verses, and a more upbeat performance. Here's the original video on YouTube.

The new version, of course, became a huge hit.

I don't know if this song always makes me feel better, exactly, but I love it to bits and want it played at my funeral. So there's that.

As far as representing my current mood goes, I'm actually just hungry. But Springsteen's 'Hungry Heart' is always a good choice. The story goes he wrote it for The Ramones, or at least was going to offer it to them. But he decided to keep it, and of course put it on The River.

That album — and most of his gigs since — wouldn't have been the same without it. But I'd still love to have heard The Ramones do it.

Madness: At the heart of the ska revival of the eighties. I’d have gone to see them in Glasgow, on the Two-Tone tour, with The Specials and The Selecter, if it hadn’t been at an over-18s-only venue. I was 16.

It’s interesting that, although I could give you various answers to the ’first single’ question, I don’t actually know what the first album I bought was.

Still, it’s bound to have been a Beatles one. So let’s go with the Red Album, and ‘Ticket to Ride’.

Lou Reed is one of my all-time faves, both with the Velvets and solo. This one popped into my mind this morning as we were walking back from badminton (playing the game, not the place where they have horsey things). It’s from the mighty Transformer album.

First love, eh? 'Music was my first love,' as an old song has it, 'And it'll be my last.' But that's not what this is about, really, is it?

Let's go with The Ramones (they were going to turn up some time, in one or another form, of course), where they made it on to Top of the Pops. Maybe because Phil Spector was at the controls, though we'd have to hope not.

'What is your favorite song from last year?' I am asked by the daily prompt from Crucial Tracks.

'Favourite,' I say. The 'favorite' spelling reads like a made-up element from thirties SF, or some such.

But I'm avoiding the question. The thing is, what this tells me is, I don't listen to much new music these days. Or, when I do, it doesn't impinge, doesn't resonate with me, become something I go back to.

I spent a chunk of 2024 listening through a list from The Guardian, of the 50 best albums of 2023, in order to check out what was good and recent. I had already heard the PJ Harvey, the Gina Birch, and the Boygenius albums, all of which I liked.

None of the others made enough of an impact to count, sadly. That is, none of them got a second play. One, I think, I gave a decent chance, but couldn't even finish.

And anyway, they were all new works from the year before last, not last year.

So for the purposes of this prompt, I'm allowing 'new to me' to count. And while I love PJ Harvey, so you might expect one of hers to make the cut, I Inside the Old Year Dying is too much an album. It's its own unique thing, but I don't recall a specific standout track from it.

So I'm going with Boygenius and, in another acknowledgment of my lack of new-music-attention, their one that namechecks an old singer — one of my favourites.

I did not sing along to anything today, as the daily prompt asks. But I did find myself singing this Meat Loaf ditty, at least in my head. Maybe aloud, who knows?

Interesting that it appears as by Meat Loaf & Ellen Foley. Entirely appropriate, as it's a duet. But I don't think it was originally billed that way, and the modern approach would be to include 'Feat Ellen Foley' right in the title text. As I wrote about several years ago in [Little, Feat...(https://devilgate.org/2017/03/06/little-feat/)