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Happy Songs Are Not My Thing, But I Can Never Resist a Writing Prompt
I will suffer through it just this once
I am not a happy song kind of guy. Excluding Springsteen (whose songs all make me happy, obviously), my genre preferences tend toward morose jangle-pop (The Smiths), cry-in-your-beer country, or flat-out angry (Judas Priest). Music is supposed to match your personality, which in my case is grumpy/sarcastic.
As many of you know, I also have an inability to resist music-related writing prompts. Normally it’s Buddy Gott who will derail whatever I happen to be doing with something like “What New Wave Bands Were You Listening to in February 1982?” This time, however, it was my good friend and fellow Springsteen disciple Mark Holburn who issued the challenge, and it’s one where my love of writing prompts crashes into my avoidance of “happy” songs with the force of a meteor: “The World Needs a Bit of Peace and Harmony: A Few Happy Songs to Cheer Us Up.”
He’s right about the world needing a bit of peace and harmony right now, so I pushed through my hesitance and found a number of songs that can reasonably be considered happy tunes. Note I said “tunes,” because in a few cases you might not consider them all that happy if you listen to the lyrics. I have avoided the more blatantly cynical ones, and some of these are…
