Levon Helm was a rare spirit: he radiated love so great you could hear it in his voice, feel it in his backbeat, and see it on his face.

Let me start by crediting my friend and inspiration, singer/songwriter Milton, for much of the following theory. He didn’t coin it (and I wouldn’t be surprised if he disagreed with some of it), but it was born out of hours of conversation between the two of us, over which I’ve been mulling for the last few years. Let me add that I don’t pretend that anyone can be an authority on this subject, and I don’t mean to sound like I’m trying to be one. I just like talking about it. The following is my current theory of great songs.

Songs are like lovers: the best ones have a good heart, a good brain, and a great body.

The heart is the emotion: the melody and harmony, the shape and feeling of the song. The brain is the insight: the part that makes you think, usually it’s conveyed in the lyrics, but sometimes with fancy chord voicings or time signatures. The body is the physicality of the song: the rhythm, the primal, erotic force that makes you want to get up and dance.

In other words: a great song should break your heart, make you think, and turn you on.

Since I started thinking of songs like this, I’ve noticed that most songs (like most lovers) tend to be unevenly distributed. Most are heavy on one or two of these categories and lacking the third. Even whole genres of music tend to concentrate on one or two aspects. For example…

Folk music tends to be heavy on the brain and heart, and light on the body. Think about Joni Mitchell’s canon: sweeping, heartbreaking melodies, brilliant lyrics, but generally not much going on downstairs. The few times Joni brought in some eros – some sexy, powerful rhythm – she had a hit (think “Big Yellow Taxi”). Leonard Cohen has the same concentration: “Suzanne” is one of my very favorite songs, but you could sing it to a metronome, and not lose anything essential. It’s got a tempo, but no rhythm. It doesn’t move rhythmically. To think of it another way: Dylan was a folksinger when he played solo. When he brought in The Band, he became a rock star.

Pop Music, for most of the last hundred years, tends to have plenty of heart and body, but no brains. Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge fan of pop music. The hugest. But rarely does a pop song contain much insight. This spans the decades, from “Ain’t Misbehavin’”, through “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “What’d I Say”, all the way to Bruno Mars’ “F**k You”. Those songs are like smokin’ hot lovers, sweet and kind and passionate, but without a thought in their pretty little heads.

Think about “Dock of the Bay”, one of my favorite pop songs of the last fifty years: It moves you, and it makes you want to move. It’s sexy and sweet and full of longing. But what is it actually saying? This guy is sitting on a dock, thinking about life. He thinks to himself “looks like nothing’s gonna change”. Then he whistles. Again: I adore this song – and I think it has “meaning” in a sort of cosmic, big-picture sense – but it’s not going to change anybody’s mind about anything.

I don’t know rap and hip-hop well enough to comment much, but based on the heart=melody theory, rap seems to be light on the heart, and heavy on the body and brains. I could say the same about punk and hardcore. It would make some sense, because so many of those songs are conveying strength, anger, and toughness, and you don’t want to show too much emotion if you’re trying to win a fight. You want to show brains and brawn: words and rhythm.

All of this is to say that the greatest songs of all, of course, shatter the boundaries. They transcend genres by displaying, in all their beauty and vulnerability, the heart, the mind, and the physicality of the singer. They sing of the complete human experience.

My fans are currently nominating their favorites. Here are a few of mine.

Lean On Me (Bill Withers)

Still Crazy After all These Years (Paul Simon)

Brown Eyed Girl (Van Morrison)

Picture in a Frame (Tom Waits)

What A Wonderful World (Theile/Weiss)

Forgiveness (Patty Griffin)

In 2008, I helped start a business called “Quidplayer”, which built a nifty little widget for artists to post on their websites. The Quidplayer is a music player that allows fans to pick their own price for the music they download from artists. It was a fairly revolutionary idea at the time (I had only heard of Radiohead taking that approach, never a smaller-time artist). These days, because of the success of Bandcamp and similar businesses, I’m happy to say it’s becoming more commonplace.

I’ve now adopted Bandcamp on my website, allowing fans to download tracks from the Buoyalbum for any price they choose. I’m planning to release the new record, Idiot Heart, in the same way. Additionally, for the past year, I’ve been inviting fans to choose their own price for my physical CDs at my shows.

This approach has gotten mixed reviews from fans. Some people are instantly in favor of it, others are downright incredulous. I’d like to let you in on where the idea came from, and why I’m now 100% sold on it.

The fan experience

Before I was a musician, I was a music fan. I still am! Music that moves me is worth more to me than almost anything else in the world. I would eat gruel every day for the rest of my life, or live in a tin hut, before I would give up good music. Music that doesn’t move me, on the other hand, is worth nothing to me. So how can two songs, one totally inspiring and one completely boring, both be worth $.99?

My answer is, they aren’t.

Not everybody has the same taste, but I will wager that everybody who loves music has a similar experience. If you really love an artist, if their music gets inside you and wreaks glorious havoc, destroying and rebuilding your interpretation of the world, making you laugh and cry and reconsider things, their art is worth an infinite amount of money to you.

The industry

Something big happened in the music world about a hundred years ago. Vinyl records were invented. Suddenly, record labels could record musicians, and distribute their music to jukeboxes, and later, directly to music fans and radio stations.

Imagine the enormity of this! Before 1910, a musician was a working person who traveled from town to town, performing their music live, in the same room with their fans. A fan was a person who saw that artist, enjoyed their performance, and planned to see them again the next time they came through town.

Recording changed the face of music in countless ways. The most shocking and new and important way, I submit, what that it turned a song – previously an experience, unsellable and unquantifiable – into an object which could be bought and sold.

With that one little idea, the recording industry was born. You can’t have an industry without a product, and you can’t make a product out of a musical performance unless you stamp it onto a piece of plastic. Now, a hundred years later, the music-buying public seems to think that a song is more or less the same as a pen, or an iPod, or an ice cream cone: it’s a thing, and it’s worth a fixed amount of money.

This, my friends, is lunacy. Songs are magic. Money is just money.

In Conclusion

It seems to me that the big mistake – the very biggest mistake in the history of the music industry – was not highly paid record executives, or unfair royalty distribution, or Napster, or iTunes. It was the faulty premise on which the whole empire was built: pretending, in the first place, that a song could be bought or sold.

So, here in the 21^st century, as I make my songs and sing them into microphones, as so many others did before me, I’m challenging that premise. If you hear my music, and you like it, and you want to take it home with you, don’t ask me what it’s worth.

To me, it’s worth everything. It’s worth every failed love affair I wrote about. It’s worth the debts, and the late nights, and the incessant station wagon traveling. It’s worth every ounce of heartache that went into conceiving, writing, singing, and recording it. It’s worth all the money I’ve ever made, and ever spent, and ever will.

The question is: what’s it worth to you?

As you probably already know, the first and most important gift to buy for your music-loving loved ones (at least if you live in the northeast US) is a ticket to one of my upcoming CD release shows.

Now that my shameless plug is complete, let me shamelessly plug the work of some excellent songwriters who are not me. Myself, I don’t listen to much music that was made after about 1975, but I have proverbially spun all of these records til they wore through. Keep in mind that I have a strong bias towards great lyricists, so if that ain’t your thing, you might want to read somebody else’s list of recommendations. Also, keep in mind that all of these artists are even better live, so if you dig their records, sign their mailing lists.

Below are my top 5 not-widely-known-album recommendations, all of which are guaranteed home runs, some of which your music-loving friends and family may not already have.

1) Devon Sproule – Don’t Hurry for Heaven – Buy it here

For fans of: Rickie Lee Jones, Bob Dylan, Gillian Welch, Hoagy Carmichael
Who dig: Outstandingly playful, creative, wry, image-rich lyrics paired with earbogglingly beautiful melodies, presented by Devon’s sweet, young, conversational vocals and skillful, warm jazz guitar.
Note: For the already-avid Devon fan, consider gifting her newest record, I Love You, Go Easy, on vinyl.

2) Milton – Grand Hotel – Buy it here

For fans of: Van Morrison, Randy Newman, John Prine, Nick Lowe
Who dig: Classic tunes (and I mean CLASSIC, like could-have-been-written-in-any-decade-by-any-of-the-aforementioned-greats), simple arrangements with great groove, conversational singing from a disarmingly honest, whip-smart, totally endearing songwriter.
Note: This song is not on this album. Grooveshark lacks the new record, but it’s at least as good.

3) Anais Mitchell - The Brightness – Buy it here

For fans of: Joni Mitchell, Joanna Newsom, Leonard Cohen, Ani DiFranco
Who dig: Expansive, emotive, exuberant, pitch-perfect singing, sparse instrumentation, absolutely masterful wordplay. Topics include Jesus, apples, war in the Middle East, Hades and Persephone.

4) Mark Erelli – Little Vigils – Buy it here

For fans of: Jackson Browne, early Paul Simon, Loudon Wainwright III
Who dig: Incredibly sweet, melodic, totally love-filled songs, delivered with a shockingly adept voice (this dude has a five-octave range, all of which has the texture of warm honey). The songs are simple-but-surprising, honest, and introspective. I especially recommend this album if you’re buying for your sweetheart, or for new parents.
Note: Again, this song is not on this album, but it is my favorite album of his. Damn you, Grooveshark! Also, Mark is touring with me in January as a special guest.

5) Cary Ann Hearst – Lions & Lambs – Buy it here

For fans of: The Band, Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Steve Earle
Who dig: Instant heartbreak, fearless vocals, classic country melodies, totally asskicking drums and harmonies (think The Band with Janis Joplin as frontwoman), songs of death, courage and outlaws.

As you may know (if you’re my Facebook buddy), I just spent way too much time over the past week compiling a list, proposed and edited by my friends and fans, of the Top 50 American Musical Artists of the Past 100 Years. The final list (after four rounds of voting) can be found here.

As a highly music-obsessed and highly opinionated person, of course, I have my own version of this list. First, I’ll tell you why. Then, I’ll tell you what it is.

1) Originators over Popularizers

Occasionally, someone invents a whole new kind of music, becomes gigantically famous, and brings that kind of music to the whole world (Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Michael Jackson). Usually, though, it’s one or the other.

One of my biggest pet peeves in reading these sorts of lists (*cough* ROLLING STONE *cough, cough*) is when an artist like Buddy Holly is listed instead of, or higher than, an artist like Chuck Berry. Why? because Buddy Holly was doing something extremely similar to what Chuck Berry did, only a little later, and not as well.

It’s difficult to say how much race influences the popularity and long-term idolization of a given artist, but I do see a theme. The more popular, and more-often-cited “originators” of a given genre, are usually white. See also: Frank Sinatra, Eminem, Elvis Presley.

“The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin’ now, man, for more years than I know. They played it like that in their shanties and in their juke joints and nobody paid it no mind ’til I goosed it up. I got it from them. ” – Elvis Himself.


2) Pop Musicians over Cult Artists

This is not a hard and fast rule, and this tenet is not very popular with music geeks, but in general I think pop musicians have a wider scope of influence than cult musicians. Obviously, there are exceptions to that rule (eg: The Pixies. But who ever thought indie rock would become pop?)

You’ll notice Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker didn’t make it onto my list. Why? Because bebop & modern jazz are, and always have been, cult genres. That music is for music geeks, not the general public. As much as I appreciate it, as a music geek myself, I don’t think geekery influences the world of music the same way a brilliant pop song does.

3) Lasting Impressions over Flashes in the Pan

In creating my list, I am extremely hesitant to include anybody who’s been making and releasing records for less than 20 years. Why? Because it’s impossible to take the long-view of a part of history that one is currently involved in. Eg: I think Ani DiFranco is incredible, and I’m glad she made the top 50 (especially glad considering some of the other proposals). But, I didn’t vote for her myself, because we can’t yet say whether she changed the face of music forever, or just for now.

So here it is, my top 10, in chronological order (rather than order of greatness).

Louis Armstrong

Like I said, this list is not supposed to be in order of greatness. BUT, if I had to pick one artist, the artist who MOST changed the face of music, worldwide, irreversibly and for the better, it would be Louis. As Wynton Marsalis said, “He invented swing, he invented jazz, he invented the telephone, the automobile and the polio vaccine.” Louis Armstrong redefined rhythm, phrasing AND tonality, changing the way people write and sing songs forever.

Robert Johnson

I’m already breaking my own rule, here, because Robert Johnson was a cult musician if there ever was one. He achieved no kind of fame or fortune during his short life, just wandered the juke joints of the south, playing what eventually became known as the blues. However, he made a series of recording that unequivocally changed music; writing and recording the first set of songs in a genre that later morphed into R&B, rock & roll, folk, soul, funk, punk and all the rest.

Bessie Smith

Bessie Smith originated (more or less) a singing style that influenced all the singers to follow, thus influencing the way songs were written, in an infinite feedback loop that still continues today. Among those influenced by Bessie Smith, whether they know it or not, are Adele, Kelly Clarkson and Amy Winehouse (RIP). She also penned at least one extremely well-known and long-enduring blues standard, Backwater Blues.

Billie Holiday

If I’m being honest, Billie was a popularizer more than an originator. Her phrasing was extremely similar to Armstrong’s, only moreso. But, she was just SO DAMN GOOD…. I guess this one is just a personal favorite I can’t let go of.

Duke Ellington

First off, thanks for naming him #1 on our little list over there, voters. He certainly had a gigantic circle of influence. In addition to writing and arranging (yes, along with Strayhorn) “It Don’t Mean a Thing”, “Mood Indigo”, “I Let a Song Go Out Of My Heart”, and of course dozens of other totally gorgeous and magical jazz standards, Duke was a very elegant slap in the face to a segregated society that still didn’t like seeing well-dressed, well-spoken, undeniably ingenious black men. Plus, he brought us Johnny Hodges.

Little Richard

See above. Li’l Rich is more responsible for Rock & Roll than most, possible all other, Rock & Rollers. He was cited as a major influence of, among others, The Beatles, The Stones, The Kinks, Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke, Jimi Hendrix and Queen. I had a small conniption over whether to include Chuck Berry instead, but went with LR because he had better hair.

Ray Charles

UGH. If all Ray did was record a huge percentage of the best records of all time, I would still include him on this list. But no, he also invented several genres which went on to change all American music, wrote dozens of classic songs, sang dozens of other classic songs better than they’d ever been sung, popularized gospel and blues music with white people, popularized country music with black people, and personally integrated Birmingham, AL.

Bob Dylan

First, I’d like to congratulate Bob for being the only white dude on this list. I swear, it’s not that I’m a self-hating white racist. It just happens to be the case, in this particular country, during the particular span of years in question, that persons of African descent invented, perfected, and popularized almost all of the best music.

Bob, of course, being a notable exception to that rule. Funny thing about Bob Dylan: he was (is) not a great singer or instrumentalist, but he certainly did change music in a huge way. His genius lies in changing the way people hear the popular song; suddenly, it’s personal, direct, conversational. He more or less invented a style of songwriting to which everyone who came after owes a great debt (myself included). He cracked open the genre, and allowed us to speak when we’re singing, and to speak to someone in particular. Simultaneously, he helped turn the songwriter into the performer, the celebrity, and the idol. Then, he made it cool for folk artists to have a rock band. Thanks, Bob.

Aretha Franklin

Much like Billie, Aretha was more a popularizer than an originator. But again, she recorded a huge number of the best records in her genre (and yes, in the history of American music). She also just sang (sings) her ass off, all the time, more than anybody else ever has or will.

Michael Jackson

Controversial, I know, but would anybody argue that hip-hop would exist without MJ? How about pop music, as it’s currently defined? What about breakdancing? How about music videos, as we know them? Perhaps most pertinently, what about the show “So You Think You Can Dance”?

MJ originated AND PERFECTED a genre that we still don’t know what to call. Ask me in another hundred years.