https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0JvF9vpqx8
I call my list "favorite songs", but technically it's "favorite *recordings* of songs", and those can be quite different. To make the case for Tom Petty as one of our great mainstream rock songwriters, I have a decent array of options. Few hit songs have ever sketched a character as efficiently and wittily as "She's a good girl: loves her mama, loves Jesus and America too. She's a good girl, crazy about Elvis; loves horses, and her boyfriend too". "Into the Great Wide Open" needs just two verses of AAABCCCD rhyme to tell an entire VH-1 Behind the Music biography ("His leather jacket had chains that would jingle/ They both met movie stars, partied and mingled/ Their A+R man said 'I don't hear a single'/ Their future was wide open"). "She was an American girl/ raised on promises" summarizes a person and a country in eight words.