#404: Ian & Sylvia, "House of Cards" (1968)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riM0OdxBCT8

Given my over-complicated grown-up tastes, there wasn't much in my near-term upcoming queue that followed smoothly from the hippie sing-along "Free to Be You and Me", so my next selection is another from my mom's old collection that predates my birth. Ian & Sylvia represented well mom's taste in folk music, heavy on vocal harmonies, the kind of songs you get out the autoharp and sing together while snuggling cats -- Bob Dylan songs appeared in our house only when rendered by proper singers, Simon & Garfunkel or the Chad Mitchell Trio or the Byrds or, on-topic, Ian Tyson and Sylvia Fricke. (Dylan-loving friends I respect have tried repeatedly to sell me on his artful vocal expressiveness, and have failed.)

That said, Bob's "the Mighty Quinn" and "This Wheel's on Fire" are among the least interesting tracks on Ian & Sylvia's best album Nashville, most of which they wrote themselves.

#405: the New Seekers, "Free to Be You and Me" (1972)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mU8gDKN5sE

If "Free to Be You and Me" were a brand new folk song, I have no idea what I would think of it. Maybe I'd be a fan. It's jolly and bops along at a pleasant pace; the group vocal harmonies, male and female and young-sounding, are nicely done; the banjo is Kermit-esque, and judging by the fact that I no longer own my Bela Fleck & the Flecktones album, being extremely talented at the banjo is a much less effective path to my heart than playing it like you're a green felt puppet.

The lyrics are ... uncomplicated. "There's a land that I see/ where the children are free/ and I say it ain't far/ to this land from where we are". Now, it's a children's song, but my kids have never shown much interest in children's music, so I'd probably fail to adjust much for that. It's also direct enough to be a national anthem, were it interested in anything as artificial as nations, but there are no national anthems in my countdown. It could also strike me as hippie-dippy sloganeering, and I could start parodying it almost without noticing ("There's a shop that's very nice/ where the children are half-price....", perhaps, or modifying "Take my hand, come along/ Lend your voice to my song" into "Use the wi-fi on the street/ give a share to my tweet").

#406: Adam Schmitt, "Elizabeth Einstein" (1991)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdxyXJqgvNI

We have another case where there's the artist's usual style, and then there's the song in question. Adam Schmitt's album World So Bright is, in general, an excellent collection of "power-pop". That's a species of indie-pop premised, I believe, on the idea that since the Beatles' Help! was an immensely charming record that everyone loved in 1965, and inspired dozens of soundalikes to record hits of their own, music inspired by it should still be loved by everybody today.

This is not, in my view, a completely silly premise.

#410: James McMurtry, "How'm I Gonna Find You Now?" (2015)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bE3DVMwjfw

Sometimes picking the searchable musical tags for these countdown posts is easy. "Indie pop" ropes in Los Campesinos! and Dowling Poole and Gentleman Auction House; "alternative rock" has both recognizable sonic characteristics and MTV certification for the Pixies and Mary Timony; "heavy metal" clearly fits Queensryche and Savatage. Joni Mitchell's "the Jungle Line" was tricky, but once I thought of "experimental pop" I immediately recognized several occasions I'll have to re-use it later in the countdown. James McMurtry ought to be straightforward: he's a country music songwriter, albeit a culturally rebellious one, so certainly here's the first use of the "folk/ country" tag I'd intended all along. But ideally you've clicked the link to play the song, in which case you can also sense the incompleteness of that label.