#420: Tom Petty, "Don't Come Around Here No More" (1985)

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.

#425: Buggles, "Video Killed the Radio Star" (1980)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwuy4hHO3YQ

MTV, obviously, set the precedent here back in August 1981: if you're going to present a bunch of unrelated songs to an invisible public with no clear path to accomplishing anything, start with "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles. It's structured superbly for an introductory song: first the gleaming, reverberating washes of synthesizer. Then the soft but sprightly electric piano and the sad vocals, distorted over cheap transmission; the cooing female "Oh, uh oh" hook; the thumping quarter-note drum that starts 24 seconds in, and the first quick tease of that switched-on-Bach style of sprightly keyboard two seconds later.