Playlist · Threehundredsongs · 35 items

Somewhere around the 11th March 2002, 17-year-old future megastar Avril Lavigne burst onto our screens with her debut single, Complicated.

YouTube video by Sarah McQuaid

Playlist · FCWatson · 979 items · 8 saves

I’ve come to believe that empathy is the currency of popular music. It’s what we offer the listener in return for their time — Billy Bragg

YouTube video by kevin pearce

Once described as “America’s greatest rock critic”, Lester Bangs was one of the USA’s most noted music writers of the 1970s and beyond, exciting and infuriating readers in equal measure until his untimely death in 1982.

Threehundredsongs was lucky enough to catch India Electric Co. live at Colchester Arts Centre earlier this year. I think I was officially supposed to be working, but it may well have been one of those nights where tools are downed early, and the show just simply enjoyed.

This one is about a lost love. Which would be standard songwriter fare, except in this case, Lisa isn’t lost to a rival suitor: she is lost to a city. A city with which John pleads, asking Geneva to kindly take care of her:

John Martyn’s Grace and Danger is widely considered to be one of the classic break up albums of all time, regularly being mentioned in the same breath as Blood on the Tracks and Rumours, and it isn’t difficult to see why.