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I listen to a fair amount of podcastery while working, often relistening to ones that I like. One such podcast is Ricky Gervais’s appearance on Desert Island Discs, a UK program in which famous folks are brought on to talk a bit about their lives, and given the premise that they’ve been stuck on a desert island with no hope of escape, the 8 pieces of music (along with a player of some kind, obviously) they’d like to be stuck with, along with one luxury item (frequently a piano).

I’m not even remotely famous, so it’s unlikely I’ll ever be invited on, so at the risk of copyright infringement, I’ll simply list mine here, although I’ll spare you the biography because nobody wants to read about how I was brought up by wolves in the Ardennes or graduated from the University of Helsinki in 1788 or once got in a fight (consisting of little but attempting to knee each other in the balls) with a fellow 5th grader who is currently part of Ben Folds’s touring band.

(Some of those facts are true.)

I’ll do my list in rough chronological order. Since the idea seems to be to pick individual songs or singles, I’m only allowing myself individual movements of larger works.

1. Messiah – Handel – final movement, consisting of “Worthy Is The Lamb” and the closing Amen. If I were allowing myself to pick an entire work, I’d take Bach’s B-minor Mass, but it’s hard to pick just one movement of that to listen to. Messiah is also a great work start to finish, but I could easily listen to just the last movement every Christmas Eve while drinking fermented coconut milk and, probably, weeping uncontrollably.


2. The King Of Love My Shepherd Is – Sir Edward Bairstow. This is very nearly the pinnacle of English choir music. Occasionally I get out the score and play it at the piano while my children are screaming. It doesn’t make them stop, of course.


3. If These Walls Could Speak – Jimmy Webb. I think that Amy Grant and a few others have covered it, but they suck. The recording I have from Webb’s “Ten Easy Pieces” album from the mid-nineties is heart-breakingly beautiful, and deceptively difficult to play.


4. Little Secrets – Passion Pit. I’m not particularly into electro-pop, but I heard their song “Sleepyhead” on a podcast and said hey, I like that. I was a little concerned that the lead singer’s high pitched wailing would grate on me, but I splurged on the album, and Sleepyhead’s not even the 6th best track. “Little Secrets” is the song I put on when I’m going for a fast run, or lifting a heavy weight, or working at my desk, or cooking bacon, or snoozing in front of the TV. It’s the Swiss Army Knife of pop songs. And Michael Angelakos’s voice is the pimp’s limp.