New Good Song: What to Keep and What to Throw Away by Mary Chapin Carpenter

Here's a new good song -- "What to Keep and What to Throw Away" by Mary Chapin Carpenter

Two of the best new good songs are of very different genres. One is "Yoyo" by Pop Inc, and the other is the song above by Mary Chapin Carpenter. Both were featured a couple weeks ago on iTunes Indie Spotlight, and somehow neither has been uploaded to YouTube yet. So I am resorting to the Spotify embed, which I'm not sure works. The Pop Inc song isn't even there, though. Both are on iTunes, and I encourage you to check them out.

When I was moving into a new apartment in 2009, my roommate and I were putting up curtains, and I put my iTunes library on a random shuffle of songs while we did this chore. Some time later, I asked her whether she liked the music, and her comment was: "Everything you listen to is so sad."

I don't think that's necessarily true. "Yoyo" is not sad at all. But this Mary Chapin Carpenter song certainly is. Perhaps my taste does run toward the melancholy. But for a new song to be good, it must also be somewhat sincere, as I noted previously. Often, happy songs do not seem to be honest songs, while sad songs seem to be. This is because expressing sadness is often a confession, while expressing joy is often a put-on.

"What to Keep and What to Throw Away" is very simple and has no chorus. It repeats the same two chords and moves through verses. But the lyrics are so touching and nice, the melody so sweet, the production so gentle and the vocal performance so perfect, that the blend of these things creates one great song. It is sad, though.

For happy, go to "Yoyo" by Pop Inc. I have no idea what that song is not tremendously popular.