A lot of the songs I am compelled to sing aloud fall into the category of happy music for me. It’s not that they’re necessarily happy songs, but that they make me happy when I hear them.

As I already discussed in the post Music For The Blues, the music I listen to must compliment the emotion I’m feeling. I listen to happy songs when I’m happy and they make me even happier. There are some songs, even some artists, that I can only listen to when a particular emotional need is present. Those tend to be my favorites. If I can listen to a song any old time at all, it seems to me that it doesn’t have the emotional depth that the songs I can only listen to during a certain mood contain. Perhaps that’s just bias, but music is subjective anyway.

Let me also state here that I cannot sing. By that I mean that I am physically capable of producing sound from my vocal chords, but those sounds aren’t anything anyone would ever want to hear, least of all, me. This would be fine and I would accept my total lack of talent in the singing department, but for the fact that I also have perfect pitch.

Perfect pitch means that I can always hear when I am off key and I am almost always off key when I sing. Not only that, but I have partial hearing in my right ear due to meningitis as an infant. My odd right ear can only hear background noise, not what’s right in front of me. When I sing along, I can hear myself singing, badly, way louder than the song. It’s a curse and also a total waste of perfect pitch since I have not even an ounce of musical talent. I wish I could give it to someone who could use it.

That being said, I don’t let any of that stop me from singing aloud. I just turn the sound up to drown out the caterwauling sound of dying cats coming from my own throat. Some of my favorite happy songs, a.k.a songs I sing along to, are as follows:

Toots & The Maytals. All of them. Toots is my happy music, even though the song lyrics themselves are often sad. Toots takes horrible experiences and turns them into songs that you can’t help but sing along to and bop your head with as you move down the road. Toots and I have shared a lot of good times together. A world without Toots & The Maytals is a world in which I don’t want to live. In the same vein, this also applies to The Specials and Madness.

AC/DC. I can’t think of a better example of a sing along band. These guys made songs so catchy that they’re just begging to be sung. You put on Back In Black, Highway To Hell or any of their albums and you’ll be hoarse by the end of it. This also applies to Motörhead, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Pantera (actually, all of Phil Anselmo’s side projects, too), Slayer and early Metallica.

Fairytale of New York by The Pogues & Kirsty MacColl. You can listen to it here. My friends and I have a thing about this song. Any time it comes on, even in public, we all stand around in a circle, arm in arm, swaying back and forth with stupidly wistful expressions on our faces while we drown out whatever else is going on with our singing. The boys sing the Shane part and us girls do a terrible impersonation of Kirsty. Shane: “I could have been someone.” Kirsty: “Well, so could anyone. You took my dreams from me when I first found you.” Shane: “I kept them with me, babe, I put them with me own. Can’t make it all alone, I built my dreams around you.” I apologize if you’ve ever had to witness that.

Clutch. They’ve been one of my favorite bands since right after they became a band. I know all of the lyrics and I’ve listened to all of the songs more time than you can count. They are an intelligent band, which also means they are dorky as hell. They’re the only band I know who’s worked “ribonucleic acid” into song lyrics.

Fu Manchu. The Mighty Fu is a southern California band with a southern California sound. Unfortunately, I can’t really describe what I mean by that; you’ll just have to listen. Here’s a link. I dare you not to sing along with “king of the road says you move too slow.” I don’t think it can be done, especially if you’re driving. A lot of their songs are very catchy and I always find myself singing along.

Then there are the punk songs of my youth; all of the rebellious anthems that I clung to as I was trying to figure out who I am. The songs by these bands take up an enormous quantity of my brain space: Minor Threat, The Dead Kennedys, Fear, The Misfits, Black Flag, The Circle Jerks, etc. The list is infinite, so I won’t bother naming them all here, but they are all important to me. They all make me want to run around like a drunken monkey and live very hard.

All of these songs are a part of me. They all help to make up who I am as a person. Over time, my musical tastes have changed a little, for instance, when I was a punk girl, I never would have listened to metal, but there are certain songs that will always take up space in my brain. Each one is structurally important and each has its own memory. All of these songs call forth in me some primal instinct and I can’t help but scream along at the top of my lungs, even if I can’t stand to hear the sound of my own voice. I wouldn’t have it any other way.