The songs of the 90s included some that never hit the mainstream but that are so big and epic and powerful, that they inspire me as I write. I wanted to talk this morning about new music (there is a serious amount of excellent stuff being released), but am listening to the 90s on my headphones. I wonder if anyone knows these songs. Bjork sits next to David Bowie. Top right, Radiohead.

Blast the music while writing, go for silence while editing. It works for me. The songs below have helped me write numerous short stories. I start with an idea of where a story is heading. I let it percolate in my head, lay it out virtually, and let the music carry me. Simple formula. Not always successful, but always inspiring.

There are only three bands that I want to talk about when addressing the 90s. To be sure, there is more to discuss, such as the onset of grunge, but a decade of music is too large to cover in one post. For me, the 90s were about Radiohead, REM, and The Verve. There are links to each of these six songs.

Radiohead – Let Down

From OK Computer, a concept album released in 1997. You may remember Paranoid Android from that album, a mood-shifting song that trampled through multiple genres on the way to a screeching halt, with a manic video to boot. But the best song on that disc is Let Down, a song that starts in the mud and feels like prototypical Radiohead depression. Thom Yorke’s voice warbles through despair and lets us know how he feels about the world, how he’s been let down by it. Feels like a downer. Could have been, but near the end, this song sprints in a different direction and lets us know how Thom actually feels. ‘One day, I am going to grow wings…’ Gorgeous, how this song lifts up and opens to the world with an alternate view, a different disposition, a message that resonates today. It’s a sprint, this life. I like to think that my writing always starts in the mud, too. But I never want to end there.

Belong – REM

From Out of Time, released 1991. REM shone the brightest in the 80s but their 90s discography soared to a different level. Everyone remembers ‘Losing My Religion’, a seminal jangling rumination on faith, and ‘Shiny Happy People’, a ridiculous, effervescent ditty that I find to be disposable. Have a listen to ‘Belong’, from the same disc. It starts with the lyrics ‘Her world collapsed early Sunday morning…’ Spoken words dominate the song as it lays out the apocalyptic breaking of the world, the deterioration of the protagonist’s dreams as she sees it all ending. The parts that follow, Michael Stipe giving up the spoken autotuned sentiments in favour of sending his voice against the tired concrete and the browned, baked parks, is so glorious that it snaps my heart. There is a devious level of hope in this song as Stipe talks about what this mother ended up telling her child in the face of catastrophe. What is music for if not for this?

Velvet Morning – The Verve

From Urban Hymns, released in 1997. OK Computer and Urban Hymns released the same year, amazingly enough. The Verve, fronted by madman Richard Ashcroft, cut the best disc of the 90s as far as I’m concerned. Everyone remembers ‘Lucky Man’, a gorgeous acoustic-y ballad, and the strings-rich ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ that sampled from, of all bands, the Rolling Stones. Have you heard ‘Velvet Morning’? Another slow starter with Ashcroft ruminating about the haze of life, easily interpreted as his journey through a drug-fuelled rock star existence. What he brings us is the explicit attempt to tell us about his life, as though it’s ours, too, not limited to a poet/singer/musician but emblematic of our struggles. ‘And life is a game, you’ve tried… Life is a game, you’re tired…’ Those lyrics and the way they are sung absolutely slay me. You know he’s been through it, and that he’s come out of it enough to create this piece of musical perfection. This is a song for lovers.

Lucky – Radiohead

Also from OK Computer, released in 1997. There are so many great, familiar songs on that disc, but this one never got any attention and I doubt most have heard it. Stuck at the end of the disc, burdened with the abstractions provided by delusions of being a superhero, magnified by a feeling that the singer’s luck is going to change. Our luck is going to change. How a song this epic and soaring gets relegated to the end of a disc, with nary a thought of release as a single, speaks to how utterly Radiohead smashed this album. ‘It’s gonna be a glorious day!’ When I listen to this song, I find that I am so tempted to intersperse the extraordinary into the lives of the ordinary people about whom I write, as though this song is addressing them. It’s tracing their lives from the commonplace to the wondrous, and doing so with a contemplation of everything we could be when we lift our heads up and fully admit the possibilities of life. I never aimed to write the mundane, because songs like this lift me.

Find the River – REM

From Automatic for the People, released in 1992. A disc that contains the mysterious first single ‘Drive’, and later an oft-used and still-resonant ‘Everybody Hurts’, but top-to-bottom, a winner of a disc. ‘Find the River’ is peak REM. Some kind of accordion starts it off as Michael Stipe sings in second person to… someone. Who is it? This song is mystery. ‘I have got to leave to find my way…’ What follows is simply gorgeous, a song that shouldn’t even exist but because it does, demands greater attention than it ever got. Buried as the last song on this disc, it would never have worked as a single, even as Stipe talks about nothing going his way, and the backup vocals soaring over his voice, until he supposes that all of this, the beauty of such composition, is coming our way. A song that I wished everybody knew, because it contains a million stories, few of which have yet been told. I love its hope. I love its distance. I love what it’s given me.

Sonnet – The Verve

Also from Urban Hymns, 1997. Richard Ashcroft is a mad genius. I wonder what happened to him, or why he’s left the stage, because I really think we need him. In this song, he addresses the Lord, and in an album called Urban Hymns, that may signal a particular disposition. Yet when I listen to this song, I’m relatively positive that Ashcroft is calling out to an existence without a definable starting point or ending point, to an entity that he’s surely glimpsed amongst his travels – how else could he have written a poignant, aching song like this? Is that where artists get their genius, from those penetrations through the ether into the truth of how we got here and why we’re scurrying about like this? Richard Ashcroft might be mad but he’s particularly good at revealing the hope he sees in the world, and in us, and in the mystery of what we’re about, as well as the promise of our potential. ‘Yes, there’s love if you want it…’ I feel like this is the sentiment we have been given by someone, by something. By everything.