Random Top Ten!!

Random Top Ten!

Top Ten Sondheim Songs

10. "Losing My Mind" - Best version? Barbara Cook in the 1985 Lincoln Center concert.

9. "A Weekend in the Country" - The most complete, utterly perfect musicalized scene I've ever heard. Remarkable lyric writing here--the lyrics scan perfectly, and yet could read as dialogue.

8. "Ballad of Booth" - I love that Sondheim hands one of his most gorgeously beautiful melodies to Lincoln's assassin. His anguished aria in the middle of this song almost makes you wish the South had won.

7. "Not a Day Goes By" - One of the few Sondheim songs one can imagine hearing on American Idol. That it can be sung as an ode to passionate love or heartbreaking loss is testimony to its genius.

6. "Finishing the Hat" - A more open and beautiful accounting of what it means to be an artist has never been put to music.

5. "Loving You" - Another love song that can be sad or happy, depending on the context. One of Sondheim's purest melodies.

4. "Being Alive" - An almost frightened declaration that loving another human is very, very hard and very, very necessary.

3. "Sunday" - The best choral writing he's ever done. Why more high school choirs aren't doing this is beyond me.

2. "Epiphany" - A man loses his mind in song. Intense and gripping.

1. "No More" - A father and son admit their failures to one another in the middle of a fairy tale.

Until Whenever