20 songs released in 1995 you MUST hear

Egil makes the lists from the 60s and 70s, and I will hereby start doing the 90s. The remaining decades? we’ll see when we get there 🙂

The 1990s, pronounced “nineteen-nineties” or abbreviated as “nineties”, was a decade that began on January 1, 1990, and ended on December 31, 1999.

Culturally, the 1990s was characterized by the rise of multiculturalism and alternative media, which continued into the 2000s. Movements such asgrunge, the rave scene and hip hop spread around the world to young people during the decade, aided by then-new technology such as cable television and the Internet.

The 90s will not be done sequentially, I will start with 1995 and then, well, who knows…

Earlier posts:

• 19 Songs released in 1961 you must hear
• 20 songs released in 1962 you must hear
• 20 songs released in 1963 you must hear
• 33 Songs released in 1971 you must hear
• 21 Songs released in 1972 you must hear
• 20 songs released in 1973 you must hear
• 20 songs released in 1974 you must hear

What happened in 1995:

• This was the year that the Internet entered public consciousness.
• Lyricist/guitarist Richey Edwards of the Welsh alternative rock band Manic Street Preachers goes missing from a hotel in Bayswater, London on the eve of a planned tour of the United States. His car is found two weeks later at Severn View services in Aust.
• Astronaut Norman Thagard becomes the first American to ride into space aboard a Russian launch vehicle.
• Mississippi ratifies the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming the last state to approve the abolition of slavery. The amendment was nationally ratified in 1865.
• The DVD, an optical disc computer storage media format, is announced.
• The final original Calvin and Hobbes comic strip is published.

The 10 best Movies in 1995:

1. Strange Days
2. The Usual Suspects
3. Seven
4. Wild Bill
5. La cité des enfants perdus
6. Smoke
7. Bound
8. Devil in a blue dress
9. La Haine
10. Il Postino

A good year at the movies!

Egil has commanded:

• Only one song per artist/group
• The song must be released that specific year
• Songs from live albums not allowed
• Restricted to only 20 songs

A lot of wonderful music was released in 1995, very hard to pick only 20. Lets start this demanding task…

Here is a Spotify playlist (missing Palace Music and Van Morrison)

Lake Marie by John Prine from the album Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings, released 4th April 1995:

In a 2009 interview with The Huffington Post, Prine fan Bob Dylan commented, “If I had to pick one song of his, it might be ‘Lake Marie.'”

The song was inspired in part by Prine’s crumbling marriage and a series of grisly murders the singer remembered the Chicago news media having a field day with when he was a kid. The John Prine Shrine website quotes the singer discussing his inspiration for the song: “It’s an actual place along the Illinois-Wisconsin border. There’s an entire chain of lakes along there, small lakes, and I remember as a teenager growing up in Chicago, a lot of the teenagers would go to these lakes and in the summer time kind of get away from the city. Lake Marie was kind of just one that stuck out in my mind. About ’59, ’60, ’61, I grew up in Maywood – it’s a western suburb of Chicago, and we started hearing about murders that weren’t related to the mob. You know, John Wayne Gacy was like, about two towns away from me and you just hear about it. The suburbs were kind of thought to be a pretty safe place at the time, and then some of these unexplained murders would show up every once in a while, where they’d find people in the woods somewhere. I just kind of took any one of them, not one in particular, and put it as if it was in a TV newscast. It was a sharp left turn to take in a song, but when I got done with it, I kind of felt like it’s what the song needed right then.”

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