Aaron Keck’s Live & Local Top 100 Countdown continues! You can check out the complete series here, only on Chapelboro.com!

Celebrating Chapelboro’s great music scene, we’re continuing our countdown of the top 100 local songs of all time.

Reminder of the ground rules: Orange, Durham, and Chatham-based artists only; no more than three songs per artist; covers are allowed but originals are preferred; and the songs have to be radio-friendly.

Here we go!

80. Shelles, “Carousel” (2016)

“Can’t be trusted with it, can’t be trusted with it…”

Stuart Edwards has released two stellar albums with this project, which also features local stalwarts Reid Johnson, Chris Girard, Justin Blatt and John Jaquiss. “Carousel,” the title track from Shelles’ first album, is the highlight, anchored by Edwards’ dreamy, seen-it-all-and-lived-to-tell-the-tale vocals.

Every one of these guys has also delivered great work with other local bands as well.  Just for starters, try Schooner’s “Married” (Johnson) or JPhono1’s “Traces All Around” (Jaquiss).

79. The Muslims, “Sura Sura” (2020)

“I saw you in my dreams, coming down Erwin Road…”

Islamic, queer, Black, feminist, left-wing, and punk as hell, The Muslims are as radically transgressive as it gets – and just for good measure, they’re also one of the hardest rocking bands the Triangle’s ever seen. Most of their best stuff is too hot for radio, but we’ll go with this awesome banger off their new album Gentrified Chicken – their fifth release just in the last three years. (They know the Protestant work ethic is an oppressive capitalist tool, right?)

78. Ben Davis, “Finally I Stand” (2001)

“You don’t like it at all, at all, at all…”

Ben Davis has had a long career stretching two decades, but in this case the first cut is the deepest. “Finally I Stand,” the opening track off Davis’ debut album The Hushed Patterns of Relief, builds a haunting, climactic rocker around a simple, hypnotic piano riff that grabs you in the first three seconds and never lets go.

77. Travis Atwell, “I Killed A Robot” (2016)

“I am coming to get you…”

Travis Atwell eventually moved to Brooklyn, but not before dropping this vaguely dystopian, catchy-as-hell track with a driving beat and a playful take on 2001: A Space Odyssey’s star child. (At least I assume that’s who this is supposed to be? Though if you imagine all local music existing in the same universe, Atwell’s ubermensch protagonist here could just as easily be Duncan Alva Edison from Supreme Fiction’s equally catchy “Land of Nod.” Either way, those two songs together make a pretty sweet science fiction double feature.)

76. The Never, “Antarctica” (2005)

“And the witch can’t find me here…”

The Never were the midpoint of a triptych of highly-influential Chapel Hill bands. Noah Smith and Ari Picker cofounded the B-Sides in high school, had success with the 2001 album Yes Indeed the B-Sides Quite, rebranded as The Never after Johnny and Joah Tunnel joined the mix, and released one album together before Picker left for music school – though he’d form a new band, Lost in the Trees, shortly thereafter. Antarctica was actually the Never’s second album, one last glorious gasp after Picker’s departure – an orchestral multimedia project about childhood and wonder, with an environmentalist message, that came with an accompanying children’s book written by Smith and illustrated with dozens of his oil paintings. Pretentious? Oh my goodness yes – but pretentious is fine if you can back it up, and Antarctica was one of the best local albums of the decade. Several songs are worthy contenders, but I’m going with the title track, which combines childlike imagery with a dreamlike narrative and builds musically to a powerful crescendo. (Bonus: the album was produced by John Plymale, a name we’ll hear again in just a few paragraphs.)

The only trouble with choosing “Antarctica” is that we’re not actually honoring Ari Picker. For his best work, check out the B-Sides’ “Idiot Proof” or Lost in the Trees’ “Neither Here Nor There” – for starters.

75. T0W3RS, “If All We Have Is Time” (2012)

“And there’s so many visions that he’ll never know…”

Is it a love song? A celebration of life? What does the crow even mean? Enigmatic and melancholy, filled with unforgettable imagery delivered in Derek Torres’ inscrutably great voice, “If All We Have Is Time” pulls you in immediately with a simple but supremely confident acoustic riff and builds imperceptibly to a powerful climax.

Sadly, time was the one thing this wildly talented band didn’t have: they split up shortly after releasing their debut LP, though T0W3RS has continued on as Torres’ solo project.

74. Honey Magpie, “Undecided” (2020)

“I need to make up my own damn, make up my own damn mind…”

The best local song of 2020 so far, off the year’s best local album. (Midnight Morning’s release has been Covid-delayed, but – seriously, y’all, just take my word for it.) Rachel Hurwitz and Pippa Hoover mesh beautifully, and this is their best song yet, softly and insistently embracing indecisiveness and turning it into a message of empowerment. “I won’t let your impatience win.”

Hurwitz and Hoover are pretty good on their own too: check out Hoover’s “A Grace You Don’t Deserve,” off her solo album Night Bird Singing.

73. Matt Phillips, “Your Own Lullaby” (2012)

“I can’t see those eyes shed a tear – no, not for me, another guy…”

Matt Phillips’ protagonist is a Nice Guy: decent, kind, a good friend, always there with an ear to lend or a shoulder to cry on, and hey, if one day you wake up and realize you’ve been looking everywhere for love and it’s been right there waiting for you the whole time, well gosh, so much the better. But the Nice Guy persona is ultimately toxic – the ‘friendship’ is a means to an end, nothing more – and in “Your Own Lullaby” the fangs come out. Quiet and contemplative, backed by a single melodic piano that’s soft and soothing riiight until the anger oh-so-briefly boils to the surface, our hero announces (to himself?) that he’s through being friendly. It sounds liberating, like a declaration of independence, but even that’s phony: “tonight” he won’t answer the phone, but the infatuation is still there, as strong as ever.

…or at least that’s how I hear it. Your mileage may vary: it’s equally possible we’re supposed to be on the speaker’s side the whole way, and I honestly have no idea which way Phillips wants me to go. Don’t tell me, because I love the uncertainty: “Your Own Lullaby” blends expressive music and simple lyrics to create a vivid, crystal-clear depiction of a character exactly as he is, and leaves it to you the listener to judge him for yourself. (Another favorite MP song, “Bluegrass,” features a similar protagonist who has found love – though that relationship too turns out to be better imagined than realized.)

72. Libba Cotten, “Freight Train” (recorded 1958)

“Please don’t tell what train I’m on…”

And here’s where it all began. Born in Cottenboro in 1893, Elizabeth Cotten learned to play her brother’s banjo at the age of seven, bought her first guitar at 11, and composed “Freight Train” (among other classics) sometime in her teens. (Famously, the left-handed Cotten taught herself how to play by turning the instrument upside-down.) She might have gone undiscovered, but for a wild chance encounter later in life: working in a department store, she helped a lost girl find her mother; she hit it off with the family and eventually went to work for them – and that family turned out to be the Seegers, one of the most influential folk-music families of all time. “Freight Train,” her signature song, is almost incomparable; we’re putting it here on our list, but it could just as well go anywhere.

Libba Cotten is just one of several blues legends who came out of our area, along with Durham’s Blind Boy Fuller and Chapel Hill’s Floyd Council – who put the “Floyd” in Pink Floyd, if you didn’t know. Council only recorded six songs, but check out “Working Man Blues” for another worthy classic. (Honestly, all six are pretty great.)

71. The Pressure Boys, “Where The Cowboys Went” (1982)

“Look to the east, boys…”

Chapel Hill already had some pretty great artists before 1980 – Libba Cotten, Floyd Council, the Nova Local, Arrogance – but the scene was still in utero when six buddies from Chapel Hill High School got together and decided to take up ska. Within two years, Je Widenhouse, Byron Settle, Jack Campbell, Greg Stafford, Rob Ladd, and John Plymale (told ya you’d hear his name again!) had gone into the studio with Arrogance’s Don Dixon and recorded this crazy, horn-driven, proto-rap knockout of a cult classic. I have no freaking clue what it’s about.

The Pressure Boys stuck together for seven years before splitting – opening for bands like REM and Duran Duran along the way – but their legacy is timeless. Just about every branch of Chapel Hill’s music tree passes through this band: Settle and Plymale each became prolific producers; Ladd went on to a spectacular career as a drummer, both locally and beyond; Plymale and Widenhouse moved on to another cult-favorite local band, the Sex Police (“Elevator” their biggest hit); and Widenhouse moved on from that to another somewhat popular horn-centric outfit, the Squirrel Nut Zippers. Chapel Hill’s music scene would still exist without this song – but it wouldn’t have been the same, and it wouldn’t have been as much damn fun.


Next week: the Archers emerge; Stranger Spirits are overcome; and a beloved local icon – um, hawks his wares.

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