Song Of The Day 1/29/2017: The Smiths – “What Difference Does It Make”

You Pick The Artist - The Final Picking  -- For the last theme week of Song Of The Day I went back to a feature that was traditionally a wildly popular one on this blog. The procedure: I get on Facebook and ask my friends to name some artists. Then I pick seven of their submissions that meet certain criteria: (a) I am familiar with the artist's overall work, and (b) I haven't covered them before in this series. I decide what's my favorite song by that artist, then spend a whole week putting those songs up for SOTD. So that's what I did Friday, and now we're having our final You Pick The Artist feature. Only this time, because I'm eternally grateful to you the audience and have no programming ideas until the Final 50 start on Feb. 8, I'm doing nine artists. I'm digitally generous that way.

For starters, Andy Lewis gave me Morrissey and/or the Smiths. You should know this about Andy: He is the biggest Morrissey/Smiths fan in the world. That is fact. I know you think you're the biggest, but you're not. Andy is. I have past email threads between him and me in which we discuss in great detail themes the Smiths brought up. That's kind of how we roll regardless, but it gets a special kick when we talk about contemporary music, and an even bigger roundhouse when we talk about the Smiths.

Personally, I was never a ginormous Smiths fan, but my admiration has increased steadily over the past five years. I prefer them to the Cure by a long shot. I thought Morrissey's autobiography was the greatest rock memoir I'd ever read until that 50-page section where he bashes lawyers and throws the whole book off-course. But I owned no posters or wrote too much about them, though I did see them on the Meat Is Murder tour. I think I bought a T-shirt.

My favorite Smiths song is the first one I ever heard from them. It was on a sampler from Sire Records called Survival Sampler SR-1A Sound Rations that came in a can, like great music should.