Sarah Louise's playlist for a rainy day

1. Bring on the rain (Jo Dee Messina and Tim McGraw) I remember reading that Jo Dee wanted this to be a generic song, not a particular calamity. I love this song.

2. Every storm runs out of rain (Gary Allen). This summer has been a lot of trouble. And I keep thinking, "every heartache will fade away, just like every storm runs out of rain."

3. I love a rainy night (Eddie Rabbit.) I remember listening to this song, circa 1980, on my radio that was in the stomach of a stuffed animal dog. It's strange to me that my siblings were not even born, that a lot of people weren't even born when this amazing song came out. This song always makes me smile.

4. Raindrops keep falling on my head (B.J. Thomas) There was a radio show when I lived in Bonn, and I remember listening to it on Saturday mornings. and "Raindrops" was the theme song. I liked making up extra lyrics to it.

5. The Sunny Side of the Street (Tony Bennett, this version) My mom played this on the piano a lot. It's just another song that I know by heart. There is no recording that I like of this song, b/c I know it from singing it, not listening to it.

6. Here comes the rain again (Eurythmics) No joke, when I went to the Sting/Annie Lennox concert (maybe 2003?), Annie Lennox started singing this song and it started raining. My friend M and I spent a great deal of the concert in the ladies room where it was at least dry. My brother drove up from (not sure where he was in 2003) for the concert. We had lawn seats, but he pretty much sat outside for the concert. Sting butchered some old Police favorites. So, yeah, no great memories for that concert, but this song sticks out.

7. Rainy days and Mondays (The Carpenters) This song makes me think of the movie About a Boy. I had heard of the song before seeing that movie, but I'm not sure I had heard the song. 

8. (You make me feel like a) natural woman. (Carole King) My senior year of h.s., I had a crush in on this guy and I told my friends that he made me feel like a natural woman. It was an innocent crush, so it wasn't meant in the earthy sense, just that I felt like a girl around him, the way a girl feels. (Sorry, my words aren't working...but just gooey and flirty and nice.) This song opens with "Looking out on the morning rain." I had two Carole King albums that I bought at the beginning of my senior year of high school. I listened to them over and over and over. I know them by heart.

9. I won't last a day with out you (The Carpenters) The lyric that gets me in this song is "When there's no getting over that rainbow, when the smallest of dreams won't come true..." I just love this song.

10. Somewhere over the rainbow (Judy Garland) This one is another one that I don't have a favorite recording. I remember my friend N. singing it at the senior's luncheon the year we graduated from college. I actually think I saw the movie Under the rainbow (a bizarre comedy) before I ever saw the Wizard of Oz. (I lived overseas. We didn't have the Wizard of Oz coming on TV every year.) Also, I remember going to the movies with my parents to see Michael Jackson in the Wiz.

I started thinking about playlists this morning while listening to the Saturday Light Brigade. Two teachers talked about "playlists" and how to cross over to history by asking what would your grandchildren think about the songs on your playlist right now, what would it teach them about who you were and the time you lived in. Voices across time, a project of the Pitt library system and the Stephen Foster Memorial, looks at songs over history and exactly what songs our grandparents listened to, and what we can learn from them.

The songs on this list are songs that I heard on the radio when they were popular, or sang them from a song book, or songs that I discovered by buying an old record or listening to standards on the radio. They all have their own place in time, as well as a place in my own timeline, in or out of chronological time.