11. 10 Songs Sung Blue

Blue - The Jayhawks
Blue - Lucinda Wiliams
Blue - Joni Mitchell
Blue - McAlmont and Butler
When the Stars go Blue - Ryan Adams
The Blues are Still Blue - Belle and Sebastian
Powder Blue - Elbow
Way to Blue - Nick Drake
Weaker Shade of Blue - The Pernice Brothers
Bluetonic - The Bluetones

Blue is the pre-eminent colour in rock'n'roll, for obvious reasons.
Everyone ever has had the blues, apart from Holly Golightly, who had a serious case of the reds, but that didn't become a trend.
All these songs are about blue - rather than blues.
I don't think, of all the tapes I'll list here, there'll be another ten songs so beautiful, or bluetiful. Even The Bluetones one has a wry melancholy, tho is somewhat at odds with the rest.
I love the Bluetones though. Not love, but rather, still think they were pretty good. They're kind of my benchmark for overhyped music. If a world is going crazy for a band and you know it's phony, you say "It's ok, but it's not as good as the Bluetones" and it turns out to be true.

Anyway, here is my thing about Blue, a self-prophesying, self-referential little thing written a fair while back.
It is called

A POEM CALLED 'LITANY'

I'm making a night of it, a night in
Nineteen ninety six, I reckon, with twists
A night where foxes' screams are drowned out
By a sony walkman playing a tape
I made, of Songs Called Blue
A night where I don't just imagine
the abandon of inapproriate singalongs
with a quiet smile on the tube
as voices crack and words fail
At the end of Grace ... the end of grace.

I'm making a tape - called Songs Sung Blue
it's for before iTunes and before
I figured out all my current truth.
It's a word play, you understand,
you're amused, perhaps, delighted, perhaps
where this ain't a list, not even a litany
but a poem called LITANY, goes
Lucinda Williams goes Joni Mitchell
goes McAlmont & Butler goes Jayhawks
goes BLUE so BLUE.
I'm making a night of numbers and figures
with fingers and thumbs at all angles
I'm building a tower of song so high
it dares to touch the dark blue sky
and sends the years spinning, spinning back.