Playlist: Kinks favorites

So the Ray Davies contest is over, but any time I start spending any amount of time thinking about Ray Davies, I always end up falling into a Kinks jag. The material is just too good, too rich, too deep. This time I’ve emerged from the depths with a playlist.

A few notes about the playlist:

– Yes, it’s on Spotify again. For better or worse, that is where I am going to be creating playlists, at least in the near term future. There are all sorts of issues with Spotify, but at least it’s legal.

– While I include a couple of their more widely-known songs, I have more or less steered away from the most obvious choices, aiming this more for discovery than nostalgia. (Besides which, neither “Sunny Afternoon” nor “Waterloo Sunset”—which I would have included; they’re too great—are on Spotify. Neither is the original version “Lola.” See next note.)

– Because we’re dealing with Spotify, and because we’re dealing with what some would call a “heritage” artists like the Kinks, not all the necessary albums are available, for whatever arcane reasons of rights and distribution and such. I used songs from alternative sources when the song itself is still the original version of the song. But I did not include things like a live version of “Victoria” when the original version of “Victoria” is not available. (Sadly, the great Arthur album is not on Spotify, and neither are a number of other essential albums from the back catalog, such as The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society and Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround.

– For the excessively curious, here are the songs I had included on my original playlist that are not available on Spotify:

* “Victoria”
* “Shangri-La”
* “Apeman”
* “God’s Children”
* “Sunny Afternoon”
* “Waterloo Sunset”

They were replaced with:

* “Where Have All the Good Times Gone?”
* “Death of a Clown”
* “This Time Tomorrow”
* “Living on a Thin Line”
* “Tired of Waiting For You”
* “Sitting in the Midday Sun”

All in all, great stuff. If I can entice even one person not otherwise too familiar with the Kinks to give this a listen, my work is done.