This one was easy. This song never fails to perk me up.
I can think of 3 off the top of my head: “Shut Up Dance with Me”, “Walking on Sunshine”, “What A Wonderful World”.
Oh and also Ode to Joy
This one has a disturbing title, but it is really odd, amusing and vaguely silly. Sometime just two or three words out of conversation will start it running through my head.
Cheesy and overplayed but I love it:
Coast is Clear by Skrillex
I really like the energy and speed of the song. “What your interests are, who you be with” is of course a line from Big Poppa by Notorious BIG. It’s a classic, but that song is slow and laborious and it feels like you’ve been Christmas shopping at the mall all day and your feet are swollen from shuffling around on tile since breakfast.
Sam Cooke - Twistin’ The Night Away. Who wouldn’t want to go to the place described in this song?
“(Not Just) Knee Deep” by Parliament-Funkadelic
Truly THE JAM to lift me out of the dumps, no matter how down in them I might be.
I’ve lionized this one in another thread, and I’ll lionize it again here. This probably makes sense only to me, but I can’t think of any other song that could be described as “shimmering”, like this one. Hard to stay bummed out listening to this.
It’ll kill me if I can’t sneak in one more - even when I was a 70’s kid I thought AM radio sucked anteater yarbles, but this number always had me bouncing off the walls. Still gives me that “sugar rush”, especially that low-down, stank-ass break right before every chorus.
Oh, and damn she’s hot, here.
You can’t go wrong with Todd Rundgren, I Don’t Want to Work. Happy happy happy!
This will get me singing at the top of my lungs and dancing around like a lunatic, even when I’m driving. All hail Queen Donna Summer and her Hot Stuff.
My first choice isn’t available anywhere online, so I’ll go with my second. It’s Brindisi, from “La Traviata” by Giuseppe Verdi (Joe Green).
What a Wonderful World
Satchmo (Louis Armstrong)
Great stuff, and a great idea for a series of threads, Idle Thoughts! So far, I’ve got MMM’s “Stay with Me” and Eddie the Horrible’s, “What is Life” recommendations added to my daily random playlist. A handful of others were already there.
For this one, I’ll dip into Jimmy Hall’s band, Wet Willie, and their, “Street Corner Serenade” Jimmy Hall, besides having success with Wet Willie in the mid-70’s, also works and tours at times with Jeff Beck. He sang on, “Gets Us All in the End” from Jeff Beck’s, “Flash” in the mid-80’s.
Since others are back-dooring several candidates(not that I’m complaining 
), I’ll do the same and put this in as a runner-up: “Keep on Smilin’”
One thing I wish Idle Thoughts had put on his list of songs to choose (great as the list is), is a day for LIVE songs. I don’t think people get exposed to enough live performances. I think I’ll throw in live versions of my recommendations wherever I can find a reasonable version.
Keep On Smilin’ - Live Jimmy looks wrung-out. It’s the finale and a bit uneven I think, alternately rough and butter-smooth, and he messes up the lyrics at one point. . .but it’s good footage from the 1970’s, which is pretty rare in my experience. A slice of time.
Street Corner Serenade - Live Almost 25 years later. This is why I LOVE seeing old bands in small venues: decades of experience. They’re better than ever, as long as they’re not phoning it in. If I felt better, I’d be rib-festing it up.
And holy shit, did I fall down the Youtube rabbit-hole doing this! Jimmy Hall doing an acoustic version of “Keep on Smilin’”, Jimmy and Jeff Beck on, “A Change is Gonna Come”, Jimmy and Toy Caldwell performing, “Can’t You See” . . .
This one was a little bit harder than the first two. There’s almost no limit to the number of songs that make me happy. There are bands with multiple albums that every track makes me happier than the last. Heck, play the right song on the radio, and I’d be so happy I’d cry.
But! The song that wins this week for reliably setting the endorphins free to be bound to just the right places is Dan Deacon’s The Crystal Cat. Bouncy and frenetic as hell, gratuitous Eventide-style abuse, it’s like it was engineered for my brain. The intro doesn’t quite make my hair stand on end in anticipation anymore, but it would probably still make me happy on my death bed.
And since runner-ups appear to be the order of the day, I’ll add The Fendermen’s Mule Skinner Blues. Hearing that over and over again as a tot made me the man I am today, and I thank them for that.
Oh!, and Roger Miller’s Dang Me has probably had the same effect for nearly as long. I could literally go on all day. You should ask me over for dinner.
Accidently Kelly Street by Frente. Just relentlessly perky.
And yes, ironically they accidentally spelled it “accidently”.
U2 - Beautiful Day
Smoke Two Joints, but not done by The Toyes, or the cover by Sublime. It’s got to be the Norman Nardini Pittsburgh version.
Good times.
I always groaned when Norm started this up when he played at* Excuses*.
Damn, did a little googling. Glenn Pavone died!? Well, shit. And when is someone gonna post more Shari Richards on Youtube? How’s an expat supposed to get his fix?
Yeah, Glenn was a shocker. He had a few feet of small intestine removed and a few weeks later he performed at Hartwood. Jill West had a brush with death recently as well. Getting old sucks.
There’s a guy whose name I can’t remember right now who used to video a lot of bands especially at Moondogs. He has a YouTube channel, though the quality on many is kind of shitty.
If you’re ever in town we should meetup at Excuses, Moondogs, or The Thunderbird.