Top Seven Musical Moments

I'm being literal when I say "moments": these are nanoseconds or milliseconds in a song that are especially stimulating and memorable, often involving a major change of direction, texture, or mood.

1. The Arrival of the Ride Cymbal in Radiohead's "The National Anthem" (from Kid A, 2000)
   Technically, it's a minor change, with the cymbal strikes shadowing and riding over the central bass riff. But it comes in at about the one-minute mark of the song, after the bass, drums, and assorted other background sounds have had time to nestle in your head and establish mood. The effect for me is revelatory, like throwing a bright light on something I didn't know needed illuminating.

2. The Outro of the Manic Street Preachers' "Black Dog on My Shoulder" (from This is My Truth Tell Me Yours, 1998)
   This rather low-key song (about depression, apparently) shuffles along for several minutes with tense acoustic guitar and brushed drumming. The clenched, anxious atmosphere evaporates, though, when the drums relax and subtly spread the song out just in time for weeping strings and an electric solo that sounds, by comparison, like hair being let down.

3. The End of Guided by Voices' "Echos Myron" (from Bee Thousand, 1994)
   This band has provided me with more perfect music than I could have hoped for from ten genius artists, but it's an absence on this tiny song that stands out in the context of the list. What's missing is a standard feature of almost all popular music: a true refrain. The chorus, like most of Robert Pollard's melodies, is gorgeous and painfully catchy, but it's sung exactly one time, and smack in the middle of the song at that. You spend the rest of the song responding to the structural stimulus just as you're designed to--by waiting for that goosebump-extracting "all fall down" to come back, but it never does, and when the song ends a few seconds later, the longing for and lack of closure is both unbearable and precisely what makes the song so brilliant.

4. The Guitar Solo Climax in Stephen Malkmus's "Church on White" (from Stephen Malkmus, 2001)
   At least four initial reviews of this album mentioned this song's unabashed sentimentality (noteworthy because of Malkmus's infamous smartassedness) and highlighted the closing guitar solo as the prime manifestation. But the song really is lovely, and the solo's pinpoint climax (here, literally the highest note in the song) is truly heartwrenching.

5. The Beginning of the Trumpet Solo in Billy Bragg's "The Saturday Boy" (from Brewing Up with Billy Bragg, 1984)
   Like most of Bragg's early work, the majority of Brewing Up consists merely of simple guitar figures and unpolished vocals. So it's thrilling when this Spartan song, which articulates adolescent romantic longing as perfectly as anything I've ever heard, breaks into a stately trumpet line that somehow manages to change the song's demeanor AND become its heart, all in a few crisp seconds.

6. The Muted Downstrokes in the Main Riff of Rage Against the Machine's "Born of a Broken Man" (from The Battle of Los Angeles, 1999)
   This is a metal song. Period. And while any non-Golf-Rock guitarist would kill to write a wrecking-ball riff like this, they'd all botch it, because almost no one would have the musical instinct to punctuate the sludge with these toneless, percussive downstrokes.

7. The Beginning of the Trumpet Solo in Elvis Costello's "Shipbuilding" (from Punch the Clock, 1983)
   On a brilliant album full of striking moments, it's the initial sound of Chet Baker's trumpet ringing those descending notes through the song's dejected jazz-club haze that pokes me in the heart every time.