Everything that was ever beautiful was more beautiful in 1996

10.  Til I hear it From You by The Gin Blossoms

                According to Billboard charts this was sung by the Gin Blossoms. However, obviously this song was done by the Lumineers. Okay, not exactly, but it’s basically the same thing where you kind of wonder how this lighter sounding band, not quite pop, not quite rock, winds up getting really popular. I don’t want to take advice from fools either, Gin Blossoms. Let’s just sit around and wait in 1996 for our girls to tell us that everything is fine. It’s probably going to take a while because we can’t just text to see what’s happening or even e-mail, because that’s not really a thing, and people, even back then, knew that calling was uncool, so we’ll just wait around and maybe strum on some guitars while we wait. I love 1996, Gin Blossoms, and I love you. 

9.  I Love you Always Forever by Donna Lewis

The best part about this song was attempting to sing along. It’s so fast. What is she saying? But I can kind of keep up, in the privacy of my own car or room, because I think this is a fast paced euro pop-ish song. But it’s also a great exercise in locution as she jam everywhere and everything so close together. It’s a real easy song to screw up when you’re singing along and equally easy to cover up because she slows it down at the end to allow you time to catch up. 

8. Insensitive by Jann Arden

Jann Arden was thirty four in 1996 when this masterpiece of American music and heartbreak was released. If other songs captured existential longing or the emptiness of life better, Jann Arden, who was a gd adult, was busy capturing adult sadness when a relationship, you know, actually ends. In 1996, I was more into the vague descriptions and connections of love that had been lost that had never really been had, but Jann Arden wasn’t about that. Jann Arden wanted to tell you what it was like to be in a shitt- adult relationship, so she wrote this beautiful song for you. And she’s so old that they won’t even look at her application for the upcoming season of The Bachelor. Life is tough.

7. One of us by Joan Osborne

This song reminds me of the Grand Inquisitor passage from Dostoevsky. We’ve all read that, correct? It's a seminal piece of world literature. I’m sure you have. Good. I’m glad we got that out of the way. I’m not sure I need to say anything else.

What if you took a seminal piece of Christian doctrine, Christ coming down to earth, and then you mused about it with a nose ring before nose rings were totally a mainstream thing? You’d probably blow all of our minds. 

6. Always be my Baby by Mariah Carey

Why are you so good, Mariah Carey? Why? I mean, my brother, who is a cool and quite type study person is busy buying up singles of Always Be My Baby. Probably because it’s a wonderful expression of what love is in 1996, not something that goes away after one night, or that one weekend in Vermont. No. Love is something that sticks around forever. Sure, we were wrong and love fades, but way back in 1996 love didn’t fade, it just hung around like a bad ex, reminding us of how good things used to be and preventing us from experiencing the future. 

5. Name

I don’t know what this song is about. However, I do know that it played on Z Rock at least ten times a day despite it not being, you know, a real rock song. Of course, that’s always the way these rock groups get famous, playing something a bit slower. #sellout. We didn’t hashtag things back then, but we still thought in hashtags, though we called them pound signs. They were complicated times. I think I’ve described what made this song so amazing about as well as anyone could have. 

4. Ironic by Alanis Morissette

The best thing about this song is getting people raging about the definition of ironic. “It’s not ironic that it rained on your wedding day.” I get it, you filthy elitist. You’d probably have me paying all my taxes to people who don’t want to work/weren’t born into privilege and were given totally bullshi- opportunities in comparison, but yeah, laziness.

Anyhow, I’m afraid of dying in a plane crash and so is the guy in the song. And yeah, Canadians. Amirite?

It doesn’t matter that she’s not using the term ironic correctly. What’s important in this song is the lesson that she’s teaching, which is that life won’t always work out exactly as we want it to and that was news in 1996, or at least a confirmation of what we’d slowly come to realize as we transitioned from naïve little selves into people filled with angst. 

3. It’s all coming back to me now by Celine Dion

                According to Billboard this song was somewhere in the sixties during 1996, which can’t possibly be true. I watched the video of Celine Dione at least 100 times when she was dramatically banishing the memories of all the time they’d ever had. But guess what? It’s all coming back. Stop melting my heart.

In my book, you either go epic or you go home. I want someone to mash this song up with that Metaloaf song from 1994 to make the greatest song in the history of the universe. I’ve never really heard much opera, but I’m guessing that if I heard opera I’d probably start crying and spend the rest of my life trying to build a time machine in order to travel back in time to hear the greatest opera sang by enuchs in Italy a few hundred years back. Luckily, I’ve not really heard opera. The point is, I think even pharoh’s heart would have been softened had he heard this song. Edit: I watched a large portion of this video. It’s really pretty epic with the lightning crash and the ghost and her trying to banish the memory.

All I’m saying is that, at the end of the day, this song may be the reason that human beings evolved to have emotions. 

2. Nobody Knows by Tony Rich Project 

The album cover is light years ahead of its time in just being the quintessence of cool, which is a good start. And then the song starts and you can feel 1996’s heart breaking. In the early portions of the song it’s easy to think on all those foolish people who didn’t know how much you ached for them in your soul of souls. However, by the end of the song when he’s hitting a dusty road in search of love, you begin to realize that he’s not really looking for a real love but regretting all the things he didn’t say, the person that he couldn’t be. That dusty road isn’t leading to a person. It’s leading to a journey of self-discovery, which is hopefully filled with some beautiful people, some laughs, some late nights, and eventually, you know, death. 

1. Breakfast at Tiffany's by Deep Blue Something

I may be overrating this song solely based on the fact that I heard it the other day on New Girl, and as Nick celebrated the nineties I got sucked into this vortex of nineties music. However, it’s still a good song. It ages well. It has a nice chorus, a nice sound. You can basically still listen to this song without feeling out of place.

Also, my sister drove me to school every day in 1996 and she had one tape playing on repeat, and I heard this song roughly 1,000 times, but it didn’t matter, I’d listen to it another 1,000 times and still be happy. Like the great part when the chorus slows down before one last triumphant rendition. Plus, as break up songs go it’s pretty upbeat.