After months of deliberation, secret ballots, voodoo rituals, and solicitation from you, our readers, we have finally pared the list for A.V. Undercover’s seventh season down to just 25 songs. You have no idea how tough it is to get to 25—we had thousands of suggestions, both internal and external. The initial short list was a not-very-short 450 songs. Some suggestions were easy to expunge, since we try not to feature multiple songs by the same band: Pixies, Talking Heads, Prince, Van Halen*… we’ve done all those. We made an exception for David Bowie, considering this list was put together pretty soon after his death (and he’s got a few pretty good songs in his catalog). Things that almost made the list but that we realized were terrible ideas in practice: Anything by Weird Al, Tracy Jordan’s werewolf song, Faith No More’s “Epic.” We’ve already treated you to a couple of bonus tracks, specifically Wye Oak doing Pat Benatar and Colin Hay “covering” Men At Work, and we’ve got another very special bonus coming up this Thursday: a veteran Undercover act doing the entirety of David Bowie’s Lodger album in our studio. Without further ado, here’s a list of the 25 songs you can look forward to seeing performed over the next 25 weeks, starting next Tuesday, May 17. (*We’ve decided Van Hagar and Van Halen are different bands.)
The Killers, “When You Were Young”
Thin Lizzy, “The Boys Are Back In Town”
Adam & The Ants, “Goody Two Shoes”
Bauhaus, “Kick In The Eye”
Glenn Frey, “The Heat Is On”
Wye Oak, “Holy Holy”
Miley Cyrus, “Wrecking Ball”
Goo Goo Dolls, “Name” or “Iris” or a medley of the two
Men At Work, “Overkill”
The National, “Mistaken For Strangers”
Built To Spill, “Big Dipper”
Counting Crows, “Mr. Jones”
Ginuwine, “Pony”
Motorhead, “Killed By Death”
Nena, “99 Red Balloons”
Pearl Jam, “Corduroy”
David Bowie, “Heroes”
Katy Perry, “Roar”
Death Cab For Cutie, “Photo Booth”
Erasure, “A Little Respect”
Georgia Satellites, “Keep Your Hands To Yourself”
Sum 41, “Fatlip”
The Left Banke, “Walk Away Renee”
The Misfits, “Skulls”
Van Halen, “Why Can’t This Be Love?”