My Top 100, No. 5: "Make Our Garden Grow" by Leonard Bernstein

"Make Our Garden Grow" was the second movement of my high school's marching band show when I was a sophomore, and boy oh boy is it so much better with an orchestra and a choir than with a high school marching band.

I have the same problem picking apart Bernstein as Beethoven--this is way more complex than, say, a Gwen Stefani song, and I just don't play on that level. So I'll do the best I can to explain why I like this song so much.

I've never seen Candide, nor read the book it's based on, so I'm a little hesitant to take any sentiment expressed in this song at face value, because it could be draped in layers of context I'm just not aware of. That said, I'm here for any song that starts: "You've been a fool, and so have I / But come and be my wife / And let us try, before we die / To make some sense of life." I just like the sentiment.

And that would've been enough, the cute lyrics and the nice melody, but it doesn't stop. It builds, from one voice, to two, to a duet with an increasingly prominent orchestra, to an entire choir. 

Then the tempo picks up and the orchestra swells, and then all the instrumentals cut, all at once (around 3:06 in the video above), leaving the featured vocalists and chorus in kind of a Wile E. Coyote-just-before-free-fall moment. 

It's difficult to describe, apart from being fucking awesome. It's like being able to see inside a huge machine, without all the supports or the exterior shell. It's just a complex, slightly unorthodox, very loud, completely all-out moment of vocal transcendence, which just hangs in the air without any orchestra to prop it up. 

Which is why I'm not including this song this high on the list to be pretentious or sound sophisticated--you just can't do that shit in pop or rock and roll.