In all the year-end acclaim for Beck as the man of the year in pop music, some of the applause should be saved for movie director Tim Robbins.
The soundtrack album for Robbins' "Dead Man Walking" gave us both Steve Earle's "Ellis Unit One" and Eddie Vedder's collaboration with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan on "The Long Road," which top my list of the most distinguished single recordings of 1996. (The list of best albums appears in Sunday's Calendar.)
Equally important, the album--which also included tunes by such respected pop figures as Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash, Patti Smith and Tom Waits--served as a reminder of the importance of passion and purpose in a pop music world where most artists don't really have anything to say.
The soundtrack project started when Robbins--whose brother, David, wrote the film's score--sent rough cuts of his film to various songwriters whose work he admires and invited them to submit any songs that might be appropriate for the film or album.
Earle responded with "Ellis Unit One," basing the lyric on stories he had heard from his relatives about the reaction of prison guards and townsfolk to executions at a Texas prison.
"I must have watched the movie three times with my band while we were ending a tour, and it had such a powerful effect on me that I sat down after I got home and wrote the song in about two hours," Earle said in an interview earlier this year.
Pearl Jam singer Vedder had already written "The Long Road," which was inspired by the death of his favorite high school teacher, when he saw the early version of "Dead Man Walking." He thought the song might fit the mood of the film, and Robbins agreed.
"I was just trying to ring a bell with the song . . . something to signal that an important human being had left the earth," Vedder said recently about the song, which was written during the 1994 sessions for the Neil Young-Pearl Jam album, "Mirror Ball." "I actually started playing a D chord, which actually sounds like a bell."
Although the degree of purpose varies in the other records on today's list of the year's 10 best singles or album tracks, each conveys a spirit that contributed greatly to the richness of pop during the last 12 months.
In the spirit of a New Year's Eve countdown, here is a salute to the year's most engaging tunes, starting with some honorable mentions.
