Andrew Collins is currently compiling and writing about his alltime favourite 143 tracks at circlesoflife143.wordpress.com. Many of the tracks he’s been choosing have been new to me, so I’ve created this YouTube playlist so as to hear the music itself in a separate window while reading Andrew’s commentaries.

Two hiccups so far: the only available version of Elvis Costello’s “Beyond Belief” on YouTube is from a live TV concert in Germany. And Bob Dylan’s people slapped a blocking order on the only uploaded version of “If Not For You”. So the playlist below has Robert Forster’s cover of the same song instead. But you can hear both of these records on Spotify where Steff Galley is already tracking the 143 with his own playlist there.

About the list, Andrew writes “These are my 143 favourite songs, in no particular order; neither alphabetical, nor chronological, nor generic, nor quantitative. This is just the order I felt moved to write about them in. Although ‘going forward’ I have an approximate idea of The 143, I suspect it will change over the time it takes to add every one as an entry (which I’m initially doing at the rate of about three or four a week — you do the maths). So let’s officiate it this way: as soon as a song is written about and published on the blog, it’s on the statute books. Until that decisive click of the “publish” button, I reserve the right to fiddle with the final 143, taken from the personal playlist of origination. And I’ll log each entry at circlesoflife143.wordpress.com.”

Tom Robinson