by Stephen Fife-Adams

Created on: December 21, 2006   Last Updated: April 07, 2011

I have a theory that if you wanted to quickly put together a reliably excellent group of pop, rock, and rap tracks (say, on your iPod), your best bet is to make a playlist that consists solely of track twos. This theory derives from a couple of rules of thumb I always use to make a quick evaluation of an album if I'm thinking about buying it:

1. Track 2 nearly always provides a strong sense of the sound and style of the rest of the album.

2. If I like tracks 2 and 8, I'll like the whole album.

What about track 1, you may ask? Well, of course some of the greatest songs ever recorded are track ones -"Smells Like Teen Spirit", "London Calling", "A Hard Day's Night", "Bridge Over Troubled Water", "Like a Rolling Stone", "Thunder Road", "Where the Streets Have No Name". But the first slot is a spottier proposition than you might think. First of all, in the parade of great track ones, there are few surprises. All the songs I mentioned are iconic, which is another way of saying that you've heard them all a million times. They're the songs that come to mind right away when you think of the bands that recorded them; that's not a bad thing, but it doesn't yield a lot of hidden gems either. Second, a lot of bands in recent years have begun using the first track to essentially clear their throats before they launch into the proper album. This is especially true of rappers, and increasingly true in the indie and alternative rock world in the era of the 50- or 60-minute CD. Third, because over the years the big labels have insisted on putting the obviously-radio-ready single in the first slot, you tend to get a lot of track ones that are more middle-of-the-road and less daring than the rest of the album.

Meanwhile, consider the songs that follow the track ones listed above: "In Bloom", "Brand New Cadillac", "I Should Have Known Better", "El Condor Pasa", "Tombstone Blues", "Tenth Avenue Freezeout", "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For". All of these are great songs in their own right, but you haven't heard most of them a million times (maybe only half a million). Here are 25 other staggeringly great track twos, some of which are familiar, some of which you may have never heard but you ought to:

"Paranoid Android", Radiohead
"Sweetest Decline", Beth Orton
"Misguided Angel", Cowboy Junkies
"Thrasher", Neil Young
"Neighborhood #2 (Laika)", Arcade Fire
"Graceland", Paul Simon
"Sledgehammer", Peter Gabriel
"Crosseyed and Painless", Talking Heads
"Joga", Bjork
"Stop Dat", Dizzee

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