It was back in July that I wrote /Tuesday Ten /562, intended as a pair of posts that were the opposite of each other.

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It didn’t work out like that. I lost my job just before then, and as my period of job-hunting and joblessness stretched out, I didn’t really feel in the right frame of mind to write about songs where things were getting better, when they weren’t. But, as these things often do, things were resolved swiftly in the past week. After well beyond 100 applications, I was approached about a role at the end of the week before last, and by last Friday, I’d been interviewed and offered the job (which I accepted). I’ve got a few weeks before I start, but things are now definitely getting better.

Indeed, perhaps a little serendipitously, one of the last songs played in my car before I got to the interview was Get Better by Frank Turner (unfortunately, a song I’ve used previously, so it can’t feature again here). I sang along at the top of my lungs, and perhaps that was the pep talk I needed to get me in the right frame of mind for the interview. Well, it worked…

Anyway, here’s ten songs on things getting better in various ways. Thanks to everyone that offered suggestions. I check each and every one, nothing is totally ignored.

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/D:Ream
/Things Can Only Get Better
/D:Ream On Volume 1

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This mighty earworm is, perhaps, testament to sticking with your hopes and dreams. Peter Cunnah’s original band had fallen apart, and he was working menial office jobs to pay the bills, and an early version of this track two or three years later made the lower reaches of the charts in early 1993. It was then remixed – although when you listen to the two versions back-to-back, there wasn’t all that much tweaked – and released when they supported Take That at the end of the year, and this time, the version we all know topped the charts (after being in the charts already for two months!) and sold 600,000 copies.

That universal message of hope and striving for better wasn’t missed by others, either, and it swiftly became the galvanising theme for a resurgent Labour Party, and so in 1997, when Tony Blair swept to power, it was absolutely inescapable. Interestingly, the band refused use by a similarly resurgent Labour Party in 2024.

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/Oingo Boingo
/Nothing Bad Ever Happens To Me
/Good For Your Soul

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Apparently this new wave band – formed by Danny Elfman, who of course found greater success scoring music for Hollywood – formed from “a surrealist musical theatre troupe”. They never quite lost their weirdness, that’s for sure – the summery feel of this song appears to have been cribbed from a bunch of different styles of music (and the video is just plain odd). Anyway, this song is from the perspective of someone with the proverbial spoon in their mouth, as they observe the troubles of the world happening to other people, without giving a shit about whether things might get better for those other people. Things were always better for this protagonist…

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/IDLES
/GREAT
/Joy As An Act of Resistance.

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IDLES have lost me a bit in their more recent albums, and for me at least, Joy As An Act of Resistance. will remain their definitive statement. It was, and is, an album that celebrates the UK as a multicultural, hard-working and caring country, one where people support and encourage each other: and GREAT spelt out that view, taking on the bigots and those who refuse to change, gently reminding them that the world is always changing, and not to believe everything they read or hear. A laudable aim, but sadly one that hasn’t quite worked out: there are still many, many far-right idiots, immune to change and still wanting the past to become the future. But the country can be better, and while the new Government are a long way from perfect, I’d still take them over what there was before.

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/EELS
/Grace Kelly Blues
/Daisies of the Galaxy

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Mark “E” Everett dealt with a whole lot in the years after his initial success, with a number of close-family deaths that clearly shook him deeply. So for Daisies of the Galaxy to have a (mostly!) breezy, sunnier disposition despite this is quite the achievement. Grace Kelly Blues is a curious song as a result: a country-tinged, horn-assisted piece that takes five very different people as mini-character sketches, who all are finding or trying to find ways to better their own situations, from a teenage kid working a dead-end job in a mall, to Grace Kelly herself. And then there is “E” himself as the fifth person, who shrugs and goes “you know what, I’m doing ok as I am”.

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/The Beatles
/Getting Better
/Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

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Of course, getting better is a matter of degrees and your viewpoint. Paul McCartney reflects on how his education did make him better – like all of us, perhaps he didn’t realise it at the time – and his beloved partner is definitely making things better. But John Lennon’s lyrics are rather darker, as he admits to using violence against past partners, and now realises what he was doing was appallingly wrong, and is trying to make amends. It might be better, but it certainly couldn’t be much worse.

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/David Bowie
/Golden Years
/Station to Station

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Released when Bowie was mostly blitzed on cocaine, it’s frankly a wonder that he released so many great songs (and albums) in this period. Golden Years is one of those – the soulful funk of the track, that soaring chorus, the warm empathy of the lyrics in offering a better life for someone else. Although look a little closer, and there’s an interesting twist to what’s going on. This isn’t just someone offering another a better life, they are offering them a gilded life, cocooned away in a limousine so that they never have to see, never mind experience, life’s troubles ever again…

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/Yard Act
/Dream Job
/Where’s My Utopia?

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So what happens when you obtain the success you’ve long wanted? Suddenly, you’ve got the adulation, you’ve got the money, everyone wants a piece of you. According to Yard Act, on the disco-funk glory of Dream Job, it solves nothing. You’ve still got the imposter syndrome, you’re still questioning why everyone likes you, and money can’t – as we all know – buy happiness. I can kinda see their point, as I’m not sure I’d want the glare of fame and success, where everyone thinks they are entitled to you. I’m happier in the shadows, enjoying my own moments of success away from that glare.

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/Tegan and Sara
/Everything Is AWESOME!!! (feat. The Lonely Island)
/The Lego Movie OST

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The lead song to The Lego Movie brought Tegan and Sara into the mainstream, alongside comedy trio The Lonely Island (Andy Samberg, mind, has also seen huge success in Brooklyn 99 too), the kind of ridiculously inescapable earworm that once you’d seen the film, was absolutely fucking impossible to shift for weeks afterward. Of course, the joke is that behind the facade, everything is not awesome in the film’s universe – and it’s the job of the protagonists to make things better – but the film itself and the song absolutely are awesome.

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/Bruce Springsteen
/Better Days
/Lucky Town

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The Boss has never allowed hope to be entirely extinguished in his songs: from his earliest days, he’s always looked at things as if there could be an escape from the kind of working class struggle that he has chronicled. That might require societal change, it might require personal change, but there is a positivity and burning desire for better things that make Springsteen’s take on things admirable (and, of course, he puts his money where his mouth is and gets involved himself). The big, brash sound of Better Days is one of those songs where he looks at what he has, and thinks…it’s better than it was, and maybe I shouldn’t complain too much…

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/Janelle Monáe
/Turntables

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Written for the 2020 documentary All In: The Fight for Democracy, a film about the history of voter suppression and the fight against it in the US, it feels ever more pertinent now with the next US election looming, and the same old attempts at suppression going on. Her comments at the time blaze with Monáe’s determination to be part of the change for better, and the song is just as fiery. The video is a three-minute primer on those who fought for black voting rights and tearing down the walls of suppression, and Monáe is absolutely part of the next generation that wants to change this for good, and that might start with the election of the first black woman as US President in November. It would certainly be a vastly more positive outcome than a convicted criminal in office.