Recently in Song of the Day Category

Splendid music magazine The Word is trying to revive John Peel's Festive Fifty, where people voted for their favourite five songs of the year to build up a poll of the nation's top tunes. (Click here to take part).

I added my votes yesterday. Regular readers of this blog - hello, Ma! - will know that I've been very fond of Elbow, Little Jackie and Jenny Lewis in 2008, so here's my fourth choice: I Keep Faith by Billy Bragg.

You Can't Hurry Love is two minutes and 50 seconds of absolute pop perfection.

A number one in 1966, You Can't Hurry Love was written and produced by Motown's crack Holland-Dozier-Holland production team. Remarkably, it was recorded at the same time as the also fairly fantastic You Keep Me Hangin' On and it was left to Motown's Quality Control Department to choose which one would be released first.

It was included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's permanent collection of 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. It's hard to argue with that judgement. Not even the efforts of Phil Collins and Whoopi Goldberg (in the film Sister Act) in their covers of it can do anything to sully its good name.

Having said that I have two songs of the year so far, here's a third.

Carpetbaggers is the first single from the second album by Rilo Kiley singer Jenny Lewis. It's a duet with the great Elvis Costello, though on first listen it does sound rather like a tribute band singer doing a slightly deranged Elvis Costello impression.

After some shamefully populist choices in the last couple of days, something a bit more obscure today.

Most people will know Little Star by Stina Nordenstam - if they know it at all - from the soundtrack of the Baz Luhrmann film Romeo + Juliet. But it was originally released on her 1994 album And She Closed Her Eyes and at the time Mark Radcliffe used to play it all the time on his Radio One show.

That was a time when I would often tape Radcliffe's late night show and listen to it the next day - a low-tech version of the "listen again" thingy you can do on the internet these days - and I still have a recording of him playing Little Star.

It was either going to be Einstuerzende Neubaten or Girls Aloud today and in the end something made me go for Cheryl Cole's crew.

Something Kinda Ooooh is a song that raises an important philosophical question: namely, is it right to like a song because of a bit of dancing in a video?

I had heard Something Kinda Ooooh a number of times and it had left me pretty much as cold as the rest of Girls Aloud output. Then I saw the video and became entranced with the dance they all do in the chorus where they stand on their left leg and cock their right leg up in a frankly remarkable manner (see what I mean at 1 minute 21, 1.36 and 2.49 in the video).

After three songs that could loosely be considered cool, I thought I'd admit to something a bit more cheesey.

I was surfing Freeview last weekend and settled on something called 50 Best Songs of the 1980s on one of the music channels. A Good Heart by Feargal Sharkey came on and I've been singing it ever since.

The video for A Good Heart should be put into a time capsule to sum up everything that was awful about music in the 1980s: Feargal's terrible hairstyle is topped only by his buttoned up white shirt (yuck) and it's impossible to ignore the gimmick of having two female drummers playing in unison.

Oh, what a little tease I am.

Yesterday I wrote about Elbow's One Day Like This being one of my two favourite songs of the year but didn't tell you what the other one was. Well here it is: The World Should Revolve Around Me by Little Jackie.

I first heard this one Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie's Radio 2 show and I'm convinced that I was singing along before it even ended. It's insanely catchy and makes you want to dance around your house (even if you are a 36-year-man with a dodgy knee).

After yesterday's 40-year-old song of the day, I thought I'd go for something a bit more up to date today.

One Day Like This by Elbow is one of two tunes in the running to be my favourite song of the year so far. It's based around a beautiful string riff (if you can have such a thing), has some lovely lyrics and builds up to a repeated chant of "throw those curtains wide, one day like this a year would see me right".

All in all, it's one of those life affirming songs that are great to play loud on sunny days, and it really got into my head as I walked into work today.

I am GP and this is my blog about the song I've got in my head each day.

To kick things off, I thought I'd share what I consider to be the greatest song ever written: Tracks of My Tears by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.

That may sound like a bold claim - one that only a fool would make, in fact - but believe me, ladies and gentlemen, when I say that I am that fool.