This is PART ONE of a special two-part episode of Bee Gees And Me. This is my attempt to get a conversation going around what is THE BEST Bee Gees song.
It’s an almost impossible task, narrowing down a career that spanned multiple decades, with albums of songs from different musical styles and genres. And in these episodes, we’re talking about JUST the 22 studio albums of the Bee Gees proper. So not taking into consideration solo albums, work with other artists, and unreleased material, we’re still looking at over THREE HUNDRED songs.
And, let’s not forget, enjoying music is a personal and subjective thing. One person’s ‘best’ is going to be different than another’s. AND THAT’S OK. It’s an opinion, and we all know what they say about opinions. ‘Best’ could mean ‘favorite,’ it could mean ‘most weeks at #1,’ it could mean ‘best selling,’ it could be ‘most culturally significant.” It could mean a number of things, and they’re all right. The point of this podcast is not to cause fights or disagreements, it’s merely to start discussions about the songs we love and why we love them. So please, if you disagree with what someone on this podcast says, don’t take it personally.
Alright, so then WHY am I doing this? Why am I stirring up a hornets nest, risking to get stung by angry Bee Gees fans by trying to rate the unrankable? It’s all because I used to host a podcast called List Rate Rank where each week we assembled a Top 5 list about a topic with the help of an expert in that field. This was before I launched Bee Gees And Me, and of course if I had a vehicle to talk to an audience, I wanted to do a podcast about one of my biggest passions. So, as I’ve been known to do, I forced my friend and co-host Felicia Gillespie into listening to a bunch of Bee Gees music with the goal of picking the ultimate and definitive Top 5 songs. And the expert we consulted with on this Bee Gees episode is the legendary Andrew Mon Hughes. He wrote the book on the Bee Gees, no seriously, he quite literally had a hand in writing several books about the Gibbs. You’ll hear more about his story once we get into Part 2 of the show. It was so awesome talking with him.
In fact, one of the best things about List Rate Rank was getting to talk with people from all over the world about such interesting topics. We discussed things like Top 5 Things to Do On Mars with a scientist who helped build the Mars rover, we talked with a film school professor about the Top 5 Fake Bands from TV & Film, we even talked about the Top 5 Ways to Overcome Adversity with a quadriplegic motivational speaker. It was a really rewarding show to host, every week I learned something new.
The season two finale was to be this one centered around the Bee Gees, but the show ended before I was able to finish the episode. Though now, thanks to THIS podcast, Bee Gees And Me, I was able to dig into the archives and publish this never before heard episode, split into TWO parts, because quite frankly it was too long to do in just ONE show.
A short time ago on social media, I asked YOU what YOU thought the Best Bee Gees Song is. In Facebook groups, on Bee Gees And Me Facebook page, and on Instagram and Twitter @BeeGeesAndMe, we had hundreds of votes from Bee Gees fans like yourselves. So at the end of this show, Part 1, the first half of the List Rate Rank episode-within-a-show, I jump in with the voting results, the Top 10 Bee Gees songs as voted on by YOU. It will be fun to see how your list compares to the list that Felicia and I came up with last year.