Also: My favorite Exile songs of yesterday
Everyone's choosing their favorite Exile songs. Jimmy Fallon had bands playing theirs, and the NPR piece has been sitting in my browser tabs for days. It's hard to argue against Tumbling Dice as the world's choice — two weeks ago, I spent half an hour listening to it on repeat — and the album's opening set is so monster as to bias any listener subtly against the second half. So, I'm going with my favorite Exile songs of yesterday alone: All Down the Line and I Just Want to See His Face.
On the latter's merit, an All Music Guide mini-essay is perfection:
… "I Just Want to See His Face" sounds ancient and from another planet; a swampy, stompy gospel song hat was recorded to intentionally sound as if it is a field recording document of a long-ago church basement revival meeting. … The inspired lyric suggests surrendering in the midst of trouble and finding the spirit, getting into the mystic, as Van Morrison would say, and letting go of any intellectualizing about religion; the comfort that comes from a shoulder to cry on: "Sometimes you ain't got nobody and you want somebody to love/Then you don't want to walk and talk about Jesus/You just want to see His face."
Audio:
