I played it on KRNU the other day, and I haven’t really stopped thinking about it. “Shipbuilding” by Elvis Costello is just one of the greatest songs of all time.

I love countdowns, and many “modern rock” stations have best-of-all-time countdowns around the new year, and it always makes me think, “Could KRNU ever do something like that?” We have such a huge, varied music library – could there really be anything that could justifiably stand among the greatest “indie rock” of all time?

There are obvious choices – “London Calling,” “Anarchy in the UK,” “Blitzkrieg Bop,” etc., but those are the ones that make it in whether you’re a college station, a Clear Channel modern rock station or MTV. I was trying to think a little deeper, to the ones that are absolute classics, but are perhaps undersold by the mainstream historical view of modern rock.

So that’d been floating around in the back of my head for some time when I played “Shipbuilding” the other day. The song has always brought about a sense of awe, in the way that it so poignantly tells several stories at once, hitting on the tragedy and the ironic joy (“within a week they’ll be reopening the shipyards”) that comes from war.

“Shipbuilding” is one of the few songs that I could comfortably say, “Yes, this is one of the greatest songs of all time.”

BBC’s Radio 2 has a fantastic site for classic songs called Sold on Song. Here is the subsite for “Shipbuilding.”

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