Happy days; in today's edition of With A Shout we read and highlight things that make us happy.  A story about 1983 that reminds us of our formative years and why music is important to us.  We follow that with another story about beautiful people on social media that play a 10-year-old's original composition.  Quoting Ice Cube: 

RollingStone and iconic writer and contributing editor Rob Sheffield compiled a long read about the 100 Best Songs of 1983.  The list will shock you if you are a kid from the 80s or 90s.  The songs that came out this year are so well-known they will surprise you.  We must rip apart this big story in several sections over the next month.

MTV had been around for a few years and was hitting its stride; this opened up a new avenue for artists to explore new forms of expression in music and film.  1983 saw the release of both Michael Jackson's Thriller and Purple Rain by Prince, with the rise of Pop and the beginning of rap on the mainstream and with new ways to listen to music, like the introduction of the Sony Walkman, the world of music was getting ready to explode.

The attitude of 70s punk hit the bratty teenage years, and the attitudes started to match a new sound, and alternative rock was the new punk.  The Replacements, R.E.M., and Echo and the Bunnymen proved you could create sounds and music that were difficult to categorize.  Seems like yesterday, and yet 40 years go by like the snap of a finger.

10-year-old Olive Wallace plays the violin and enjoys writing music while she plays.  Mimi Wallace, Olive's mom, found one of the songs Olive wrote on the kitchen table and decided to send it to all the wonderful players there.  This was just for fun, and Olive was unaware of mom's plan; the sheet music might have needed to be more technically perfect, but the musicians who grabbed it and interpreted it, which is what music is.

Sometimes we can see stories that remind us of all the good people on social media.  If only sweetness and compassion like this could drown out all the crazy voices.  We need to turn up the beautiful music.  Thank you, Olive, for creating music and wonderful social media and for the musicians who contributed.

In an interesting article or ad for retirement savings, we need to find out that a site called NetCredit put together a lot of data on the average cost to retire worldwide.  Singapore is the most expensive country to retire in, costing $1.1 million for a 15-year stint.  Pakistan came in as the cheapest at just $158,410; we will also note several countries were missing from this list, and we assume that is due to a lack of data.

Closer to home, Mexico comes in at $307,460, further south, most countries are under $300k except Costa Rica at $378,721 and Uruguay at $458,140.  Head north, the U.S. is $702,330, and Canada is a happy medium at $557,164.  A state-by-state cost of retirement is also on this site.  Start saving up now!

A farmer in Wales broke his world record by growing a sunflower with a sunflower head weighing 14.21 pounds.  The site has a couple of videos, and the bigger the sunflower head gets, the more hardware you need to support it before it snaps the stem it's growing on.  We don't know if the sun in Wales is different, but it could be why the U.K. is always cloudy.

Just got lucky.

Click on the Apple Music image to listen to the song on Apple Music or on the Spotify Image to listen to Spotify.

Thank you for spending a few minutes with us. Here’s one for the road!

With A Shout newsletter is written by Johnny Christian with the support of a thousand idea bits and the help of many people.

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