Best Local Rock Songs Ever, Part 13 [The Features, The Nobility, The Privates, Lambchop, Joe Marc's Brother]

Editor's note: For the 13th installment of our ongoing Best Local Rock Songs Ever series we turn to Sam Smith, an exceptionally gifted locally residing graphic designer who has both done design work for the Scene and graced our publication's pages. Not only that, he's also played drums for local and locally based outfits including Ben Folds, Tristen, The Comfies, Character, My So-Called Band and Lifeboy — the latter of which just happened to be featured in the 12th installment of BLRSE, filed last week by editor-in-chief Jim Ridley. See Smith's five picks for Best Local Rock Songs Ever below.

The Features, "Leave It All Behind"

Listen: YouTube

If Nashville had its own Local Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I imagine The Features being the inaugural inductees. You know the story , now I have to pick a song. Even before the long-awaited release of Exhibit A, the band's first full-length record after years as a band, fans knew The Features' songbook like the back of their hands. Some of these classics would be left in the primordial sludge or only heard on bootleg copies of the Mahaffey sessions. One song that made it past band's figurative adolescence was "Leave It All Behind," which encapsulates so many of The Features' defining attributes: larger-than-life arrangements and instrumentation, Matt Pelham's vocal cries (which sound like he's just woken up, wrestling with an epiphany from a disturbing dream), and most of all the triumphant hook of a sing-along chorus that involves the audience in only the way Features songs so famously do. It still feels so good to sing along.

Songs I almost picked: "Button My Shirt," "Exorcising Demons," "33 1/3," "Contrast"