The Future's So Bright, We Should Be Wearing Shades

Last Sunday my old company had organized a walkathon for charity, on the island of Koh Kret.
The day before I’d assisted with setting out the routing, similar to the previous year.
It was a fun event with a 100+ people attending, finished around 11 am, and we were thinking about having a sort of celebratory drink at one of the islands’ restaurants/bars.
This time however the sale of alcoholic beverages were prohibited due to the upcoming elections.
As long term expats we’re kind of used to this but unnecessarily to say we didn’t particularly approve of it either since foreigners aren’t allow to vote anyway!
Surprisingly enough though we managed to find a restaurant that was happy to serve us beer, great!
Soon afterwards we were happily chatting, nibbling away some snacks, and enjoying our drinks, but still, something wasn’t quite right…

Problem was the background music, not too loud but still very present, old English hits, but the more ‘poppy’ ones, very popular songs here, which all of us probably had heard at least a million times before. Beloved karaoke classics like “Have You Ever Seen The Rain”, “Sutter’s Mill”, “Yellow River”, “Love You More Than I Can Say”, “Beautiful Sunday”, “Cottonfields”, etc.
By the time “Mississippi” from Dutch band Pussycat began, I couldn’t handle it any longer and politely asked if we could change the music.
‘Sure, go ahead.’ More than that wasn’t needed and a quick search through YouTube turned up ZZ Top’s “Cheap Sunglasses”, a whole different kind of music, powerful and with plenty of guts, let’s rock!
Suddenly our party became a lot more fun (& noisy I guess) and we ran through a lot of rock classics.
As our beer consumption increased dramatically the restaurant’s owner didn’t mind our group's erratic behavior…
About 2 hours later we decided to call it quits, paid the bill, and (a bit wobbly) left the restaurant.
The next few days that ZZ Top song was stuck in my head and I began to wonder what other glasses (with or without sun) songs I remembered.

Some were obvious, like Dwight Pullen’s rockabilly classic “Sunglasses After Dark”, Corey Hart’s “Sunglasses At Night”, but others less so; Miranda Lambert’s “Pink Sunglasses”, Inner Circle’s “Sunglasses At Nite”, etc.

Some digital digging turned up more glasses and shades related songs, including 3 unusual Japanese ones.

And before I knew I had a new collection ready for JOKONKY… 

Musically it goes all over the place, but on the whole it’s good fun, judge for yourself.

However, be sure to put on some shades while listening to this collection!