1. "Here Comes the Rain Again" -- the Eurythmics. OK, can you believe this song is eighteen years old? That's long enough for Annie Lennox's bright orange burr to be retro chic and then passé all over again. Originally from Scotland (where it rains lots), Lennox could certainly dance to this, and just about anything else. One of the best frontpersons I've ever seen command a stage.

2. "Happy When it Rains" -- the Jesus and Mary Chain. Or should it be, "Happy When We're Playing with Our Backs to the Audience?" or "Happy When We Fight on Stage and Cancel Tours?" When they were on, they were "Head On." Too bad they bickered too much in the 90s to have folks take notice. Also hailing (raining?) from Scotland, but don't notice a pattern here.

3. "Rain" -- the Cult. The direct approach. I like it. I can even understand what Ian Atsbury sings in most of the song - unlike in the infinitely more popular single from the Love LP, "She Sells Sanctuary." The album also gave pictograms to identify each track that were typically inscrutable, i.e., a stylized Iron Cross, rotated 45° for "Big Neon Glitter." Fortunately, for "Rain," there was a cloud with drops falling from it. Hey! I get it. I also get the song, especially when the pronoun Atsbury uses to replace "rain" is "she." With fringe leather jackets, long hair and a penchant for Native American iconography, you'd be correct to think that Ian and the Cult hailed from England where it rains.

4. "You Look Like Rain" -- Morphine. Mark Sandman (R.I.P.) liked girls and wrote a lot of songs about them. Most were less striking than this tune where the object of the narrator's eye caused him to exclaim, "You taste like the sky/You look like rain." Morphine were from Boston. Apparently, it rains there.

5. "Another Song about the Rain" -- Cracker. Smart aleck extraordinaire David Lowery, ex-Camper Van Beethoven, who has also written paeans for a "Eurotrash Girl" and Joseph Stalin's automobile among many others, hit the right minor key of melancholy on this song from Cracker's debut. As if all that wasn't enough, the sad narrator has to "sing himself to sleep at night." Oh, woe. A Californian, now living somewhere in Virginia or the Carolinas, Lowery probably has seen the rain.